Infinite Wisdom

"It is all my fault."

La Triviata

• In the early seventeenth century the military writer Jacob von Wallhausen noted that, “When you recruit a regiment of German soldiers today, you do not only acquire 3,000 soldiers; along with these you will certainly find 4,000 women and children.”
• From 1879 through 1888, 79 in every thousand men in the U.S. Army committed suicide, a rate three times higher than that of the British Army, and twice that of the Prussian Army.
• At the height of the Roman Empire, capturing animals for the arena was a common duty for the troops, and documents survive that refer some personnel as “NCO in Charge of Wild Beasts.”
• Fluent in German, Danish, English, French, Italian, Russian, and Turkish, Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke kept a diary in which he freely mixed the first five, but was so tight lipped that he was known as “A man who can be silent in seven languages.”
• Despite the fact that the “Irish Free State” was officially neutral, over 45,000 men from Eire served in the British Armed Forces during World War II.
• The Second Florida War (1835-1842) cost the U.S. something between $35 million and $45 million dollars, not to mention about 5,000 lives, to effect a partial “resettlement” of the Seminole Indians to the West.
• Anti-espionage vigilantism in Britain during the opening days of World War I caused the London Metropolitan Police to receive over 8,000 “tips” from patriotic citizens, none of which panned out.
• Catalina de Erauso (1592-1650), a former nun, served for many years in the Spanish Army in the Americas during the early seventeenth century, initially disguised as a man and later openly as a woman, eventually rising to second lieutenant, with a grant of the right to wear men’s clothing from Pope Urban VIII.

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