Are child soldiers a modern taboo? How young were fighters in pre-Industrial Europe?

>Hey, baby. You got Vietnam gf?
>Well, baby, me so horny. Me so HORNY. Me love you long time. You party?
>Fifteen dolla
>No. Each you fifteen dolla. Me love you long time. Me so HORNY.
>Me sucky-sucky. Me love you too much.
>Okay. Ten dolla each.
>Every t'ing you want.
>Every t'ing

>that pearl necklace
>probably the only valuable she owns
>probably given to her by her now dead mother (killed by US firebombing of civilian village)
>mandatory conscription
>forced to fight and kill
>still hangs onto the hope that the war will end; the necklace, her only link to once normal feminine life.
>mfw i found a necklace like this half-buried in the dirt last year when i went to visit Vietnam on an exchange.

Child Soldiers were a long taboo. Largely because Children are useless in a fight.

Children WERE present in rear echelon roles though such as cooking for you shit, cleaning your shit, or the occassional bedwarmer.

>throw slings

sling stones

and men do that better

I imagine it has a lot to do with the proliferation of firearms

Depends on what you consider a "child." Teenagers certainly partook in wars on a regular basis in the middle ages. Richard the Lionheart was 16 when he was leading men into battle.
People in ye olden days had to grow up a lot faster than they do now. It's entirely possible that people a few hundred years from now will consider us barbarians for sending 18 year olds off to war.

deremilitari.org/2014/03/teenagers-at-war-during-the-middle-ages/

"Yet another source of evidence has facilitated the historians’ search for soldiers’ ages: the excavation of corpses from military conflicts. For example, excavations of graves from a 1812 battle at Snake Hill, near Fort Erie, Canada, have established that 17 of the 32 bodies were of soldiers under the age of 25, with 9 of these under the age of 20. The youngest was only 14 years old.5 These findings are further corroborated by the excavations of 21 eighteenth-century military corpses from Fort Laurens, Ohio, whose average age was 23.5 years, with two soldiers aged between 12 and 15 years.6 Other age-related studies of victims of war indicate a similar young age of the soldiers: five who died during the attacks on Fort William Henry in 1757 averaged 23.3 years, and thirty New York Provincials who died during engagements in 1760 averaged 25.5 years.7 It is this evidence that has led-some early modern military historians to estimate that while the largest portion of men serving in armies of the period were between 20 and 40 years of age, up to a quarter of the soldiery might have been under 20 years of age, with many only 15 or 16 years old.8"

>pic is obviously fairly modern
>US firebombing some village in SE Asia
Nah m8.

So what's everyone guess on this qt's country?
I wanna say Philippines, but AK's are rare for the insurgents there.

>Are child soldiers a modern taboo?
It is literally considered a war crime.

That's not the question he's asking, dum dum.

He's not asking if it's taboo, he's asking it's a modern taboo. As in: is child soldiery bad now, or was it always bad?

Nice post

During middle ages with 25 you are a middle aged man. And as someone else said, physical strength was an advantage. Sending someone younger then 16 to battle just made not much sense.