For 2,000 years Europe has been divided by war, each passing century marked with the blood of endless conflict, sometimes religious, always political and never resolved, finally this never ending conflict exploded engulfing the world. It seems absurd that nearly all this bloodshed can be traced back to a single battle, but it can. A battle that few Europeans remember but no Roman was allowed to forget. They would have referred to it as the Varian Disaster.

The Varian Disaster describes the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest which took place in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE, when an alliance of Germanic tribes ambushed and destroyed three Roman legions and their auxiliaries, led by Publius Quinctilius Varus. It gave birth to a rift in the centre of Europe between two groups of nations, the Romanic and Germanic. This rift is with us still, the European Union exists to try and heal it and no one fully knows whether or not not it will succeed.