Infinite Wisdom

"We must see the art of war not only within the framework of political history, but also within social, economic, intellectual, technological, and eventually, psycho history."

La Triviata

• While serving on secondment on the North West Frontier in 1897, Winston S. Churchill was paid £5 apiece for his dispatches to The Daily Telegraph, and a further £600 for his book The Story of the Malakand Field Force (Dover Military History, Weapons, Armor) , which was twice his annual pay as a lieutenant in the 4th Queen's Own Hussars, and amounts to about  $153,000 in today’s currency.
• In addition to her other attainments, Clara Barton was a crack shot with a pistol (regularly impressing male onlookers at the firing range with her ability to hit targets at 50 yards) and volunteered to help guard Washington during the opening days of the Civil War, in April of 1861.
• At the Battle of Ramillies (May 23, 1706), 19-year-old Color Ensign James Gardiner led a Scottish battalion into action and was shot in the mouth by a musket-ball that exited through the side of his neck without breaking a tooth or damaging his tongue and left him with no permanent injury, so that he was able to later rose to lieutenant colonel and commander of what became the 13^th Dragoons, only to be killed in action fighting the Jacobites at Preston Pans (Sept. 21, 1745).
• In 1792, with nobility and wealthier bourgeois not supplying enough candidates to meet the army’s needs for officers, the House of Habsburg instituted special cadet schools for the sons of non-commissioned officers, thus opening the officer corps to members of the working class.
• Entering government service in February of 1940, by the end of the Second World War, the liner Queen Elizabeth had travelled nearly 500,000 nautical miles and carried a total of almost 750,000 passengers, mostly troops or prisoners-of-war.
• Fighting in Spanish service, the Italian condottiero Giovan Luigi Vitelli (1519-1575), known as "Chiappino", campaigned successfully against the Turks, the French, and the Dutch, and was "equally distinguished for his courage, his cruelty, and his corpulence," being so fat, in fact, that his "protuberant stomach was always supported by a sash suspended from his neck."
• On the eve of the American Civil War, some 3,165,000 men were officially enrolled as militiamen in the U.S. (including about 650,000 in the South), out of which only about 115,000 (35,000 in the South) had any training or equipment.
• During the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), the Marine Society of London sent some 4,500 boys into the Royal Navy to serve as servants and trainees.
• Three landlocked countries -- Bolivia, Paraguay, and Yugoslavia -- not only have navies, but also have naval infantry or marine corps, intended for riverine operations.

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