Infinite Wisdom

"Moral force is, unhappily, no substitute for armed force, but it is a very great reinforcement"

La Triviata

• After World War I, the War Department calculated that 7 million man-days of service had been lost due to venereal infections.
• Adam Freitag (1608-1650), who held doctorates in philosophy and medicine, had a distinguished career as a fortification engineer in the Netherlands, Poland, and Sweden.
• Allowing for rounding, the personnel of the Papal Swiss Guard are roughly 70 percent native German-speakers, 20 percent French, 10 percent Italian, and about 2 percent Romansch, about proportionate to the frequency of these groups in Switzerland’s Catholic population.
• Although the Egyptian offensive across the Suez Canal on October 6, 1973 caught the Israelis by complete surprise, mobilization of reservists was greatly facilitated because it took place on Yom Kippur, the “Day of Atonement,” on which observant Jews stay home, and thus easy reach, not to mention that there was virtually no road traffic.
• By mid-2011, approximately least 350 military dogs were performing security, search and rescue, mine detection, and reconnaissance missions with the U.S. Armed Forces in Afghanistan, where at least 50 have been killed in action.
• During the Boer War (1899-1902), the British Army lost 7,894 men killed in action or dead of wounds, plus 13,250 to disease, as well as 86 killed by lightning and one man eaten by a crocodile
• In 1940, the actor Cary Grant donated much of his earnings from The Philadelphia Story to a charity that financed the evacuation of British children from London and other cities suffering under the blitz to Canada and the United States.
• Nearly 35,000 Americans are believed to have served with the Canadian Armed Forces during World War I, almost all of whom enlisted before the United States entered the war, and five of whom won the Vitoria Cross.
• Quite short (5'2"), Engelbert Dollfuss, Chancellor, and later dictator, of Austria from 1932 until his assassination by the Nazis in 1934, bore several nicknames satirizing his altitudinal condition, among them “Millimetternich,” punning on the name of long surviving nineteenth century imperial chancellor Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich.
•  The Roman historian Livy tells us that while Gauls were fierce warriors, their penchant for taking enemy heads often created problems on the battlefield, because they would sometimes leave the fight after getting a suitable souvenir, and even if they did not abandon the field, the need to carry their trophies often interfered with their ability to fight. 

More...