Infinite Wisdom

"Brutality in war seems to pursue a logic of escalation despite the best intent of commanders to act humanely."

La Triviata

• During the fighting in Leipzig on October 19, 1813, the final day of the “Battle of the Nations,” casualties were so heavy that some French troops reportedly fled across the River Pleisse when it became choked with dead men and horses and abandoned equipment.
• In mid-2008, Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott III commanded the 18^th Air Force, apparently a several-times grand kinsman of a certain noted officer .
• In 172 B.C. the small southern Italian city-state of Uria was required by treaty to support Rome with four warships, despite the fact that the place was nearly 20 miles from the sea.
• In October of 1917 the Austro-Hungarian 144^th Infantry received its 41^st colonel, since the outbreak of World War I in August of 1914, commanders having averaged only 28 days before being killed, wounded, or otherwise separated from regiment.
• Because he had passed out from loss of blood after being wounded during the Battle of Churubusco (August 19, 1847), when sometime brigadier general Franklin Pierce ran for president in 1852, some of his political enemies took to calling him “The Fainting General,” an early instance of “Swift Boating.”
• While lying at Port-au-Prince, Haiti, in 1915, during a local political crisis that would ultimately lead to nearly 20 years of American occupation, the 1,100 sailors of the armored cruiser Washington (CA-11), learning that 766 Haitian troops had been aboard a transport without rations for four days, donated their breakfast to the hungry men.
• During the French Wars (1793-1815) disease accounted for about half of the deaths among British sailors, followed by accidents or the hazards of the sea, at 41 percent while all other causes, including combat, accounted for less than 9 percent.
• In October of 1941 the Nazi occupation authorities in Kiev made one Volodymyr Bahazii mayor, though they later shot him, possibly because before the war he had been the private tutor for the children of the former First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, one Nikita Krushchev.

More...