Infinite Wisdom

"No part of the Great War compares in interest with its opening."

La Triviata

• At the time of his death,on November 24, 1916, at the height of the Great War, Hiram Maxim was deaf, having fired his invention, the first really practical machine gun, some 200,000 times while selling it to virtually every army in the world.
• The famous “Taxis of the Marne” which, aided by some buses and trucks carried about 6,000 troops of the 7^e Division d’infanterie from Paris to the Front on Sep. 6, 1914, did so with their meters patriotically ticking away; though afterwards the French Army convinced the cabbies to settle for a reduced rate.
• Soon after Italy entered the World War in the Spring of 1915 about 310,000 Italians living in other countries (including nearly 90,000 from the United States and one from Siam) returned to their native soil to serve.
• The Imperial German Füsilier-Regiment Generalfeldmarschall Prinz Albrecht von Preußen (Hannoversches) Nr. 73 wore a blue cuff band bearing the British battle honor “Gibraltar,” commemorating its descent from a Hanoverian regiment that had served in the defense of “The Rock” during the Franco-Spanish siege of 1779-1783.
• The Netherlands was one of the first counties to call out its troops in the summer of 1914, initiatingpreliminary mobilization measures on July 27^th, the same day as Austria-Hungary and Serbia, the cautious Dutch having gotten wind of some of the details of the German war plans, which originally included a invasion of their country.
• Late in 1914 a clever French officer invented what he called a “chariot bomb”, a partially armored tank of liquid oxygen designed to be shoved across “No Man’s Land” by a mechanical traction system and then exploded by rifle fire to open an 18-meter breech in enemy barbed wire, which worked perfectly during testing, but utterly failed in combat.
• Although the “Christmas Truce” of 1914 has attained mythic importance, it’s worth noting that similar spontaneous pauses in fighting were not unknown in previous or later wars, nor was the cease-fire as widespread as is generally believed, although British combat deaths on December 25, 1914 fell to about 42 percent of “normal.”
• Negotiations during the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 over the disposition of defeated Germany's High Sea Fleet became so heated that some wits termed the talks "The Naval Battle of Paris."

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