Infinite Wisdom

"The day of destruction of sacred Troy will come, And the slaughter of Priam and his People."

La Triviata

• Although the frigate action is an iconic symbol of the age of fighting sail, of approximately 670 men who commanded frigates in the Royal Navy during the great sea wars of 1793-1815, only about 4 or 5 percent ever had the honor of doing so in a frigate-to-frigate action.
• Among notable future Eastern European Communist leaders who saw military service in the Imperial-and-Royal Austro-Hungarian Army were Yugoslavia’s Josip Broz Tito, Bela Khun and Matyas Rokosi, leaders of the “Hungarian People’s Republic” in 1919, and Imré Nagy, the hero of the anti-Stalinist Revolution of 1956.
• Hailed as a great victory over the Indians during "Pontiac's Conspiracy," in the Battle of Bushy Run (August 4-5, 1763) a British column 450-strong under the notorious Col. Henry Bouquet defeated a band of 95 Indians, though each side lost about 60 men killed in the process.
• The Byzantine fleet included special vessels designed to transport cavalry mounts in such comfort that they could immediately go into action upon landing, an invention that might be termed the “Landing Ship Horse”
• During the late 1930s and early 1940s, when they expected him to liberate Egypt from the British, many members of the Moslem Brotherhood managed to convince themselves that Mussolini was actually an Egyptian Moslem named Mussa Nili ("Moses of the Nile").
• In September 1914, General of Infantry Eugen von Falkenhayn (1853-1934) was recalled from retirement and given the newly formed XXII Reserve Corps, which he continued to lead until the end of the Great War, probably the longest tenure in command of any senior officer in the Imperial German Army, garnering the Pour le merit in the process.
• In 1783, shortly after learning of the first balloon ascent in Europe, Benjamin Franklin observed that for the price of three ships-of-the-line, a country could procure 5,000 hot air balloons, and use them to deposit 10,000 men into an enemy’s territory, wrecking havoc on any attempt at a coherent defense.
• When on campaign, the Roman Emperor Alexander Severus (222-235), impressed many of his contemporaries by limiting his meals to the standard legionary diet.
• During the nineteenth century it was common when visiting foreign parts for Royal Navy officers to go hunting whenever possible; Of one such expedition in the Falkland Islands by six officers, the later Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon, who caused the disastrous loss of HMS Victoria on June 22, 1893,  wrote "we killed . . . 409 wild geese, 26 snipe, 80 teal, 8 guanacos, 9 duck, 4 oyster-birds, and 24 miscellaneous.”
• An attempt to break a French siege of Arras in July of 1640 failed when Spanish troops in the relieving army refused to support an attack by two Italian regiments, because they felt that their honor had been insulted by being relegated to a secondary role in the battle. 

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