Infinite Wisdom

La Triviata

• Early in the Revolutionary War, Sir William Howe, commanding British forces at Boston, appointed the loyalist Joshua Loring as Commissary of Prisoners, a most lucrative post, in return for which the latter’s wife, Elizabeth Lloyd Loring served as the general’s mistress; Mrs. Loring is believed by some to have used her “position” to provide useful information to George Washington.
• Published in 1931, The Battle of Jutland by Cdr. Holloway H. Frost, USN (1889-1935), was so well regarded that the German Navy adopted it as a text for officer cadets.
• During his several days’ sojourn at the White House in the fall of 1860, the 18-year old Prince of Wales found to his disappointment that President Buchanan had banned dancing, but, on the upside, was quite happy to slip the prince cigars when his chaperones weren’t looking, thereby helping turn the future Edward VII into one of Britain’s merriest monarchs.
• At the Hague Conference in 1899 forty-four nations solemnly agreed by treaty to refrain from conducting aerial bombardments of cities.
• From the fall of France in mid-1940 until Germany declared war on the United States in December of 1941, Josephine Baker, the famous expatriate African-American entertainer, served as a courier for the French Resistance, carrying documents in her clothing or coded into sheet music to Allied contacts in Lisbon, for which she was awarded the Croix de guerre and the Rosette de la Résistance, and was made a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur.
• The last occasion on which a battleship was damaged in combat was on Feb 25, 1991, when, during an Iraqi Silkworm missile attack in the Persian Gulf, some 20 mm Phalanx rounds from the USS Jarrett (FFG 33) accidentally struck the USS Missouri (BB 63), the ship suffering some minor damage, while one crewmember was slightly wounded, becoming the last battlewagon sailor to have been a combat casualty.
• Believing their African troops to be unusually susceptible to European winters, during the First World War the French introduced the “hivernage” system, which pulled black regiments out of the front every Fall and sent them to relatively mild Provence until Spring.
• At the Battle of the Boyne (July 11, 1690), near Dublin, troops on both sides wore so many different uniforms that the partisans of King James II wore a white cockade to distinguish themselves from those of King William III, who put a bit of greenery in their caps, which almost caused the death of the latter by “friendly fire” when he lost his twig during the fighting.

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