It was customary with Frederick the Great of Prussia, whenever a new soldier appeared in his guards, to ask him three questions–viz., ‘How old are you? How long have you been in my service? Are you satisfied with your pay and treatment?’ It happened that a young soldier, born in France, and who had served in his own country, desired to enlist into the Prussian service, and his figure was such as to cause him immediately to be accepted. He was totally ignorant of the German language, but his captain gave him notice that the King would question him in that language the first time he saw him, and therefore cautioned him to learn by heart the three answers he was to give. The soldier learned them by the next day, and as soon as he appeared in the ranks Frederick came up to interrogate him. His Majesty, however, happened to begin with the second question first, and asked him, ‘How long have you been in my service?’ ‘Twenty-one years,’ answered the soldier. The king, struck with his youth, which plainly indicated he had not borne a musket near so long as that, said to him, much astonished, ‘How old are you?’ ‘One year, an’t please your Majesty.’ Frederick, still more astonished, cried, ‘You or I must certainly be bereft of our senses.’ The soldier, who took this for the third question, replied firmly, ‘Both, an’t please your Majesty.’ ‘This is the first time I ever was treated as a madman at the head of my army,’ rejoined Frederick. The soldier, who had exhausted his stock of German, stood silent; and when the king again addressed him, in order to penetrate the mystery, the soldier told him in French that he did not understand a word of German. The king laughed heartily, and after exhorting him to perform his duty, left him.

— E. Shelton, ed., The Book of Battles, 1867

In 1863, the register of the U.S. Treasury, L.E. Chittenden, had to sign 12,500 bonds in a single weekend to stop the delivery of two British-built warships to the Confederacy. He started at noon on Friday and managed 3,700 signatures in the first seven hours, but by Saturday morning he was desperate:

[E]very muscle on the right side connected with the movement of the hand and arm became inflamed, and the pain was almost beyond endurance. … In the slight pauses which were made, rubbing, the application of hot water, and other remedies were resorted to, in order to alleviate the pain and reduce the inflammation. They were comparatively ineffectual, and the hours dragged on without bringing much relief.

He finished, exhausted, at noon on Sunday, completing a mountain of bonds more than 6 feet high. These were rushed to a waiting steamer — and only then did word come that the English warships had been sold to a different buyer. The bonds, in the end, were not needed.

See “Counting a Million in a Month.”

In October 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a group of American destroyers trapped a Soviet submarine near Cuba. When the ships began dropping depth charges, the sub’s captain prepared to launch a nuclear-tipped torpedo, believing that a war between the superpowers might already be under way.

But the launch was permitted only if three officers agreed to it, and second-in-command Vasili Arkhipov held out against his superior. An argument ensued, but eventually he persuaded the captain to surface instead and seek orders from Moscow.

“The lesson from this,” remarked NSA director Thomas Blanton in 2002, “is that a guy called Vasili Arkhipov saved the world.”

See Close Call.

Dorothy Parker named her Boston terrier Woodrow Wilson “because he was full of shit.”

An episode from the German trenches, August 1915, from artilleryman Herbert Sulzbach’s 1935 memoir With the German Guns:

One of the next starlit summer nights, a decent Landwehr chap came up suddenly and said to 2/Lt Reinhardt, ‘Sir, it’s that Frenchie over there singing again so wonderful.’ We stepped out of the dug-out into the trench, and quite incredibly, there was a marvellous tenor voice ringing out through the night with an aria from Rigoletto. The whole company were standing in the trench listening to the ‘enemy,’ and when he had finished, applauding so loud that the good Frenchman must certainly have heard it and is sure to have been moved by it in some way or other as much as we were by his wonderful singing.

“Musical compositions, it should be remembered, do not inhabit certain countries, certain museums, like paintings and statues,” wrote Henri Rabaud. “The Mozart Quintet is not shut up in Salzburg: I have it in my pocket.”

“This is the biggest fool thing we have ever done. The bomb will never go off, and I speak as an expert in explosives.” — Admiral William D. Leahy to Harry Truman, 1945