Infinite Wisdom

La Triviata

• The oldest “Old Soldier” on active duty on the outbreak of the World War was probably British Field Marshal Frederick Sleigh Roberts, Earl Roberts; born in 1832, who died of pneumonia while visiting Indian troops at the Front in France late in 1914.
• The outbreak of World War I in Europe left hundreds of German merchant vessels trapped in foreign ports (90 in New York alone), including some of the greatest liners of the age, such as the Vaterland; as the transport Leviathan, she would carry American troops to Europe in 1917 and 1918, and become the flagship of the U.S. Merchant Marine in the postwar years.
• In 1914 there were 874 women enrolled in medical schools in Germany, a figure that jumped to 1,150 the following year, as the demand for physicians rose due to the Great War.
• On July 1, 1914, Alberto Pollio, Italian Chief-of-the-General Staff (an enthusiastic supporter of the Triple Alliance) died of a massive coronary, and his successor, Luigi Cadorna, was not appointed until July 27^th; which meant that the Royal Army was effectively leaderless during the “July Crisis” that sparked the outbreak of the Great War.
• About one in four students who had enrolled in the universities at Oxford or Cambridge between 1910 and 1914 perished during the First World War.
• As early as August of 1914 the shortage of trained fliers prompted some armies to accept women aviators as volunteer reconnaissance pilots, among them Russian Princess Eugenie Mikhailovna Shakhovskaya (1889-1920), who flew reconnaissance missions over East Prussia, and Belgian-born Hélène Dutrieu (1877-1961), who did so for the French Army during the Campaign of the Marne.
• In 1914, Mrs. Mary Borden-Turner, an American novelist married to a very wealthy Briton, secured from French Chief-of-the-General-Staff Joseph Joffre permission to pay for a 100-bed field hospital, and served with it at the at the front as chief of nurses until the end of the war, an initiative she repeated in a later war.
• Although, as First Lord of the Admiralty, he was a civilian member of the British cabinet, for several days in early October of 1914 Winston Churchill assumed command of the forces defending Antwerp, helping to hold the enemy back for about a week or so, while angling for a commission as a lieutenant general.
• Karl Wilhelm Baedeker (1877-1914), a German physicist, a reserve lieutenant of artillery activated at the start of the war, was killed in action on August 5, 1914 while serving as a brigade major during the first day of the German assault on Liege; probably the first of the thousands of scientists, authors, musicians, artists, and such lost in the war.

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