Infinite Wisdom

"Thank God, it is the Great War!"

La Triviata

• In 1914, some of the first French troops to arrive in Germany as prisoners-of-war were warmly received by the populace, and even offered wine and sweets.
• From 1907 through 1915, Conrad von Hotzendorf, Chief-of-Staff of the Austro—Hungarian Army, wrote about 3,000 letters, some as long as 60 pages, to Gina von Reininghaus, his mistress and, after her divorce, his wife, an average of little more than one missive a day.
• On the eve of World War I a German arms dealer found a cache of 60,000 bayonets for the old French Chassepot rifle that had been captured during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), cleverly altered them to fit the equally obsolete German Mauser 1871 rifle, which was still being issued to the Landwehr, and realized a tidy profit.
• Ships of the German Imperial Navy were invariably christened by men amid festivities from which civilians – even high government officials – and women were virtually excluded, while those of the Royal Navy were almost always sponsored by women (King Edward VII occasionally took a turn), in ceremonies that mixed men and women, civilians and military, commoners and quality.
• In 1914 most Prussian generals belonged to the Prussian Evangelical Church, while only 7 percent belonged to various other Protestant denominations not part of the state church plus 5 percent Roman Catholics, though these later groups were better represented in the autonomous Saxon, Bavarian, and Wurttemberg Armies.
• Two men who went to war in 1914 rose to the command the armed forces of their nations by the end of the war celebrated the same birthdate, October 2^nd; Germany’s Paul Ludwig Hans von Beneckendorf von Hindenburg, who had been born in 1847, and France’s Ferdinand Foch, born in 1851.
• Retreating after the Battle of Le Cateau, August 26, 1914, the 1^st Battalion of the Cameronians marched 91 kilometers in 36 hours.
• The Royal Marines Brigade landing at Ostend on August 27th, and the deployment of the Royal Naval Division to Antwerp in early September, plus the near simultaneous concentration of several French Reserve Divisions at Lille sparked rumors that the Allies were concentrating vast numbers of French and British troops (even 80,000 Russians!) on the German flank, and seem to have resulted in changes to the planned movements of the German First Army.

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