Infinite Wisdom

"Fortune tends to have more influence than bravery."

La Triviata

• Having defeated the French at the Battle of Ceresole (April 11, 1544), the Spanish Army managed to acquire some 300,000 francs worth of loot, enough money to pay wages for 1½ million day laborers .
• From their arrival in North Africa in March of 1941 through the end of the year, Luftwaffe anti-aircraft gunners assigned to the Afrika Korps, accounted for 264 British tanks, but only 42 aircraft.
• At the end of many arduous hours standing in his victory chariot during his triumph in A.D. 71, the 61-year old Roman Emperor Vespasian is supposed to have remarked, "I've got my comeuppance for being so stupid as to long for a triumph in my old age."
• On May 22, 1781, the French Army decreed that all future applicants for commissions had to prove "full and unimpeachable" nobility for four generations in both the male and female lines.
• In 1941, Josslyn Victor Hay, the Earl of Erroll, fourtheenth in line to the British throne, serving as Military Secretary for East Africa, was murdered in Kenya, apparently for having “rogered” one too many of the wives and daughters of the colony’s white ruling class.
• Witnessing a demonstration of the Maxim gun for the first time in 1888, Kaiser Wilhelm II walked up to the piece, laid his hand on it, and said “That is the gun – there is no other,” despite which the Imperial Army did not begin to acquire the weapon until 1899.
• Between June of 1941, when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, and March of 1942, the German armed forces lost some 15,000 officers killed in action.
• When the time came to raise troops for the war with Spain, Minnesota, having sent eleven regiments to the Civil War, decided to number its new regiments from 12, and, to further complicate matters, did not merely designate its three militia regiments sequentially, but renumbered them on the basis of their colonel's seniority, so the 2nd became the 12th, the 1st the 13th, and 3rd, the 14th.

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