Miscellany
Describing phalanx warfare, Thucydides wrote that “fear makes every man want to do his best to find protection for his unarmed side in the shield of the man next to him on the right.” The soldier farthest right must try to “keep his own unarmed side away from the enemy, and his fear spreads to the others who follow his example.” The effect of this fear, wrote the historian: “the right wing tends to get unduly extended.”
Miscellany
After the Jacobites were defeated in 1746, a sympathizer named Flora Macdonald disguised Bonnie Prince Charlie as an Irish maid, smuggled him to her home on the Isle of Skye, and helped him escape to France. She then “took the sheets in which he had lain,” James Boswell later reported, “charged her daughter that they should be kept unwashed,” and asked to be buried in them as a shroud. She was.
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