Infinite Wisdom

"Find the enemy and beat him."

La Triviata

• Soviet military casualties against the Germans in the Second World War were approximately ten times higher than the combined military losses of all other countries fighting Hitler’s Reich.
• Celebrating the marriage of Marc Antony to Octavia in 40 BC, the Roman poet Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue, predicts a golden age that would follow the birth of a boy child, thus cementing the alliance between the groom and his new brother-in-law, the later-Emperor Augustus, but was for centuries was taken by Christians as heralding the coming of Jesus.
• During the 302 days from February 21^st through December 19^th of 1916, 259 of the 330 infantry regiments in the French Army (78 percent) served at one time or another in the Battle of Verdun.
• The word “squadron” apparently derives from the Italian quadra or square, used in the seventeenth century to indicate a sub unit of a regiment consisting of four companies.
• Although King Charles II of England (r. 1660-1685) had many mistresses, the beauteous Frances Teresa Stewart, Duchess of Richmond and Lennox, apparently spurned his advances, even after, as tradition has it, he ordered her to serve as the model for the image of Britannia that for centuries appeared on the royal coinage.
• During his visit to Italy as a guest of Benito Mussolini (May 3-10, 1938), Adolph Hitler’s 500-strong entourage prompted some Italians to refer to the event as “the German invasion”.
• From the outbreak of World War I in 1914 through 1923, an estimated 83 million people in Europe received food assistance from American volunteer organizations.
• Beginning in 1850, over 100 two- or three-decker wooden ships-of the-line were converted to steam power by Britain and France or built as such, only to become obsolete by 1860 with the introduction of ironclad warships.
• During the Second World War, New York’s John A. Roebling’s Sons, who had spun the cables for the Brooklyn Bridge (designed by the company’s founder), turned their skills to producing anti-submarine nets.

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