Infinite Wisdom

"My wealth’s a burly spear and brand,
And a right good shield of hides untanned,
        Which on my arm I buckle:
With these I plough, I reap, I sow,
With these I make the sweet vintage flow,
        And all around me truckle.

But your wights that take no pride to wield,
A massy spear and well-made shield,
        Nor joy to draw the sword”
Oh, I bring those heartless, hapless deones,
Down in a trice on their marrow-bones,
To call me King and Lord "

La Triviata

• On August 10, 1792, all 615 officers and men of the French Garde Suisse perished defending Louis XVI from a revolutionary mob, though not before slaying at least 3,000 of their attackers.


• During the Revolutionary War, service in the cavalry was considered so desirable that one Continental Dragoon convicted of a capital crime by court martial was sentenced to death or service in the infantry.


• Between June 27 and August 3, 1914, the British, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, French, and German governments generated an astonishing 6,000 documents, more than 1.5 million words, related to the crisis that had erupted with the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the outbreak of World War I.


• As a young man, Dante, the “gentle Florentine,” fought as a cavalryman in the battle of Campaldino (June 11, 1289), helping the Guelfs defeat their exiled Ghibelline opponents, an occasion to which he later referred in Canto 5 of his Purgatorio.


• When an Essex Class aircraft carrier prepared to go to for sea for the first time in 1944-1945, among the many items brought aboard were some 50,000 cartons of cigarettes, enough to provide every man in the crew with over 3,000 smokes.


• During World War I, 18-percent of personnel of the American Armed Forces were foreign born, and perhaps as many more again were the offspring of immigrants.


• Britain's Duke of Cumberland, who presided over the massacre known as the Battle of Culloden in 1745, but later did less well commanding British troops in Germany, was wont to go to war in style, and on one campaign reportedly brought along personal goods to the weight of 145 tons.


• During the peak period of Erwin Rommel’s effort to complete the Atlantic Wall, in early 1944, some 500,000 workers were involved in construction at any given time.

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