Infinite Wisdom

"The vow for the safety of the Emperor that I, Lucius Maximus Gaetulicus, son of Lucius, of the tribe Voltinia, from Vienne, made as a new recruit in legio XX Valeria Victrix to Imperial Victory, all-divine and most reverend, I, primpilus in the legio I Italica, have now fulfilled after fifty-seven years’ of service, in the consulship of Marullus and Aelianus"

La Triviata

• Following the ambush of a Prussian supply convoy near Olmutz in 1758, the Austrian exchequer found itself richer by some 200,000 thalers, of which 70,000 ha to be recovered from the pockets of the capturing troops.
• Milo of Croton, a notable wrestler with 32 victories in international competition, was also a general who commanded his city’s army successfully on several occasions, most notably in a war that led to the destruction of Sybaris, a nearby city in southern Italy, in 511 B.C., usually wearing his six Olympic crowns while on campaign.
• On the eve of World War I, 58.4 percent of every 1000 Frenchmen between the ages of 21 and 60 had received military training, the highest military participation rate of any major European power, the German figure being 48 percent, followed by Russia with 43.6 percent, Austria-Hungary with 34 percent, and Italy with 30.2 percent.
• In 1820, Mehemet Ali, the Turkish governor of Egypt, concentrated an army of Turks, Albanians, Syrians, Greeks, Sudanese, and Arabs, not to mention the occasional American, Briton, Italian, or other European, to conquer the Sudan. 
• During the Civil War, 24 percent of the 29,980 amputations performed by U.S. Army surgeons resulted in fatalities, a figure greatly exceeded during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), when fully 77 percent of the approximately 13,000 amputations performed by French Army surgeons resulted in death.
• One the night of January 31, 1804, a false alarm caused bonfires warning of a French invasion to be lighted all along the British coast, so that the army and the militia turned out before the error was realized, providing a useful test of the effectiveness of defensive preparations.
• The shortest arms control agreement in history is probably the Protocol Concerning Non-Detectable Fragments, initialed by 81 countries during the 1978-1980 U.N. Disarmament Conference, which reads "It is prohibited to use any weapon the primary effect of which is to injure by fragments which in the human body escape detection by X-rays."
• During World War I forty Roman Catholic priests died while serving as chaplains in the British Army.

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