Chuck Bryant

Or a scary mask.

or a scary mask, or a cat burglar mask.

It comes from here.

So lots of sort of little weird things.

And obviously, like you mentioned, The Charge of the Light Brigade, the very famous poem.

But the whole thing started

over a religious argument basically in the Ottoman Empire, wherein for several years the French Catholics were battling it out with the Russian Orthodox Church over who controlled the holy sites, the Christian holy sites within the Ottoman Empire, which really ticked off Tsar Nicholas I.

Yeah, boy, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

It's crazy when you see this stuff that happened back in the 1850s and you can draw sort of a straight line to things that happened today in Russian expansion.

It's just really interesting stuff.

But all that to say is that what is now, like you said, modern day Romania, he now occupied France and Britain got their hackles up.

They sent warships to the Black Sea in 1853, declared war on Russia in 1854.

And the first big, you know, this could have ended it all.

The first big major defeat against that English and French alliance was at Odessa there in the Black Sea.

And Tsar Nicholas withdrew basically that land he had occupied.

He pulled back out in July of 1854.

And that could have been the end of it.

But the Frenchies and the Brits said, you know what?

Now we want to punish them for their aggression.

So we're going to go on the offensive.