What was the worst era to be a soldier in?

Assaults are truly like that. Look at Middle-Eastern and Asian sieges. Plus it's a nightmare for both sides, taking an arrow on the battlefield is much better than drinking your own piss inside the walls.

>THIS
Ancient warfare was like 10k killed on a siege, 9k of them by disease, 500 by battle and 500 captures and executed

Is there a counter to a siege? You can't get supplies in, and your forces only have narrow gates to leave the city to enter battle

It's a popular misconception that soldiers just stood there waiting to get shot. Of course they knew about cover, etc. But in a large battle they would have to move in massive groups for the same reasons soldiers of previous eras did. To concentrate force, to cover their flanks, to be able to command in the first place.

But Neolithic farmers never has armies?

>For most of the history of warfare dudes were killed by fucking swords
>swords
fuck off

You know what I mean.

You meant spears?

Sallying out to break the siege
The enemy leaving due to fatigue or worn down by attacks
An allied army relieving you and attacking or chasing off the besiegers (unless you're fighting Caesar)

>what is the gladius

I guess he meant relatively short range melee weapons. aka, the era of being right in your enemies face and just trying to gut or dismember them before they did the same to you.

I daresay the Trenches were pretty fucking awful.

typically the other army can't besiege you during the harvest season so you just wait, there is also the likelihood that you're in you own territory and you have partisans fucking with their moral, not to mention its expensive and physically difficult to sustain a besieging army in enemy territory

Worst time would probably the time between gunpowder becoming mainstream (let's say 1500) up to when modern body armor became standardized (post Vietnam).

>For most of the history of warfare dudes were killed by fucking swords. That's got to be a hell of a way to die

No. That would probably be spears, arrows, and disease.

I think modern warfare is pretty bad for the fact that you sometimes can't always see your enemy and need to always be alert, probably why more soldiers have PTSD now than before. And by this I mean the Afghanistan and Iraq war, probably Vietnam war too.

However centuries ago the enemy was right in front of you in the battlefield and you could always rely on your skill or tactics. I suppose they are both different types of anxiety but I'd rather experience the later.

Human history of warfare up to and partly including WW1 yea

this and/or spear

What's the comfiest? Naval warfare?

>It's warishelltards show they don't know how people in the past fought episode

OP, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.

WWI was easily one of the worst eras to be a soldier.

>Enlist or be conscripted
>Constantly exposed to the sound and vibrations of artillery constantly
>Sleep deprived
>Constantly anxious concerning the next attack
>Being exposed to chemical warfare, particularly mustard gas, which could be trapped in the environment and clothes, meaning you couldn't escape exposure to it, even with respirators
>The gasmasks given to you were effective at clearing particulates, but were claustrophobic to wear and only enhanced anxiety
>Your commanders didn't give a shit about you, and viewed you little more than chattel
>Diseases like trenchfoot, typhus and other diseases due to lack of sanitation
>Suicidal mass attacks against machinegun and artillery emplacements
>You could be shot for desertion for simply succumbing to stress
>Then come along the tanks, which, while intimidating have indeterminate reliability, but can still crush the living fuck out of everything

And this is only the western front. Other theatres of war such as Africa were their own shitshows.

What was happening in Africa? You have a great writing style.

Everyone in this thread is wrong. The worst is when we were in tribes and shit. Like without metal weapons. When we had clubs and stone axes. That shit is real brutal

>keeps morale up being near other dudes.
>makes you easier to maneuver.
>harder for cavalry to fuck with
>muskets werent that accurate
They did have skirmisher troops who acted with initiative, took cover and sniped officers though.

The Entente colonies fighting the German ones; en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_von_Lettow-Vorbeck

Read about this guy and watch the great war special about him, gives you an idea of what the African front involved.

probably the correct answer
i can't remember a worst conflict than ww1... even if you never managed to fire a shot or even be shot you could come home completely broken just by being exposed to so many shit

and what's funnier is that the whole war was pretty much pointless and served no greater purpose

Disease in anything sub-tropical will be miserable.

Second French war with Madagascar. 6,000 men died. 25 of those were from combat, the rest from disease (with a sprinkling of suicide).

>For most of the history of warfare dudes were killed by fucking swords

I thought they were killed by bacterial disease, dysentry, and diarrhea illnesses?

Vietnam was probably pretty bad.

Lel imagine being a colonial Brit going through the jungles of India with a muzzle loader and no air support or artillery

...

>alp memes

...

Would that work tho? Wouldn't the elephant go crazy from the sound and vibrations?

Probably also pretty bad.

Brits didn't have to clean out the jungle square metre by square metre though.

How did people fight, propaganda user?

I read a study last night that looked at this phenomena of the 'Live and Let Live' principle. Essentially, soldiers on both sides had a mutual understanding to be inactive and passive without ever communicating with each other. When German patrols were ordered to go over the trench, British soldiers would ignore them so that they'd get the same treatment when they patrol. This infuriated their battalion officers, but the only method of escalating the violence was through artillery barrage. The attacks were routine so both sides expected it, and there was little animosity about it.

"acted like dicks"

After nearly 50 replies I think we can safely conclude that the shittiest era for fighting was absolutely always.

If one side decided NOT to fight like that, they would have a disadvantage.

How widespread was this behavior?

Sauce?

Goddamn imagine if there had been all female regiments in world war 1 and there were loads of young innocent qt soldiers being sent to the trenches, imagine the misery on their faces as they wade through the the mud, the fear shining in their eyes as they prepare to rush into no man's land, the machine guns firing through their soft tender flesh, listening their helpless whimpers as their bodies splatter into the mud, some of them surviving for hours and trying to drag themselves back to their own trench, their helpless moans signalling the enemy sniper to line up a shot on their head and kill them. Imagine their gorgeous young bodies multilated by trench foot and other horrible wounds, dying from dysentery, thousands of fertile young women dying for nothing, spending their last week's of life in utter misery.

M8...you need some serious help

Being a soldier was pretty shit as long as you were losing.
Imagine being a Roman soldier in Cannae. You can barely move and have to resort to suffocating yourself with dirt in order to die faster. I'd imagine standing in battle against the Huns or Mongols would be shit too from the sheer impotency to do anything about their meme horse archers.

include me in the screencap

Woah nelly

despite the fact that I've heard this song way too many times, I still tear up when I hear it:

youtube.com/watch?v=seMc_UaE3FQ

...

>spending weeks in a small and smelly pot with a hundred others eating only maggoty bread only to die in horrible agony by scurvy or get blown to pieces if you're lucky.

No.

This.
Also they'd have extremely itchy, shit smeared assholes

>and you could always rely on your skill or tactics

If you were a general, maybe
But as a soldier? It was all down to luck

>melee is still effective, so close formations cannot be completely abandoned.
>Officers need to command large numbers of people with no radios; meaning most people must be close enough together to hear their NCO shout or the drummer change beat.
>Close formations are necessary to not get run down by cavalry.

This pic reminds me of that

youtube.com/watch?v=jJ3wgD_zB5w

New fetish acquired

The Sociology of Trench Warfare 1914-18
A. E. Ashworth
The British Journal of Sociology
Vol. 19, No. 4 (Dec., 1968), pp. 407-423

Apparently 6 of 10 veterans indicated some form of this

Nope×∞.

Because the only way you could effectively utilize slow loading, innacurate muskets was by grouping a bunch of soldiers together and firing volleys. That way, if one guy misses, the other hundred guys might hit something to make up for it. Also, when you only have thinks like drums and verbal signals to control a large body of men, it was much easier to do it when they were lumped into tight formation or in lines. Like others said as well, it's a lot easier to ward of cavalry when you can keep your men close and use your bayonets like a pike formation.

*things

Damn autocorrect

Further, if your opponent does not form big blocks of musketmen and instead tries to skirmish, you can just fuckin walk up to him and stab him in the face. His skirmish line will have nowhere near the volume of fire to stop you, and since his line is so sparse he can't fight in melee.

CUTE!

>82nd airborne on the beaches

>looks like we missed the drop zone

holy fucking shit dude

And on top of that, a lot of skirmishes/riflemen did not have provisions for bayonets. I know a few were exceptions like the British with their Baker rifle, bit otherwise you'd be forced to use your gun like a club if you didn't have a sword or something. Hard to fend off a bunch of infantry without bayonets.

most likely
i can understand if they fired some repeating rifles or muzzle-loading carbines but a machine gun is probably too much for a fucking elephant to handle

also, this and this are memepics taken but the ancient to make young people from the future laugh

1740-1870

As a percentage of death ratio, An Lushan.

You had a very high chance of dying. Probably the highest next to the Mongol conquests.

Tang dynasty had a population record of about 52 million and about 9 million households before the rebellion. 1 year after wards, the numbers dropped to 17 million people and about 3 million households, however thats mainly due to the disarray of society and lack of proper records. Hundred years later, the consensus only records about 30 million people and about 5 million households. Total loss estimate range from 20-35 million dead. Mind you, this was in the middle of 8th century.

Now as for a particular battle, there's Battle of Suiyang. 10,000 Tang loyalist being seiged by a 150,000 Yan loyalist

Needless to say, you were forced to canabalize everyone in the city you were defending. Children, wives, servants, weak, old, etc

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Suiyang

I would assume it would be considered one of the worst way to fight as a soldier, to trade your very humanity.

PUT ME IN THE /r/Veeky Forums SCREENCAP

Why?I'm not gonna do any of that shit, I just like to imagine it.

Nijmegen duderino.
C'mon I thought this was a history board.

welcome to the world of big fellas, colonization was the best thing that ever happened.

To dovetail on this user, The Great War in Africa is a great book on the subject that covers the front in its totality.

It's crazy how the Nazis tried to portray all black people as subhumans when the German's own black Askaris were among the world's finest soldiers

a british solider at passchendaele
a french soldier at verdun
a german soldier at stalingrad

id say both reds and germans at stalingrad.

Probably the US civil war, where soldiers attacked in Napoleonic tight formations and were cut to pieces by the mini ball

If you find this shocking you are a fucking new fag. There is absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying this. I used to literally rub one out to pictures of ww2 casualties as a young preteen then at my sexual awakening I began imagining women in their place and masturbating to that instead.

What the fuck am I reading?

>tfw fapping to images of dead female soviet conscripts killed in the winter war right now
My degeneracy is unbeatable.

>images

Post some?

This isn't /b/.
Just go to goregrish and browse through the War section, it should be there.

Read up on The Baltic Fleet.

It both shows both the horrible conditions of 1900's sailors and Russias hilarious inability to do anything correctly at sea.

Officers had to do it too, and they got sniped.

Respect

outside of precolumbian north america (where they were basically neolithic), there's little evidence of large-scale warfare taking place in the stone age

My nig
twitter.com/_dutchko/media

thats fucking badass as fuck

>tfw no infantry gf to gut me with a bayonet during a trench raid and to start crying and apologize to me as I bleed to death

fighting among tribals tended to be low stakes affairs which were mostly attempts to intimidate their neighbors through flashy displays. Clashing with weapons occurred but rarely resulted in casualties. These tribes simply couldn't afford to take a lot of losses without being crippled for a generation, so they erred on the side of prudence.

This is by no means universal, certain tribes could be vicious and bloodthirsty (while others could be completely pacifist) but on a whole these societies were simply too busy trying to survive to waste too much time and effort fretting over what their neighbors are doing. It was only when men stopped needing to invest the better part of their day hunting for their next meal that they found time to war with each other.

Why are Veeky Forums all into femdom shit? It's so pathetic.