Infinite Wisdom

"Chasing Germans in the moonshine is no mean sport."

--	Captain Siegfried Sassoon, M.C., Royal Welch Fusiliers, 1918

La Triviata

• In 1694, with his forces too weak to confront a pending French attack, Duke Victor Amadeus II of Savoy hit upon the clever notion of using all the horses and cattle he could find to over-graze the areas through which the invaders would have to pass, thereby denying them forage, and thus frustrating the onslaught.


• In 1935 John J. Pershing served as best man for Rene Adelbert de Chambrun, great-great-grandson of the Marquis de Lafayette when he wed Josée Laval, only child of Pierre Laval, Premier of France, later shot for treason.


• During World War I, Ludwig Wittgenstein, sometime school mate of Adolf Hitler, served as an artilleryman in the Austro-Hungarian Army on the Italian Front, earning the Tapferkeitsmedaille First Class (“Medal for Bravery, in Gold”), and went on to become a noted philosopher, in the tradition of warrior-philosophers reaching back to Socrates and Marcus Aurelius.


• In 1380-1381, at a time when the Chancellor – chief executive – of the Republic of Florence was earning 100 florins a year, the city was paying the mercenary captain John Hawkwood 4,000 florins.


• In 1820 some Bonapartist sympathizers financed the secret construction of a submarine in England, for the purpose of rescuing the “Corsican Ogre” from St. Helena, only to run afoul of the British government, which burned the vessel.


• During Pompey the Great’s three-day triumph in 61 B.C. celebrating his victories in the East, 75.1 million silver drachmae in coin were reportedly displayed in carts, a sum greater than the entire annual tax revenues of the Roman Republic at the time, enough money to sustain two million people for a year, and that was in addition to thirty-three pearl crowns, countless wagonloads of weapons, a huge game board made of precious stones holding a golden moon weighing thirty pounds, and a portrait bust of the hero himself, made from yet more pearls, not to mention other loot.


• In 1629 Arab corsairs raided the Faeroe Islands, and carried about 30 women into slavery in North Africa..


• Presenting the 1886 budgetary proposals to the House of Commons, the Admiralty's Parliamentary Secretary stated that the two battleships being ordered, HMS’s Nile and Trafalgar, would probably be "the last ironclads of this type that will ever be built by this or any other country."

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