Infinite Wisdom

"I would prefer dealing with a troop of lions commanded by a deer than a herd of deer under the leadership of a lion."

La Triviata

• While commanding the Italian Army during World War I (1915-1917), Luigi Cadorna managed to subject a sixth of his troops to military court proceedings, and had over 750 of them shot, officially for alleged “cowardice” but most often in order “to encourage the others.”
• In the course of a military career that lasted about 30 years, Pierre Terrail de Bayard (1476-1524), the Chevalier san peur et sans reproche, earned 100,000 livres – today perhaps as much as $250 million in purchasing power – from the ransoms of prisoners-of-war.
• In the early twentieth century, ships of the German Imperial Navy were invariably christened by men amid festivities from which women and civilians – even high government officials – were virtually excluded, while those of the Royal Navy were almost always sponsored by women (King Edward VII occasionally took a turn), in ceremonies that mixed men and women, civilians and military, workers and quality.
• Napoleon sometimes became so angry with Marshal Louis-Alexandre Berthier, his chief-of-staff, that he physically assaulted the man, once banging his head into a stone wall.
• As a favor to the Prime Minister, during World War II, the R.A.F. provided Winston Churchill with an oxygen mask that permitted him to smoke cigars while flying.
• While on campaign, the late Roman Emperor Julian (360-363) often prepared his own meals, like a common soldier, making puls, a polenta-like wheat porridge.
• In 1631 two Algerian ships raided the Irish village of Baltimore, and carried over a thousand people into slavery in North Africa. 
• The U.S. Army was so small by the end of the 1920s – 125,000 men – that then Lt. Col. George C. Marshall once joked that it had barely enough combat troops to fill Yankee Stadium.

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