Infinite Wisdom

"The man who fights with his heart in a real cause, whether trained or not, whether big or little, black or white, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, or what not, is certain to fight well."

--	Giuseppe Garibaldi The Guns of August

La Triviata

• During the mid-eighteenth century, the standard Austrian Army field oven could produce about 200 six pound loaves of bread every nine hours, sufficient to provide 600 rations.


• The nickname of the Australian light cruiser Adelaide was “Longdelayed,” because, although laid down in 1915, she was not completed until 1922.


• Apparently, Lucius Fulvius Curius, Roman Co-Consul in 322 B.C., was the son and name-sake of the former senior magistrate of Tusculum, who had commanded that city’s army against Rome until it was defeated and annexed.


• French Colonel La Tour-du-Pin accompanied the Light Brigade on it’s famous charge, and managed, despite the shot and shell and carnage, to note that that ground over which it took place was normally “carpeted with dwarf-roses, mignonette, larkspur, and forget-me-nots.”


• Although China’s offer to send troops to the Western Front was rejected, during World War I over 150,000 Chinese laborers served in France, of whom as many as 4,000 may have been killed by hostile fire, while working close to the front.


• Under the direction of Jean Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s great Minister of Marine, between 1665 and 1697 the French Navy grew from ten commissioned warships to 286.


• Of 45,500 volunteers who served in the Spanish Division Azul on the Eastern Front during World War II, 4,954 were killed in action or died of wounds, 2, 137 were permanently disabled by wounds, 8,700 were less seriously wounded, 1,600 suffered from frostbite, and 7,800 came down with various diseases, for casualties of slightly over 55-percent, but only 372 were captured by the enemy.


• Marco Polo’s intrepid journey to China might never have been recorded but for the fact that on September 9, 1298, he was captured by the Genovese while commanding a Venetian galley in the Battle of Curzola, off the coast of Dalmatia, and passed his time as a prisoner-of-war dictating his story to a comrade.

More...