Al Nofi's CIC
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Issue #215, September 29th, 2008 |
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This Issue...
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Infinite Wisdom
"Under this monument lies Aeschylus of Athens, Son of Euporion, who died amid the wheat fields of Gela.
The grove of Marathon can speak of his valor in battle.
The long-haired Persian remembers and can speak of it too."
| -- | Tombstone of Aeschylus,
Greatest Playwright of Antiquity,
Gela, Sicily
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La Triviata
- Of some 2,000 Kentucky militiamen who arrived at New Orleans on January 4, 1815, only about 550 were armed, though this did not prevent them from bragging about their role in the battle that followed on the 8th, despite severe criticism from Andrew Jackson himself, who obseved that they hadn’t even brought whiskey with them, a first for their state.
- On December 18, 1935, the women of Italy, from Queen Elena on down, donated their wedding rings and jewelry to support the war effort against Ethiopia, yielding 35 tons of gold and 113 of silver.
- In 1983, only nine of the 224 top ranking officers in the Chinese People’s Liberation Army had any college education whatsoever, even if they had dropped out.
- Upon his suicide in 1913, Col. Alfred Redl, who betrayed Austro-Hungarian war plans to Russia, left assets and property (including 195 dress shirts, 400 pairs of gloves, a luxury apartment in Prague, and a Daimler limo) worth 75,000 kronen, an estate considerably larger than that of Franz Conrad von Hotzendorf, Chief of the Imperial-and-Royal General Staff and a count in the bargain, though the latter at least didn’t have kr100,000 in debts.
- By mid-1943, the U.S. Coast Guard beach patrols were employing 3,222 horses, most supplied by the Army Remount Service
- Revolutionary War veteran Maj. Gen. James Wilkinson was so crooked and pusillanimous that from about 1796 through about 1812, during most of which time he was the senior officer of the U.S. Army, he received covert payments of $2,000 a year from Spain.
- While traveling with Buffalo Bill’s “Wild West Show” in the late 1880s, Sitting Bull, the great Sioux war leader, was wont to hand out dollar bills to poor children, so they could see the show.
- During the War of 1812, the town of Salem, in Massachusetts, in a county with a population of only about 12,000, sent 41 privateers to sea, including the wonderfully named Black Vomit.
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Portions of "Al
Nofi's CIC" have appeared previously in Military Chronicles,
Copyright © 2005 Military
Chronicles (www.militarychronicles.com), used with permission, all rights
reserved.
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