Infinite Wisdom

"Good iron is not used for nails, nor good men for soldiers."

La Triviata

• Khalid ibn al-Walid (592-642), the commander most responsible for the Moslem conquest of Arabia, Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Persia, was by some accounts wont to bathe in wine.
• During the Second World War school enrollment among Americans aged 15 to 18 fell by 24 percent, as young adults sought work or enlisted, while the proportion of teenagers in the work force increased by some 200 percent.
• In 1901 the Royal Navy ordered its first five submarines, based on the design of John P. Holland, who had gotten his start in the underwater warship business as an agent of the Fenian Movement, which sought to end British rule over Ireland.
• In 1949, the average height of Cretan recruits for the Greek Army was 5’4”, which, based on an examination of skeletal remains, was a full inch shorter than the average Greek man during the Fifth Century BC.
• During World War I, about 138,000 Polish-Americans served in the American armed forces, while a further 20,000 volunteered for service with the Polish Legion created by the Allies.
• The Twelfth-Century Byzantine historian John Zonaras records that, while campaigning against the Persians in the mid-Third Century, Odenathus, the Romanized King of Palmyra, found among the enemy dead and prisoners a number of women in armor and bearing arms.
• Fought from February 20^th to March 10^th of 1905, the Battle of Mukden saw some 276,000 Russian troops fighting about 270,000 Japanese on a front that at times stretched for 90 kilometers, which made it the biggest battle in history until 1914 (though not in casualties, several previous battles having exceeded the approximately 24,000 Russians and Japanese who fell).
• During the 1830s and 1840s, amid tensions with the United States over the Maine-New Brunswick boundary, ownership of Oregon (“54-40 or Fight!”), and American support for rebels, the British Governor General of Canada proposed that in the event of war units of the Indian Army be dispatched to the Pacific Northwest. 

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