Infinite Wisdom

"Armies resemble the fashion industry in their susceptibility to trends, and health aficionados in their quest for symmetry."

La Triviata

• Reportedly, a certain German general once commented that his Supreme War Lord, Kaiser Wilhelm II, could not “lead three soldiers over a gutter.”
• After the siege of Sebastopol in 1854–1855, some 100,000 human skeletons were sold by the Tsar to a firm in Britain which processed them into fertilizer.
• Harold Macmillan, the Prime Minister of Great Britain from 1957 to 1963, had served as a captain in the Grenadier Guards during World War I, suffering his third wound during the battle of the Somme, after which he was found by a stretcher party ensconced in a shell hole quietly reading Aeschylus, in the original Greek.
• When Alexander the Great circulated to the Greek cities a request that they proclaim him a god, the Spartans passed a resolution declaring, “Since Alexander desires to be a god, let him be a god.”
• Hanna Reitch, Hitler's favorite "girl" pilot, had a long-term torrid relationship with Luftwaffe Field Marshal Robert Ritter von Greim, and the two flew out of Berlin together at Hitler's orders, in her airplane during the final hours of the Reich.
• In 1800, the purchase price of a captaincy in an “ordinary” British cavalry regiment was £2,782, while annual pay was only £266 5s.
• Despite claims -- then and even now -- by some very air-minded commentators and historians that the inter-war Navy was hostile to aviation, the proportion of personnel in naval aviation grew from about 2 percent of total manpower at the beginning of the 1920s to 20.4 percent in 1939. 
• In 1945, a Philadelphia newspaper ran a picture of two pet baby skunks who had been named "Hitler" and "Mussolini," which prompted numerous protests, on behalf of the skunks.
• In late-1917, the First Sea Lord (CNO), Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, proposed that the Allies undertake a naval offensive in the North Sea to capture Helgoland and the Wangeroode Islands and block the exits from German ports and rivers by scuttling 83 old warships, a plan to which the U.S., France, and Japan objected because they would have to supply two-thirds of the obsolete vessels. 

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