Infinite Wisdom

"In warfare, the force of armies is the product of the mass multiplied by something else, an unknown X . . . the spirit of the army."

--	Leo Tolstoy, Sebastopol veteran, War and Peace

La Triviata

• From the outbreak of the French Revolution in July of 1789 through 1793, two-thirds of the officers in the Royal Army - some 6,000 of 9,000 men - left the country.
• Although the Imperial Army did not adopt the Maxim machine gun until 1899, German officers serving in Africa reportedly began purchasing them with their own money as early as 1889.
• Between April 1^st and August 1^st of 1898, during the Spanish-American War, the strength of the U.S. Army grew slightly more than tenfold, from 27,146 Regulars to 56,012 Regulars and 216,034 volunteers, for a total of 272,046 troops.
• During the First World War, David Ben-Gurion, later the first Prime Minister of Israel, served as a private in the 38^th (Service) Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers, known as the Jewish Legion.
• In 1870, slightly more than 3 percent of staff corps majors in the Austro-Hungarian Army were over 43 years of age, compared with 17 percent in the cavalry, 42 percent in the infantry, and 94 percent in the artillery.
• The all-time peak strength of the Marine Corps was reached in August 1945, when 485,113 officers and enlisted personnel were on active duty.
• In 1804 Francis II, the last Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1792-1806), proclaimed himself the first Emperor of Austria as Francis I (r. 1804-1835); thus becoming, for two years (until the Holy Roman Empire was dissolved) history’s only “Doppelkaiser -- Double Emperor”.
• Although scores of American destroyers conducted convoy operations during World War I, only one U-boot was sunk by an American tin can, U-58, which was depth-charged to the surface by the USS Fanning (DD-37) and then finished off by gunfire on November 17, 1917, off Queenstown [now Cobh], Ireland.

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