Infinite Wisdom

"When the army marches abroad, the treasury will be emptied at home."

La Triviata

• Of some scores of Jewish inscriptions dating from Roman times found in Pannonia (roughly western Hungary and adjacent bits of Austria and the former Yugoslavia), two-thirds were dedicated by men serving in the Imperial Army, notably as archers in the auxilia.
• In 1857, when informed that their regiment was to be transferred from the swamps, mosquitoes, fevers, panthers, snakes, alligators, and undefeated Seminoles of Florida to the deserts of Utah, over 200 men of the U.S. 5^th Infantry promptly deserted.
• On September 30, 2006, the remains of the Franco-Italian explorer Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza (1852-1905) were exhumed from a cemetery in Algiers, transferred to the Republic of Congo -- the former French Congo, which he had governed from 1886-1898 -- and interred in an elaborate mausoleum in Brazzaville on October 3^rd; an unusual and controversial measure of respect from a former colony to an unusually humane and sensitive imperialist.
• By May of 1945,  enemy prisoners-of-war held in the United States totaled 371,683 Germans, 50,273 Italians, and 3,915 Japanese, of whom about 200,000 were working in agriculture or light industry.
• For allegedly swindling many Indians out of their lands, John Washington was dubbed Conotocarious (supposedly meaning “Town Destroyer”); a name that Seneca leader Tanacharison (“Half-King”) in 1753 applied to John’s grandson George Washington, and which George himself sometimes used when writing to Indian nations.
• The seemingly spectacular German air operations during the invasion of the Netherlands on May 10-15, 1940, may have cost between 225 and 375 aircraft, including many transports, a matter that was suppressed by the Luftwaffe’s high command in the interests of the service.
• When a new king ascended the throne of the Neo-Assyrian Empire (934–609 BC), among the oaths he took was one requiring him to “extend the boundaries”, perhaps the only instance in history that imperial expansion was publicly stated as part of a ruler’s job description.
• Trapped in Paris in late 1870 by the German siege that concluded the Franco-Prussian War, the French scientist Jules Janssen (1824-1907) was given special permission from the Committee of National Defense to escape in one of the famous balloons that sustained the city’s communications with the outside world, in order to observe the solar eclipse of December 22, 1870, from Algeria.
• The personnel of the Marine attack squadron who found themselves engaging in ground combat to help defend Camp Bastion, Helmand, Afghanistan, from a Taliban attack on Sept. 14, 2012, were following in the tradition of their predecessors, as their unit, VMA-211, is the current incarnation of VMF-211, which helped defend Wake Island in December of 1941.

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