Infinite Wisdom

"This bow, resting from tearful war, hangs here under the roof of Athena’s temple; Often mid the roar of battle, in the struggle of men, was it washed in the blood of Persian nobles."

La Triviata

• In early 1944, Patriarch Sergius of the Russian Orthodox Church raised over 8 million rubles to finance the formation of the “Dmitriy Donskoy Battalion”, a T-34 flame-thrower tank unit named after a sainted prince who had ruled Moscow and Vladimir in the fourteenth century.
• Buckingham Palace was bombed nine times during World War II, occasionally while members of the Royal family were in residence, though they often spent nights outside of London.
• When King Mkwaw of the Hehe, a Tangynikan people, was killed by a German patrol in 1897, his skull was taken to a museum in Bremen; but after decades of efforts by the British (who had taken the colony over after World War I) was returned in 1954 and is now preserved in Tanzania as a relic of resistance to colonialism.
• Given a brigadier generalship for the Spanish-American War, William C. Oates (who had led the Confederate 15^th Alabama up Little Round Top on July 2, 1863) upon discovering that his brigade included the 9^th Ohio Battalion (composed of and commanded by black volunteers), protested so loudly that he was shortly reassigned to a less-melanin endowed command.
• At the battle of Pharsalus (August 9, 48 BC), Pompey the Great followed the progress of his cavalry attack on Caesar’s right flank by watching the movement of the dust it raised, and from the dust cloud moving back from the enemy lines was thus among the first to realize that his troopers had been defeated and were in retreat.
• About 115,000 British women married American servicemen during the Second World War.
• In 1914 the Bavarian Royal Army had 88 Jewish officers, which was more than the rest of the German Imperial Armed Forces together, and a little more than half the 182 in Britain’s army and navy combined.
• Between the world wars, entry to France's École Supérieure de Guerre required first a 27-hour series of written tests in history, geography, military practice, and more, including proficiency tests in either English or German, and then (for the 120 applicants who passed that round) a week of oral exams in various subjects, plus an equitation trial, after which about 80 men were accepted for the two-year course. 

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