Infinite Wisdom

La Triviata

• Upon being appointed Chief of the Imperial General Staff in 1956, Gen. Sir Francis Wogan Festing (1902-1976), became the highest ranking Roman Catholic in the English armed forces since the deposition of King James II in 1688.
• In AD 93, Claudius Pactus, who had retired from the Roman Army as a senior centurion after a distinguished career, was identified as having escaped from slavery decades earlier, and was restored to his former master by the Emperor Domitian.
• With the seizure of Manchuria and some adjacent regions from China in 1931-1933, the Japanese added to their Empire an area larger than the combined territory of Germany, France, Italy, and Austria.
• By one estimate, during the reign of Queen Victoria (June 20, 1837-January 22, 1901), the United Kingdom engaged in 230 colonial wars.
• Since the Union blockade largely cut off the supply of silk to the Confederacy during the Civil War, Southern medical officers often used horse hair for suturing, boiling it first to soften it, which unbeknownst to them also reduced the chance of infection.
• Although it is generally held that the Allied policy of “unconditional surrender” was first enunciated almost casually by President Roosevelt at the Casablanca Conference in January of 1943, a year earlier in Washington, on January 1, 1942, delegates from 26 countries signed the “Declaration of the United Nations,” agreeing that “complete victory” was “essential to defend life, liberty, independence, and religious freedom.”
• Entering West Point in 1824, at the age of 16, Albert E. Church graduated as a brevet 2^nd lieutenant of artillery, and almost immediately was appointed a Professor of Mathematics at the academy, serving until his death in 1878.
• Documents found recently in German archives suggest that had Adolf Hitler succeeded in invading Britain in 1940, he intended to establish his personal headquarters at Bridgenorth in Shropshire, a centrally located town in a region rather resembling some of his favorite parts of Germany.

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