Three strong young men all home on spring break sit in an inn on the edge of Colmar in the French part of Alsace — the wine producing region of France) — but all were of German descent. Each was guzzling down a mug of dark beer. Colmar had been captured and recaptured by French and German armies time and time again since 1226, when it became an imperial town under Frederick II, who surrounded it with defensive walls.
All the young men were fluent in both French and German, and they were all history students at the university in Munich. The subject of their table talk, no surprise, was the coming of yet another war. They all came from prosperous wine families, and all had heard, for all their whole lives, the debate as whether they were German or French.
