Infinite Wisdom

"It isn’t a victory unless it ends the war."

--

Montaigne

La Triviata

• Niccolo Machiavelli, a staunch advocat of a conscription-based army for the Florentine Republic, died in 1527, a few weeks before one was created and three years before his son Ludovico, a draftee in that new army, was killed in action against the Spanish.
  
  
• Although thousands of men deserted the American Armed Forces during the Revolutionary War, only 100 were never accounted for, 99 soldiers and one sailor.
  
  
• When the Royalist fortress of Drogheda, on the Boyne just north of Dublin, was stormed by Oliver Cromwell's Parliamentary forces on September 11,1649, Sir Arthur Aston, its commander, was among those who died in the ensuing massacre, perishing by the unusual method of being beaten to death with his own wooden leg.
  
  
• During the seventeenth century Turkey, Austria, and Sweden were at war about 66% of the time, Spain about 60% of the time, and Russia and Poland about 80%.
  
  
• Although Imperial Russia perished in 1917, the last cadets to graduate from the Imperial Naval Academy did so in 1924, White Guard exiles having reestablished the institution at Bizerte, in Tunisia, where their fleet was interned
  
  
• One out of every 35 British males became a casualty in World War II; 264,443 men were killed, over 250,000 wounded, and over 177,000 became prisoners-of-war.
  
  
• During World War I, German military courts sentenced 150 soldiers to death, only 48 of which were actually carried out, in contrast to at least 15,000 in the course of World War II, often without the slightest legal procedure.
  
  
• A petition drive to secure a referendum on abolition of the Swiss Army garnered the necessary 100,000 signatures in about 14 months during 1988-1989, in contrast to one for a referendum requiring the army to retain at least one mounted cavalry regiment, which garnered 420,000 signatures in just four months; Both referenda were defeated.

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