Infinite Wisdom

"I would have paid horse prices for sheep, if sheep could have pulled artillery pieces to the front."

La Triviata

• Napoleon’s plans for an invasion of Britain in 1804-1805, were largely based on studies and proposals made in 1779, during the War of the American Revolution, when France and Spain seriously considered undertaking the operation.
• Upon becoming President in 1913, Woodrow Wilson was shocked to discover that the Joint Army-Navy Board had developed “war plans” for certain contingencies, and immediately suspended its meetings and ordered the two services to stop planning for possible conflicts.
• An old tale has it that Ranjit Singh of Lahore, the first maharaja of the Sikhs (1801-1839), once scoured Persia, the Punjab, and Kashmir for 180 of the most attractive young women he could find, and then organized and trained them to serve as a troop of horse archers.
• Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s “Iron Chancellor,” apparently worked his way through a couple of bottles of champagne and over a dozen Havanas a day.
• During World War II, an estimated 700 American cities and towns closed down their “red light districts” as part of the national effort to reduce manpower loss through venereal infections.
• On the eve of World War I, in 1914, the annual death rate from accidents among workers at the Krupp Essen plant was 4.1 per thousand employees, a figure that by 1917 had risen to 8.7 per thousand, as the tempo of production increased, while employee health deteriorated from malnutrition and overwork.
• During the Franco-Prussian War, Friedrich Engels, already famous as Marx’s partner as a founder of international communism, raised money for the German cause.
• In 1939 159,409 men tried to enlist in the U.S. Navy, of whom only 14,512 were accepted, about 9 percent.

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