Infinite Wisdom

"The tragedy of war is that it uses man's best to do man's worst."

--Harry Emerson Fosdick

La Triviata

• In 1914 a French army corps required eight railroad cars to carry its daily bred ration.
• During World War II 66,568 Australian women served in uniform, in the Australian Army Medical Corps, Australian Army Nursing Service, Australian Army Medical Women's Service, Australian Women's Army Service, Women's Royal Australian Navy Service, Royal Australian Naval Nursing Service, Women's Auxiliary Australian Air Force, Royal Australian Air Force Nursing Service, and Royal Australian Air Force Medical Service.
• It wasn't until the mid-sixteenth century that French Army surgeon Amboie Pare discovered that amputees had a better chance of survival if he avoided cauterization in favor of tying off the exposed blood vessels, a practice that had been common in the Western World until about the Fall of Rome, over a thousand years earlier.
• Of the 675 men who rode "into the Valley of Death" with the Light Brigade at Balaclava, 113 (16.7 percent) were killed, whereas fully 480 (71.1 percent) of their horses didn't make it back alive.
• Built in 1941 by New York State for the care of mentally disabled children, Willobrook Hospital was taken over by the Army in 1942, and as Halloran General Hospital, it became the nation's largest facility for troops wounded in World War II; after the war it returned to serving the mentally retarded, only to be closed in the early 1970s because of a notorious scandal over the treatment of the instutionalized.
• Although he was over 6'7" tall, immensely strong, and a veritable lion in battle, Tsar Peter the Great of Russia was terrified of cockroaches.
• As a publicity stunt, in 1925 airmen of the New York National Guard staged a "race" between New York City and Washington to determine who could get through faster, one of their airplanes or a carrier pigeon, which lost, but only by about two hours.
• On June 24, 1839 a Turkish Army under Hafiz Pasha was defeated Nezib, Syria, by an Egyptian Army under Ibrahim, the son of Mehemet Ali, largely because the Pasha preferred the advice of his Moslem astrologers to that of his foreign military advisor, Melmuth von Moltke, who later went on to engineer the Prussian victories over Denmark, Austria, and France in 1864-1871.

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