How painful and terrifying was close combat with swords before guns were invented?
How painful and terrifying was close combat with swords before guns were invented?
Josiah Smith
Nicholas Ward
Very painful and very terrifying, but guns have done nothing but amplify that. Just look at WWI.
Gavin Thomas
You sound like you're speaking from experience. Are you a time traveller?
Elijah Campbell
Do you even see what board you're on? You could make that argument for literally every thread.
Xavier Stewart
It was horrible, but also very rare.
Charles Sullivan
You just go full berserk with your dual wielding shields as a Viking and no harm comes to you.
Joseph Kelly
Probably quite painful and terrifying but not like it's depicted in Game of Thrones.
Easton Baker
Awful.
We can say as much because the people who could have experienced both, soldiers in the Napoleonic War, would avoid it at all costs.
The British and French in La Haye Sainte, would reload and fire at each across a room rather than close with bayonets.
Cameron Hughes
Some loved it, some hated it.
Mason Bailey
>combat with swords
never happened
Jeremiah Hughes
...
Jordan Gomez
wheres this from?
Luis Cook
Mountains of corpses and rivers of blood were not poetic terms.
Nathaniel Parker
Ofcourse it did you spastic.
>It's contrarian so it must be true!!
Ayden Martin
It was frightening, sure, but there was a sort of mechanical nature to the fighting. Units were organized into very deep, dense blocks. One man didn't make a difference but the formation did. It's much easier to fight when you have dozens of men on either side of you and hundreds behind you backing you up. Before the rise of professional armies most of the men you were fighting alongside would have been from the same village as you and so there was an added layer of comradery and a social pressure not to show cowardice in front of your neighbors and contemporaries. Contrast this with modern combat in which most of the men you fight with you've only known for as long as you've enlisted, if that, and the unit is spread out to a degree that you can only see perhaps a dozen of your guys beside you at any given time.
Moreover melee combat wasn't like what we see in films where the fighting either devolves into a complete free for all or the formations collide and men keep hacking at one another until they either die or the enemy flees. Melee combat involved a lot of posturing, psyching oneself up, maybe individuals running forwards and either challenging men from the other side to single combat or simply to show their bravery and inspire their comrades. Bouts of fighting that did occur in battles were generally short, intensive affairs in which the army's elites would advance backed up by their subordinates and engage in a few minutes of fighting before retreating briefly and reforming. This cycle would repeat itself a few times until one side's moral broke and they fled. Up until this point casualties would have been quite low but it was during the route where the strength of formations were abandoned and the fleeing side's men simply couldn't think straight and exposed their backs to their enemy that most casualties occurred.
TLDR: Melee combat was frightening but you stood a reasonable chance of survival and could quite easily recover from the stress.
Andrew Gonzalez
...
Chase Robinson
You basically ask every man to be a mass murderer with a sword or spear.
William Baker
Not exactly what you're asking for, but he provides an interesting analysis on why modern wars are more terrifying.
youtube.com
Cameron Reed
Fear was the major factor in close combat sword fighting.
The more fear you had, the more you were able to survive. However, like all things, you grow into it, when you have been fighting several battles you literally just don't care anymore, this is whats up with the vikings, they were professional warriors, while some french army peasant was probably fighting for the first time.
When they became immune to fear, they would fight relentlessly, but keep in mind that this is a con, because they were not fighting for their survival, but for lust of power or "nothing else to do in life".
Noah Cruz
>Fear was the major factor in close combat sword fighting.
>The more fear you had, the more you were able to survive
>Be peasant
>Be conscripted to fight in war against battle hardened enemies
>So fearful I shit my pants and run
>This somehow defeats the enemy
>If you kill your enemy, he wins
>A real human bean :^)
Charles Sanchez
t. Bindyleige
Jack Baker
On the other hand, you lived only so long as you held. If you are about to lose, retreating before your mates helps you live. If they're already retreating around you, also retreating is your best shot.
Most of the casualties in ancient and medieval battles were injured or killed while routing or retreating, not in direct combat. (sort of like how modern combat casualties are mostly caused by mortar fire)
David Rodriguez
Modern combat is deadlier and puts much more stress on soldier (it's no longer ritualistic and combatants MUST learn to act independently)
Modern deaths are usually caused by fighting itself, not (mostly) routing and people today are MUCH softer. Combat units themselves are smaller (fighting in close formation with your close ones and withdrawing to let fresh ranks join in is not an option anymore). Also you can't outrun a gun nor hush artillery shells.
Guess what - charging with a long weapon inside a fucking farmhouse is much more risky than shooting each other for hours, especially if you are a recruit.
Carter Butler
>The more fear you had, the more you were able to survive.
>When they became immune to fear, they would fight relentlessly, but keep in mind that this is a con, because they were not fighting for their survival,
well this is the dumbest thing I've read all week. And I've been on /b/ a couple of times.
Do you honestly think every single military ethos throughout history would have placed such an emphasis on fearlessness if it wasn't a survival trait?
Fear is terrible for a soldier's survival. It's meant to stop you from getting into dangerous situations, or get you out of dangerous situations as fast as possible. It is completely fucking counter-productive when you're in a dangerous situation and you can't just run away.
The most fatal thing to do in combat is hesitate, which is what fear makes you do.
Eli Diaz
Its not that painful. Have you seen Monty Python and the quest for the holy grail? There is a seen between king arthur and the black knight which historians believe is an accurate depiction of melee combat.
Benjamin Hill
repeatedly stab yourself and find out
Colton Hughes
That injury looks more terrifying than anything that has been in game of thrones.
Henry Jenkins
it fun and feel good fun time party time
Hunter Collins
y i k e s
i
k
e
s
Brayden Davis
>Guess what - charging with a long weapon inside a fucking farmhouse is much more risky than shooting each other for hours, especially if you are a recruit.
Is it? I don't see any extra danger, you just might die by bayonet as opposed to musket, which people apparently feared more.
Easton Johnson
Bayonet brawls must have been pretty awful. No armor, no shield, just a muzzle loader with a dagger on the end
Eli Richardson
It pales when compared to modern warfare. Just read Storm of Steel. Technology took hell and brought it to earth.
Oliver Reed
...
Jeremiah Wilson
This. Nothing has broken more men than prolonged artillery barrage.
Aaron Bell
>nits were organized into very deep, dense blocks. One man didn't make a difference but the formation did
I always thought it was interesting that the ancient greeks euphemistically refered to the era before the advent of combat formations (or atleast what they regarded as combat formations) as the heroic age.
Lincoln Reyes
Benjamin Lopez
>You sound like you're speaking from experience. Are you a time traveller?
How the fuck is someone supposed to answer OP's question which is almost entirely framed around subjective experience and emotion if you're going to fucking whine about them acting like they know?
Jordan Diaz
To add to this, I also heard that one of the nicer things about combat then was the travel time.
Now, you're blowing kids' balls off one night, on a plane and back home in Everytown USA the next day or so. No time to decompress.
Back then, you're walking/sailing and things have a bit more time to settle before you're culture shocked back into whatever your daily life was.
Juan James
Because back then combat was between aristocrats fighting individually. It's not until the iron age and the phalanx we see the middle class start to join in in large numbers.
Matthew Brooks
did you learn about fighting from fucking Eragon?
No soldier is immune to fear, they either die or live from their skill at arms. They would have to be brave, but there is a massive difference between bravery and not feeling fear
Jonathan Ross
>all that pinging shrapnel
Shit, that's something the movies always seem to miss.
Caleb Gonzalez
It seems like people of WWI had the previous idea of warfare in-mind, if Ernst Junger's "Storm of Steel" is any indication, and the prospect of death and horrible wounds was mostly shrugged off or teeth-grittingly endured. The process used to prepare for battle by those people seems entirely alien to that of today. It seemed medieval.
Christopher Parker
Bentley Sanders
>battle of cannae.jpg
Nathaniel Foster
Holy mother of God.
Easton Clark
Some were even found with their heads buried in the ground, having dug small pits for themselves and buried their faces in the earth, and then simply smothered themselves to death. The most spectacular sight of allwas a Numidian soldier, still alive but lying beneath a dead Roman, with his nose and ears torn to shreds. The Roman had fought to his final breath, and when his hands could no longer hold his weapon, his anger turned to madness, and he died tearing his enemy to pieces with his teeth...
Robert Powell
Very would be my guess. This is a documentary where bones of men who fought at the Battle of Towton in 1461 during the War of the Roses which was described as the largest and bloodiest battle fought on British soil were examined and the results are pretty grim to say the least.