Infinite Wisdom

"I like generals so bold they are dangerous."

La Triviata

• Arguably, first blood in the American Revolution was shed on January 19-20, 1770, at the “Battle of Golden Hill”, when New York patriots attempting to put up a new Liberty Pole (the fourth in as many years), clashed with British troops trying to tear it down, sparking rioting in which several people were injured (though none killed), six weeks before the more famous “Boston Massacre.”
• King Archelaus I of Macedon (r, 413-399 BC), an able, reforming ruler and military commander, was once asked by his barber, “How would you like your hair cut?” and replied, “In silence.”
• Pursuant to his secret agreement with the Kingdom of Sardinia to spark a war with Austria in 1859, Napoleon III seems to have shipped his allies 100,000 stand of arms, at no cost, correctly anticipating the need to equip tens of thousands of volunteers who would flock to their support in the effort to oust the Hapsburgs from Italy.
• The Marquis of Salisbury (1830-1922), who served as Britain’s prime minister on three occasions (1885-1886, 1886-1892, 1895-1902), had ten grandsons who served in the First World War, five of whom were killed in action.
• Reportedly, Napoleon's favorite remedy for virtually all ills was to douse himself liberally with eau de cologne, which his stout foeman Prussian Marshal Gebhard von Blucher also found useful, as it covered the odor of booze.
• In 915 Pope John X (r. 914-928) organized an Italian-Lombard-Frankish-Byzantine coalition to crush an Arab pirate colony at Minturno, at the mouth of the Garigliano River, between Rome and Naples, personally led the combined army on campaign, directed the siege of the enemy defenses, and twice took part in the fighting at critical moments.
• On July 20, 1808, with Britain locked in a desperate struggle Napoleonic France, King George III was “graciously pleased” to abolish the wearing of the queue (pigtail) in the British Army, requiring instead that hair be “cut close in their necks in the neatest and most uniform manner”, though cautioning that the measure would stand “until further orders”, apparently as a concession to sartorial arch-conservatives, though most officers and men in the field had already abandoned its use.
• The Emperor Augustus died at the age of 75 in A.D. 14 at a villa near Nola, in central Italy, in the same room in which his father Gaius Octavius (the first member of the family to attain public office) had died at about age 42, back in 58 BC.

More...