Infinite Wisdom

"Historically, the force which thinks best fights best."

La Triviata

• From 1939 to the end of World War II, the number of Catholic chaplains in the U.S. armed forces rose from 55 to over 3,000.
• Fearing that too many young Romans were opting for bachelorhood, and thus not helping to maintain the military manpower pool of the Republic, during their censorship (307-306 B.C.), Marcus Valerius Maximus Corvinus and Gaius Iunius Brutus Bubulcus imposed heavy fines on unmarried men.
• The “Ancient and Honourable Artillery Company,” a London militia unit dating to 1537, sent five batteries and two infantry battalions to the front during World War I.
• During the late-Twelfth Century, it was customary among the Moslem sultans who ruled various parts of northwestern Africa to have a “frendji – Frankish” bodyguard, composed of Christian European mercenaries, sometimes numbering in the hundreds, who could be relied upon in domestic crises.
• Reportedly, latrines in British Army barracks were not lighted at night until1896, because the Crown could save £200 a year, not to mention the cost of installing lamps in the first place.
• During World War II, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), later famous as a author and dissident, commanded an artillery acoustic spotting battery in the Red Army, earning two decorations, before being arrested in early 1945 for “anti-Soviet” activities and sent to the GULAG.
• The Egyptian army that successful campaigned against the Saudi capital at Dar’iyya in 1818 required 20,000 camels for logistical support.
• In 1811 the famous sculptor Antonio Canova, who had carved the famous statue of Pauline Bonaparte as a reclining nude Venus, completed a marble statue for her brother depicting him as the god Mars in heroic nudity, which proved so embarrassing that Napoleon hid it in a closet, though it was later given to the Duke of Wellington, who displayed it in his London home, where it remains.

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