Infinite Wisdom

"I don't care how they dress so long as they mind their fighting."

La Triviata

• When the Duke of Savoy was criticized for switching from the English side to the French in 1696, during the Nine Year’s War, he promptly responded by pointing out that King William III owed him a year’s “subsidy,” which Louis XIV promised to make up.
• Dying from a round of grape shot that had shattered his thigh during the Battle of Germantown (October 4, 1777), Patriot Brig. Gen. Francis Nash was asked by a friend how he felt, to which he replied, "It is unmanly to complain; but it is more than human nature can bear."
• Shortly after Chile arranged for a German military mission to reorganize and train its army, in 1886, its arch-enemy Peru decided it needed a French military mission.
• During World War II Darwin, in northwestern Australia, was bombed by Japanese aircraft 64 times.
• Dispatching a delegation to represent him at the entombment of Napoleon’s remains in Paris in 1840, Charles XIV Bernadotte of Sweden, formerly one of the Emperor’s paladins, said “Tell them that I, who was once a Marshal of France, am now only King of Sweden.”
• Campaigning against the Saudis in Arabia in 1816-1818, Mehemet Ali’s Turco-Egyptian troops were awarded 50 piasters for each pair of enemy ears they turned in to the paymaster.
• An old tradition has it that the general uprising against Austrian control of Genoa in 1746 was started by a child named Giovan Battista Perasso, nicknamed “Balilla – Little Boy,” who, oberving some Austrian troops, picked up a rock and asked the crowd around him, "Shall I?"
• During the Numantine War in Spain in the mid-Second Century B.C., Scipio Aemilianus had a personal bodyguard of 500 of his clients and friends plus 3,600 volunteers from various allied cities and kingdoms, a force nearly equal to a legion.

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