"We are not a military nation but without doubt we are the most warlike people on earth."
|--||Lord Garnet Wolseley, 1887,|
Commenting on the British.
- So drastic was the reform of the Prussian Army following its
defeat by Napoleon in 1806-1807, that only about half of the officers
who were veterans of that campaign were still on duty during the War of
Liberation in 1813-1815.
- During the winter of
1693–1694, in the midst of the Nine Years' War, the Spanish Viceroy of
Milan dispatched an enormous shipment of grain to the neutral Swiss
canton of the Grison, and promptly received permission to recruit
troops on its territory and move an army across it.
In 1698 the King of Denkiya, who ruled a fair spread along the Gold
Coast, raped the wife of his vassal Osei Tutu, who promptly led a
revolt that resulted in the overthrow of kingdom and the creation of
the Asante Empire, which by 1800 ruled an area larger than Britain with
some three or four million inhabitants.
- In 1826
Angel Vicente "El Chacho" Peñaloza (1796-1863), later
caudillo of the Rioja district in northern
Argentina, secured the rank of captain in the federalist army by
capturing an enemy cannon with his lasso.
Chnodomar, the German leader defeated by the Emperor Julian at
Strasbourg in 357, reportedly was so large that upon falling off his
horse he was unable to extract himself from the mud of the field due to
his own weight and that of his armor, and thus was captured by the
- Accused by King Louis XII of France of
having twice broken his word, King Ferdinand II of Aragon (Isabella’s
husband), replied, “Twice only does the blockhead say I have broken my
word with him? He is an arrant liar, I have broken it more
than ten times!”
- In 1901 about 5.4 percent of
officers in the Italian Army were of the Hebrew faith, in a population
that was only 0.1 percent Jewish.
- The Emperor
Augustus (27 B.C.-A.D. 14), introduced a novel
punishment for soldiers guilty of certain infractions, he deprived them
of their swords and sword-belts for specific periods to symbolize their
unmilitary behavior, making them the objects of humiliation.
Portions of "Al
Nofi's CIC" have appeared previously in Military Chronicles,
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