Infinite Wisdom

"The Soldier is as Necessary to a Community as the Magistrate."

La Triviata

• In 1896, at the age of 15, Cecil B. DeMille entered the Pennsylvania Military College, but left in 1898 to attend the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, with impressive consequences for the infant motion picture industry.
• The Swedish for "being shot by firing squad" appears to be "arkebusering," harking back to the earliest practical infantry long arm, the sixteenth century arquebus.
• The average enlisted man in the "Indian Fighting Army" of the late-nineteenth century was unmarried, about 25, probably illiterate, and most likely either an immigrant or an African-American rather than a native-born white man.
• In 1920 Willis A. Lee – later nicknamed "Ching Chong China Lee" in the Fleet -- won five gold medals for marksmanship at the Olympics in Antwerp, and later went on to become the most successful American battleship admiral of all time.
• From December of 1804, the month Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of France, and July of 1806, there were 119 recorded incidents of anti-draft disturbances in the country, with desertions averaging about 800 a month and an officially estimated 4,000 men actually fled to Spain to evade service.
• When the U.S. entered World War I, in April of 1917, the American Chemical Society offered its services to the government, only to be turned down by the Secretary of War, who noted that his department already had a chemist and did not need more, despite the fact the Germans and the Allies had been using poison gas against each other for nearly two years.
• Santos Degollado (1811-1861), one of Benito Juarez's more successful commanders and ministers during the "War of Reform" (1858-1861), bore an ancient Spanish surname with origins lost in the mists of time, meaning "Throat Cutter."
• During the Second World War the British royal family restricted their meals to whatever was available with their standard issue ration books.
• Formed from nearly 300 volunteer railroaders in the autumn of 1917, the U.S. Army’s “Russian Railroad Service Corps” spent much of 1918 and most of 1919 supporting Allied and White Guard forces in Siberia, and were often under fire, but were denied veterans’ status until 1973.

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