Infinite Wisdom

"If you had immediately sent 200,000 men forward into the zone reoccupied by the Germans, you would have rendered an immense service to everybody."

La Triviata

• Reportedly, when the Belgian revolution against Holland broke out on August 25, 1830, King William I of the Netherlands, a champion equestrian, fled Brussels on horseback, reaching the safety of The Hague that very same day, having covered over 100 miles.
• In his 1960 book about the Campaign of 1940, Recalled To Service , General Maxime Weygand tried to explain away the French defeat by asserting that the German Army had some 7,500 tanks, about triple the actual number!
• Although an armistice was concluded between the United States and Spain on August 13, 1898, and hostilities were officially ended on December 10^th, on December 12^th, the lightly armed American light house tender Mangrove engaged two Spanish gunboats in the Caribbean, before her opponents were able to convince her that the war was over.
• In the decade following the Civil War about half of all recruits for the U.S. Army were either Irish or German immigrants.
• Between 1900 and 1911, the number of candidates for St. Cyr, the French military academy, fell from 1,895 to 871, while the number of applicants for the infantry officer candidate school at St. Maixent went from 842 to 380, so that on the eve of World War I, in mid-1914, the active army was short about 800 lieutenants.
• Of 80,000 British troops sent to the West Indies between 1793 and 1798, some 40,000 died of disease.
• During the First World War, British Army regulations provided that the penalty for sleeping while on sentry duty was either death or two years' imprisonment.
• On the eve of the French Revolution of 1789, the officer corps, which had been an amazing 35,000 just a few years before, had been reduced to 9,578, of whom 6,633 (69%) were nobles, 1,845 were of bourgeois origins (19%), and about 1,100 were former enlisted men (11.5%) or of working class or even peasant origins, though the proportion of nobles was slated to rise, as a law of 1781 prohibited anyone who did not have four generations of “noble blood” on both sides of his family from being promoted above lieutenant.
• When the Bulgarians joined Germany and Austria-Hungary against the Allies in 1915, their army had only 65 percent of the great coats, 68 percent of the tunics, 61 percent of the trousers, and 57 percent of the boots needed to outfit each soldier.
• On February 14, 1957, the U.S. Army ended an honorable military tradition, selling the last 136 mules in the service, and thus for the first time since the Revolutionary War was without these hardworking animals.

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