Infinite Wisdom

"Let him that loves me, follow me."

La Triviata

• Peter the Great regularly addressed his soldiers as “Brothers,” initiating a practice that seems to have been followed by many later tsars, generals, and officers apparently until the end of the Russian Empire.
• During the Second World War the tiny Kingdom of Tonga, a British protectorate in the South Pacific, donated three Spitfires to the R.A.F.
• Of approximately 2,500 Liberty Ships built during World War II, 200 were sunk by enemy action, accident, or the hazards of the sea, 50 of them on their maiden voyages.
• During World War I, 19.7 percent of Germany’s 1914 population served in uniform, over 13 million men, of whom eight million were still under arms at the time of the Armistice, two million having died and nearly 4.2 million having been wounded, many so badly as to merit discharge.
• An old tradition has it that as a child at Paston Grammar School, in North Walsham, the future Lord Nelson was the only student brave enough to steal fruit from the headmaster’s prize pear tree, which required that the other boys lower him from the dormitory window on a rope made of sheets knotted together.
• Lenin reportedly spoke English with a distinctly Irish accent, having learned the language from a tutor who hailed from the Rathmines district of Dublin.
• Muhammad Ahmad, the “Mahdi” who installed an Islamist regime in Sudan during the 1880s, was the grandfather of Sadiq al-Mahdi, who was twice prime minister of the country (1966-1967 & 1986-1989), and played a role in sheltering Osama bin-Laden there during the mid-1990s, when he organized Al-Qaeda.
• During World War II American troops nicknamed London streetwalkers who provided quick stand-up service in alleyways “Piccadilly Commandoes.”

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