In 1910, Henry Wilson, the British army officer charged with planning for a possible war with Germany, visited the French officer doing the same job in Paris, Ferdinand Foch.

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The Anglo-French alliance was still a tentative, semi-secret thing, so Wilson asked Foch, “What is the smallest British military force that would be of any practical assistance to you?”

Foch replied: “Send a single British soldier — and we will see to it that he is killed.”

He wasn’t being cruel. He just knew that if the German army killed even one British soldier, then the whole British empire would be at war with Germany — which was what the French needed to see, given how skittish the British were being about their commitment to the alliance.

The story is only hearsay because nobody writes this sort of thing down. However, if the United States invades Greenland, the unwritten instructions of Maj. Gen. Søren Andersen, the commander of the 160 Danish soldiers who flew into Greenland on Jan. 19 and 20, will be very similar: to get at least one of his Danish soldiers killed by American troops.

Ideally, the Americans would do this unprompted, and then the rest........

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