Infinite Wisdom

"When a man stands firm and remains unmoved in the front rank, and forgets all thought of disgraceful flight, steeling his spirit and heart to endure, and with words encouraging the man standing next to him, this is the man good in war."

La Triviata

• By 1814 military personnel accounted for about 95 percent of the 32,000 men to whom Napoleon had awarded the Légion d'honneur.
• Total deaths in London from the German “Blitz” were about 28,000 over nearly five years, between Luftwaffe raids and V-1 and V-2 attacks, fewer than what prewar air power pundits had claimed would result from a single massed raid on the city.
• The loot captured when the Roman Army under P. Cornelius Scipio – later called “Africanus” – took New Carthage in Spain in 209 B.C., included 120 large and 281 small catapults, which hurled stone “cannon balls,” as well as 23 large and 52 small ballistae, giant crossbows.
• A minor scandal occurred in Britain in 1815 when it was revealed that although the national “lunacy rate” was one-in-7,000, in the Royal Navy it was one-in-1,000.
• In September and October of 1938, the British battlecruiser Hood defeated two German “pocket battleships,” the Graf Spee and the Deutschland, crushing them both in football matches, at Tangier and Gibraltar respectively.
• Following the Battle of Cerro Gordo (April 18, 1847), Mexican President Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna’s dinner, “with delicious wines and some highly flavored cigars” was eaten with great gusto by several American officers, including Captain Justus McKinstry, who during the Civil War would become the only general on either side to be cashiered for corruption.
• On December 7, 1941, Senator Gordon Nye, a notorious isolationist was addressing an America First rally when he was passed a note informing him of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, whereupon he promptly warned his audience against rumors spread by warmongers.

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