Infinite Wisdom

"Credit makes war, and makes peace, raises armies, fits our navies."

La Triviata

• Conscription regulations introduced in Sweden in 1682 remained substantially in force until 1901.
• Offering sacrifice one day in 362 BC, Xenophon was approached by a courier who informed him that his eldest son, Gryllus, had been killed fighting the Thebans at Mantinea, whereupon the aged warrior removed the garland from his head, only to replace it when the messenger added that the young man had contributed gloriously to the victory, having slain Epaminondas, the enemy commander in hand-to-hand fighting.
• Between the entry of the U.S. into World War I, on April 7, 1917, and the Armistice of November 11, 1918, the national debt rose from $1 billion to $27 billion, and borrowed money rose from virtually none to 70 percent of federal expenditures.
• In 1747, during King George’s War (the War of the Austrian Succession), to circumvent the long pacifist tradition of Pennsylvania's founding Quakers, Benjamin Franklin organized some 600 "gentlemen and merchants" of Philadelphia to adopt "articles of association" to provide for the common defense against Indian raiders and French privateers, raising funds through a lottery and in the process forming what are today's 111^th Infantry and 103^rd Engineers
• Completely bald in his old age, the great Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke often wore a wig which, one observer recalled, “could not be mistaken for anything else,” not because he was vain, but because it allowed him to keep his head covered while working in the chilly offices of the War Ministry in Berlin.
• On the night of November 2^nd, 1943, PT-59 helped evacuate a band of marines who were under heavy Japanese fire trapped against the coast on Choiseul Island, in the southwest Pacific, for which the battalion commander promised the boat’s skipper a bottle of whiskey, which was delivered on the next occasion on which the two men met, in 1962, when sometime Lt. Col. Victor H. Krulak was a major general and sometime Lt., j.g., John F. Kennedy was president.
• In the Spring of 1917, Maxime Weygand, chief-of-staff and general factotum to Ferdinand Foch, and Ulrich Wille, General-in-Chief of the Swiss Army, held secret conversations in Bern to develop a contingency plan in the event that Germany invaded Switzerland.
• To prevent a possible run on local banks, or the sudden transfer of large sums of cash out of the territory with crippling effect on the local economy, on January 12, 1940, the territorial governor of Hawaii restricted monthly withdrawals from private accounts to just $200, and from business accounts to $5,000.

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