Infinite Wisdom

"The general character of all wars is the same: they originate in the ambition of princes and terminate in the misery of the people."

La Triviata

• Casualties (killed, wounded, or missing) among the 427,910 men and officers who served in the Red Army’s penal battalions during “The Great Patriotic War” were about 50 percent, which was roughly 50 percent greater than that of regular combat units.
• It’s rare for troops who are homeward bound to desert, but in December of 1898, when the 1^st New York Volunteers (who had landed at Honolulu in August to effect the annexation of Hawaii) was ordered home, a large number of men went AWOL.
• In May of 1929, German President Paul von Hindenburg honored the crew of the German light cruiser Emden (which had captured or sunk some 30 Allied vessels during a 15 week raiding cruise in 1914) by permitting each member to add “Emden” to his family name; so that, for example, Prince Franz Joseph von Hohenzollern, who had served as a junior officer in the famed ship, became “von Hohenzollern-Emden”.
• Reportedly, British Admiral Lord Charles Beresford (1846-1919), had such a passion for fox hunting that he had “a hunting scene tattooed across his buttocks - with the fox disappearing into the cleft."
• During the French & Indian War (1754-1763), over 2,000 men from Massachusetts died in military service, nearly 1 percent of the colony’s population of about 268,600, which statistically is a greater loss than that sustained by the U.S. during World War II when, out of about 131,000,000 people, 418,000 (or somewhat over 0.3 percent) died.
• When the Duke of Wellington attended the Congress of Vienna in 1814, the Austrian secret police noted that he was accompanied by the famed opera singer Mme. Giuseppina Grassini, “a very pleasant kind of baggage”, who had previously been a mistress of a certain Corsican who had recently removed to Elba.
• On June 13, 1769, George Washington requested title to a site near the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers where, at the outbreak of the French and Indian War in 1754, he had built, defended, and surrendered Fort Necessity; a request which was subsequently granted, so that he held the plot for the rest of his life.
• When Philip V of Macedon (r. 221-179 BC) attempted a surprise storming of the city of Larissa in northern Greece, his troops discovered that their scaling ladders were about 6 feet too short, and, while they tried to remedy the problem, the Larissans rallied and counter-attacked, causing the King to call off the action.

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