Infinite Wisdom

"The principal care that a Prince or State that entreth into warres is to have, is that there be choyse made of a sufficient General."

La Triviata

• In October of 1938, just weeks after the “Munich Pact,” Britain placed an order for 2,000 tons of mustard gas.
• The last occasion on which a European monarch wielded a sword in earnest appears to have been on November 17, 1878, when King Umberto I of Italy, having been stabbed by an anarchist, defended himself with his saber, wounding his assailant, Giovanni Passannante.
• As a result of heroism during the Battle of the Ticinus, in 218 B.C., 18-year old cavalry officer Publius Cornelius Scipio – later the conqueror of Carthage – earned his first decoration, the Corona civica, awarded for saving the life of a citizen in battle, in this case that of his own father, also P. Cornelius Scipio
• To commemorate the service of its citizens in the Great War, the city of Charleston paid a French sculptor to carve a monument which, upon unveiling at the Battery in the autumn of 1932, showed the figures of a warrior protecting a maiden, both in heroic nudity, with the man so well “armed” that money had to be found to procure a large fig leaf.
• Formed in 1903, by 1939, on the eve of World War II, the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve comprised just 809 officers and 5,371 enlisted men.
• On celebratory occasions, the Ewe people of Ghana, Togo, and Benin often dance the agbadza, originally a war dance performed by men returning from battle.
• Recruited in New England and the Middle Atlantic states in early 1813, Col. Zebulon “Pike’s Peak” Pike’s First Brigade (the 6^th, 13^th, 14^th, 15^th, and 16^th U.S.) of the Army of the North, posted on Lake Ontario, totaled about 2,000 men, included some dozens of black freemen enlisted men, and early instance of integration in the ranks.
• During the Franco-Spanish siege of Gibraltar in 1782, a woman accompanying the investing forces proved so brave under fire that her husband was rewarded with a promotion, and she with a permanent pension of 5 francs a day, enough to buy nearly a dozen loaves of bread.

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