A Helping Hand

Having expended nearly half a decade's worth of thoughts and prayers upon Tsar Vladimir's crusade, and elicited the Deity's usual resounding response, the Russian Orthodox Church has decided that more practical measures are called for. Accordingly, it has dug up the remains of a fourteenth-century warlord revered for defeating the local equivalent of the Yellow Peril, and has conveyed a portion of his anatomy to the fighting front. Some bits and pieces of Alexander Nevsky, whose earlier defeat of the Teutonic Knights rescued Holy Russia from revering biological specimens from the wrong sort of people, were apparently also deployed a few months ago, doubtless to equally salutary effect.