Infinite Wisdom

"We have the formula!"

"There is no panacea. A formula is harmful. Everything must be applied based on the situation."

La Triviata

• During the Great War, King Albert I of the Belgians (r. 1909-1934) was more than a mere figurehead commander-in-chief, not only actively directed operations and appeared often at the Front, and several times above it, going aloft in observation balloons and reconnaissance aircraft.
• About a quarter of the men who were enrolled in the universities at Oxford and Cambridge between 1910 and 1914 perished in the First World War.
• Some 320,000 Jewish men served in the Austro-Hungarian armed forces during World War I, including about 25,000 who became officers; estimates as to the number of Jewish men who died in Hapsburg uniform range from 30,000 to 40,000.
• Gertrude Bell (1868-1926), an intrepid traveler, Arabist, and archaeologist, served as a British agent in the Middle East during the Great War, with a special officer’s commission, and was routinely referred to as “Major Miss Bell.”
• Some 7.7 percent of officers who were in the regular Italian Army at the outbreak of World War I were killed in action or died of wounds during that war, in contrast to 24.8 percent of German Army’s prewar officers.
• By 1916 Britain’s annual fish catch had fallen to about two-thirds of prewar levels, largely because, desperate for minesweepers, small escorts, and patrol craft, the Admiralty had requisitioned about 80 percent of the country’s fishing vessels, often with their crews.
• The winter campaign in the Carpathians in 1914-1915 seems to have cost the Austro-Hungarian Army c. 6,600 casualties a day for nearly 100 days, mostly from illness, notably cholera and frostbite.
• By the end of the First Battle of Ypres on November 22, 1914, the 1000-man British infantry battalions that had entered battle for the first time at Mons on August 23, 1914, were down to an average of one officer and 30 enlisted men from their original complements.
• Although he had soldiered for many years, when Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevich Romanov (1856-1929), was made supreme commander of the Russian Army in August of 1914, his only previous command experience had been leading a cavalry regiment during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878.

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