Infinite Wisdom

"In strategy your spiritual bearing must not be any different from normal. Both in fighting and in everyday life you should be determined though calm. Meet the situation without tenseness yet not recklessly, your spirit settled yet unbiased."

La Triviata

• Apparently the first use of cannon in a siege in France occurred in the mid-Fourteenth Century, when the forces of the crown invested Pont Audemar, though Count Philip of Evreux, who was also the King Navarre and an ally of the King of England, put up a successful defense.
• In 1878, at a time when only about 10 percent of the people of the United Kingdom were Irish, Irishmen comprised almost a quarter of all the troops in the British Army.
• Tradition has it that, in order to improve the breed of horses in Central Asia, Tamerlane distributed among the Turkmen tribes 4,200 mares that he had selected from the best Arab stock.
• At one point during the Battle of Ramilles (May 23, 1706), the Duke of Marlborough was attempting to mount a fresh horse with the aid of his equerry, Col. James Bringfield, when a cannon ball came along taking off the latter’s head before passing harmlessly between the duke’s legs.
• Reportedly after hearing the philosopher Anaxarchus propound the theory of multiple worlds, Alexander the Great said, “Alas! what a miserable man am I, who have not subdued so much as one of all these!”
• The letter of instruction issued by the British cabinet on June 29, 1854, authorizing Lord Raglan to invade the Crimea took so long to compose and was so complex, that by the time they had finished writing it reportedly all of Her Majesty’s ministers had fallen asleep.
• On the outbreak of war with Italy in 1915, Archduchess Augusta Maria Louise of Austria (1875-1964), though in her 40’s and the mother of a son serving as an officer, went to the front with the cavalry regiment of which her husband, the Archduke Josef August, a corps commander, was honorary colonel, and served a common soldier, wearing a saber and riding astride, until the end of the war.
• During the late Nineteenth Century, the custom at an officers’ mess in the Russian Army was that when the president called out “Take cartridges!” those present replied, “Taken, cartridges taken!” to acknowledge that they were free to light up.

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