Infinite Wisdom

"Nothing could, it appeared, be done for the King but it cost him more than for any other man."

La Triviata

• It was not until 1901, six years after he had joined the 4^th Hussars, that Winston Churchill managed to finish paying for his initial set of uniforms and equipment.
• Among the French troops defending Paris in 1814 against overwhelming Allied forces, where some hundreds of students of the Ecole Polytechnique, mostly aged 12 to 15, who manned several artillery batteries, putting up a good fight, during which many of them died.
• The U.S. Navy’s plan for the conduct of war against Spain in 1898 actually was written as a senior thesis in 1896 at the Naval War College by Lt. William W. Kimball, who later rose to rear admiral.
• From 1816 until the end of the German Empire, at a formal mess every June 18^th, the officers of the Prussian 25^th Infantry would each solemnly take a cigar from a little silver plate engraved with the “N” monogram and the imperial bees while the band played the regimental march, to commemorate the Battle of Waterloo, where their predecessors had captured Napoleon’s carriage.
• Between 1872 and 1882 operations on the frontier accounted for 80-percent of the U.S. Army’s budget and 73-percent of its personnel.
• The Duke of Wellington once claimed that he had joined Crockford’s, a snooty club, in order to be able to blackball the Marquess of Douro, his son.
• During weddings among the Bagobo, an indigenous tribe on Mindanao, a spear is wielded to ward off evil.
• A standard joke in the German Army on the Eastern Front during World War I was that before storming a Russian trench the troops were supposed to spray it with insect powder, to kill lice.

More...