Infinite Wisdom

"As long as there’s one alpino here, I’m here with him."

La Triviata

• Toussaint L'Ouverture (1743-1803), who led the Haitian War for Independence against France, stood only a tad taller than 5 feet.
• During the Second World War, British ski troops initially trained in the French Alps, but after the fall of France and the rise of the Gaullist Free French movement, training was shifted to Lebanon.
• Today about 200 confirmed heads, busts, or full statues of the Roman Emperor Augustus survive from his reign (31 BC-AD 14), when there may have been as many as 50,000, or about one for every thousand people in the empire.
• There is some evidence to suggest that, in the late 1930s certain law enforcement officials in the New York City area quietly suggested to Jewish gangster Meyer Lansky that he “do something” about German-American Bund rallies, provided no one actually died as a result; leading to several incidents in which meetings of Aryan übermenschen were interrupted by the sudden arrival of some very determined Semitic untermenschen, who happily delivered various busted heads, blackened eyes, broken noses, and miscellaneous contusions.
• On the eve of the Seven Weeks’ War (June 14-August 23, 1866), Italian Army Chief-of-Staff Alfonso La Marmora was also serving as prime minister and foreign minister; since King Vittorio Emmanuelle II fancied himself a military genius, the general had little influence anyway, which helps explain the defeat by the Austrians at Custoza, on June 24, 1866.
• In a remarkably prescient decision, in 1934 the British government approved a rearmament program that assumed full mobilization would be possible by 1939.
• By May of 1917, German communications troops had strung c. 515,000 kilometers of telegraph wire on the Western front and another 349,000 in the East.
• Of 235,473 American, British, and Commonwealth troops held prisoner by the Germans and Italians during World War II, only 4 percent died (9,348), in contrast to 27 percent (35,756) of the 132,134 American, British, and Commonwealth troops held by the Japanese.

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