No Tracks Coming back

Horace tells a fable about a fox who won't enter the lion's cave, because every footprint in the dust points the same way and none point back. Some decisions work like that.A Sicilian tyrant lands an army in Africa and burns his own fleet on the beach. Julius Caesar steps across a stream so small we have since lost track of where it was. A village official escorting prisoners across China works out that he is already a dead man, and unties them. A man leaves a comfortable island with a thousand soldiers and walks alone into the muskets of a regiment sent to stop him.And on a November evening in 1989, a badly drafted document and one unanswered telephone open a door that nobody can work out how to close.