Infinite Wisdom

"A fleet ready to fight at the drop of a hat."

La Triviata

• During the reign of Louis XIV, Burgundy paid a special tax, the “exemption des gens de guerre,” to keep Royal troops from wintering in the province (thereby avoiding drunken brawls, plundered chicken coops, debauched maidens, and other undesirable consequences), which rose from 112,000 livres in 1662 to 200,000 livres by 1680, though the king regularly violated the arrangement.
• By one estimate, perhaps 60 percent of all Germans where affected by territorial changes made during the Napoleonic Wars.
• Porters were the principal carriers of supplies for Inca armies in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, most of whom were women, doing their bit of compulsory national service alongside the menfolk.
• In January of 1941, asked by Winston Churchill what the United States would do in the war, presidential confidant Harry Hopkins replied by quoting the Book of Ruth, “Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge: thy people shall be my people, and thy God, my God,” which reportedly moved the Prime Minister to tears.
• In the twelfth century, “Honor Trousers” were the highest military decoration awarded by the emperors of Mali, in West Africa, which the Arab historian al-Umart described as narrow-legged pants with their bottom size determined by the number of a warrior’s heroic deeds; the greater the number of battlefield feats, the baggier the pants.
• Having abandoned his army at Smorgoni on December 4, 1812, to rush back to France, Napoleon took a boat across the River Nieman Napoleon, and as they rowed across asked the ferryman if he had seen any deserters, prompting the man to reply, “No, you are the first.”
• During the nineteenth century, the official code of military justice in Brazil was based on the Prussian system of 1763, which dictated whippings for the slightest infractions, and was not formally abolished until 1874, though brutal floggings continued “unofficially” until finally abolished after mutinies over harsh discipline occurred in the army in 1903 and in the navy in 1910.
• Although some had been slightly modernized, over 300 actual World War II aircraft were used in the filming Battle of Britain in 1969, and by one reckoning constituted the 15^th largest air force in the world at the time.

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