The imagined great war never came, leaving every side with a pounding headache. Austria, Britain, and the Ottoman Empire busied themselves negotiating with one another; even Greece declared that it had merely been conducting routine exercises.
Franz finally breathed a sigh of relief as well. If war had truly broken out, then all his efforts would have gone down the drain.
But the current situation was troublesome too. Moving over a hundred thousand troops and their corresponding supplies was no small expense, and once the costs of the colonies were added in, the overall expenditure could not be ignored.
The first thing George Hamilton-Gordon did after returning to the center of power was cut spending in the Near East and demand that the Ottoman Empire repay the interest.
Yet just as every side had breathed a sigh of relief and was preparing to sheath its swords and store away its spears, war broke out.
February 14, 1856.
Inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, clerics of every sect were, as always, fighting one another over the church's limited space. Such friction had persisted for centuries.
The Roman Church, Greek Orthodox Church, Protestantism, Russian Orthodox Church, and Armenia Apostle Society all fought within the church for every inch of ground and the ownership of every hanging lamp.
The central altar belonged to the Roman Church. The altars on either side belonged respectively to the Greek Orthodox Church and Russian Orthodox Church, while Armenian clerics held fast to the sanctuary and holy oil passed down through their generations.
As a Greek believer passed by, he happened to bump a censer, shifting its base several centimeters farther into the Russian Orthodox area.
Yet those few centimeters brought disaster only minutes later. The Russian missionaries discovered that the other side's censer had crossed the