Infinite Wisdom

La Triviata

• In 1799 there were 539 officers in the Bavarian Army, of whom only about 48 percent (260) were noblemen and the rest commoners, while by 1811 aristocrats in the officer corps had fallen to only about 40 percent (902) of 2,243 officers.
• While heir to the throne, the later King Alexander I of Macedon (r. 498-454 BC) tied for first place in the 200-yard footrace at the Olympic games of 504 BC.
• Out of nearly a million American servicemen who ended up at the front during the First World War, only about 4,480 were captured by the enemy.
• Dismissed from West Point in 1902 and then reappointed in 1903, only to be dismissed again, Lloyd R. Fredendall (1883-1963) managed to secure a direct commission into the Army in 1907, and in North Africa in 1943 turned in what was certainly the worst performance of any American corps commander during the Second World War.
• The Special Branch, Scotland Yard’s famous anti-terrorism unit, was formed in the 1880s as the “Special Irish Branch,” to counter the Fenian Movement for the liberation of Ireland.
• Bavarian Crown Prince Rupprecht (1869-1955), who rose to field marshal and army group command during World War I, was in post-war years a staunch anti-Nazi, and during World War II went into hiding in Italy to escape being sent to a concentration camp, a fate suffered by many of his relatives.
• A lunar eclipse on September 27, AD 14, helped quell a mutiny in Pannonia by the legions VIII Augusta, VIIII Hispana, and XV Apollinaris, it being taken as a sign of divine anger.
• On the eve of World War I, Rexingen, a town in Wurttemberg, had about 1,100 inhabitants, a third of whom were Jewish, but of 223 Rexingers who served in the Great War, 105 were Jewish, of whom 15 were killed in action and 25 awarded the Iron Cross.

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