Infinite Wisdom

"In the hour of Victory, tighten your helmet strings."

La Triviata

• A rider to the Selective Draft Act of 1917 imposed severe penalties for anyone selling alcoholic beverages to a man in uniform, and prescribed minimum distances that saloons and brothels had to maintain from military bases
• During the 1850s and 1860s, nearly half the Austrian military budget was spent on military and civilian officials of the war and navy ministries or as subsidies to defense contractors, rather than to pay personnel and procure equipment.
• At the time of the Battle of Trafalgar (October 21, 1805), the Royal Navy had 569,000 tons of ships, the French fleet 182,000, and the Spanish 139,000.
• During the reign of Cleopatra III (142–101 BC) the two senior-most commanders of the Egyptian Army, Chelkias and Ananias, were not only Jewish, but brothers.
• Concerned over the security of the Falkland Islands, in 1939 Britain arranged to augment the local garrison by mobilizing reservists who lived in nearby Uruguay,  Argentina, and other parts of South America, thereby saving the cost of sending troops from the homeland.
• During the late nineteenth century, about 120 to 150 officers annually applied for admission to the German kriegsakademie, the general staff college, of whom rarely more than a third were accepted, and of these, perhaps 20 might become members of the general staff corps, after completing the three year course and another year of regimental duty.
• Relations between New York’s colonial governor Jacob Leisler, who usurped power in 1689, and his council were so bad that he once had to defend himself from an angry legislator by threatening to run him through with a halberd, though his luck eventually ran out and he was lynched by the citizenry in 1691.
• Stationed in Ceylon from 1796 to 1820, and repeatedly reinforced, the British 19th Foot, later the Princess of Wales's Own (Yorkshire Regiment), lost an average of 10 percent of its strength each year, primarily to disease, for a total of some 50 officers and 1,500 other ranks. 

More...