Infinite Wisdom

"You there, what are you doing ducking at the sound of bullets? Don’t you know that bullets are like letters in the mail? If they have your address, they will always reach you."

La Triviata

• In 1916, the German General Staff over-estimated the strength of the neutral Dutch Army by 50 percent, at 300,000 rather than 200,000, despite having flooded the Netherlands with spies for more than two years.
• Rinderpest, an ancient animal virus that swept across sub-Saharan Africa in the late nineteenth century, devastating cattle, and thus facilitating European imperial expansion in many areas, was accidentally introduced to that continent in 1887, when infected cattle from India were landed at Massua in Eritrea to feed Italian troops on colonial service.
• During the 1930s, the British Labour Party, which held the prime ministry from 1931 to 1935, passionately opposed Fascism and Nazism, and just as passionately resisted rearmament. 
• Seeking metal for the baldacchino at St. Peter’s Basilica (the Baroque canopy over the main altar), in the 1630s Pope Urban VIII substituted heavy timbers for the cast bronze beams installed by the Emperor Hadrian over 1,500 years earlier to support the portico of the Pantheon, in the process obtaining enough surplus bronze to cast a number of cannon for the nearby Castel Sant’Angleo (once the emperor’s tomb), where they can still be seen.
• In July of 1759, Captain Pierre Pouchot, commanding the French post at Fort Niagara on the eastern bank of the Niagara River on Lake Ontario, first learned that the British had placed a battery nearby when a cannon ball fired by one of its pieces dropped down the chimney of his quarters, rolled across the floor of his room, and came to rest next to the bed in which he was lying.
• While campaigning against the Persians in A.D. 260, Odaenathus, the Romanized Lord of Palmyra (fl. 250-265), captured the enemy camp, including the royal concubines whom King Shapur (r. 241-272) had taken along for the war.
• During the French Wars (1793-1815), an estimated 11,000 British merchant ships were captured by enemy commerce raiders and privateers, including some by American vessels in 1812-1815.
• Navy’s win in the Army-Navy game on December 8, 2012 gives it a run of 11 straight victories in the 113 game series that began in 1890 (with no game in ten of the years); overall the score is Navy 57, Army 49, and seven ties.

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