How the hell did people fight pre firearms...

They were persuaded to not be a bitch. You fought because your country was literally being invaded, you fought to defend people, you fought to save your family, your king, your country and your god. You fought because it was ingrained in culture that fighting is Honorable, is respectable and a great service to your people. Very rarely did people think about being torn from limbs. Most soldiers were taught that they were to fight to the death and that THEY were to tear the enemy to limbs. It's not until they got into battle that they got the "oh fuck" moment.

Firearms or not, soldiers have always been the same. Nothing has changed but technology. Read letters from soldiers from the 1700s,1800s,1900s.

You can even read some translated writings (dictated writings) from mesoamerican peoples that learned to write in Spanish in the 100-200 years after the Spanish conquests of the Americas.

See pic related. Poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson in regards to the Battle of Balaclava in the Crimean War

Note: "Theirs not to make reply, Theirs not to reason why, Theirs but to do and die. Into the valley of Death Rode the six hundred."

A soldier is a soldier and he knows what he's going into. He is going to do two things and hopefully he only does one.
He A. Goes to kill the enemy.
or he B. Gets killed by the enemy.

What I first mentioned in the post, all that reinforcement crammed into the psyche of a soldier. Even more reinforced when many civilizations would execute deserters, so thats another reason to go fight and not turn back. Warriors in the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Africa. All the same, you fight and you die, such is life.

Do you actually think later period wars were any less bloody?

How the hell did people fight pre laserguns? Just how high do you even have to be to go into battle knowing that your face could literally be torn through by a bullet? I can't imagine how brutal gunpowder combat truly was.

I think getting shot is less psychologically damning than the thought of having one's face shattered with a chunk of iron on a stick.

Not when you seen hundreds of men be shredded to bits by small flying pieces of metal. I think its more psychologically damaging that one second you're literally ok but scared, and the next literal second your jaw has been magically removed.

I'm fairly certain having that same chunk or iron coming flying at you at high velocity out of nowhere is a lot scarier than having it attached to a stick of a guy who you can clearly see in front of you and who you can fight.

>your jaw has been magically removed.

But that's the thing. Getting shot or hit with shrapnel seems magical. It doesn't strike a primal nerve like having your hand sliced off does.

Have you ever fought anyone?

>firearms cant slice off your limbs

>blown to pieces out of nowhere
how horrible

Yes. And I'd be a lot more worried about someone drawing a knife on me than a handgun.
I didn't imply that.

>I'd be a lot more worried about someone drawing a knife on me than a handgun.
youtube.com/watch?v=F1VzOeGetkI

The guy with the knife could easily close and start stabbing the fuck out of him before he could draw and aim from that distance.

Have you ever been held at gunpoint? I'm sure if you have you would know that a knife is nothing.

>6 out of 7 people survive their injuries (handguns)

everydaynodaysoff.com/2012/08/26/doctor-talks-about-gunshot-wounds/

See
I'd rather get shot than get 30 holes in my stomach and chest from a 5 inch knife.

Then we should just replace all police guns with knives since they will only survive with minor injuries and guns are a non-issue.

So that's just you being scared of knives. You can get 15 holes put through by a small child with a firearm. Somehow the knife is SO much worse.

You don't need to kill someone with one shot in order for a gun to be useful.

t. brainlet

I'm a slight drunk at the moment, elaborate a bit more if you could.

Pistols have the ability to inflict injury at range. Shooting to stop isn't just a euphemism that police or armed civilians use for killing in self-defense. It really is possible to stop someone harming you by inflicting multiple gunshot wounds on their torso without actually killing them.

>human psyche was as basic as the weapons.. they probably didnt realise what it was to have value but merely dragged along by the strata at that time, as everyone is..
Nigger, reading a single page of classical literature invalidates your post.

>Shooting to stop isn't just a euphemism that police or armed civilians use for killing in self-defense. It really is possible to stop someone harming you by inflicting multiple gunshot wounds on their torso without actually killing them.
Someone go notify American policemen.

Thanks for answering the question.

Da wrong white boyiee 2 funk wit, yo.

Stunning argument

But he died in battle.

t. Weakling scared of a melee

Most autistic post of Veeky Forums in 2018.

Oh okay.

>You can get 15 holes put through by a small child with a firearm. Somehow the knife is SO much worse.

Yeah well if you want a real argument, your creation of a ridiculous scenario in an attempt to support your position is borderline-comical and demonstrates that your position is flawed.

>I sit around all day and have never felt significant pain before, so I don't realize how awful it actually is.

Pour me out a funky-fresh swag-swagon of mead for my homie.

Not an argument, retard. Are you 16 years old?

If you can't see the comparison I'm drawing between physical strength versus physical threat then you're a fucking idiot who probably should be shot AND stabbed.

>wanting to be shot this bad

It's like you don't even want a chance to live.

>Townton
that makes me feel so angry

>Dur dur if a baby got shot with more bullets than a typical handgun holds then you'd see how dangurus guns r
SeeHuh?

Wow, you certainly are a retard.

The two most recent incidents involved them using rifles, not pistols.

>“Towton 25”, one of those who died at Towton and were recovered by archaeologists.
The damage to the skull, some of it inflicted post-mortem, speak to the viciousness of the assault that took his life.

There is an entire science of manipulating the predictable psychology of young men to go to war. It probably wasn't as considered in those days but smart people just understand shit, like how young men are anxious creatures who desire to prove themselves in some way.

We're also not programmed naturally to think about our death all the time. Even after growing up on war movies (that don't hold back on the effects of modern weapons) training in scenarios where "I'm the one that was wounded," it doesn't really sink in for a new guy until he gets shot or actually sees a buddy bite the dust that he is very likely to meet the same fate. The unblooded young men of ancient times probably felt similarly invincible.

There was also a cultural bias toward men fighting in war, it was seen as a good and necessary thing. Cowardice was abhorred and in many cases severely punished to keep others from thinking it's acceptable.

For the undisciplined, booze was probably involved.

The piece of metal on a stick is much scarier. Typically men will fight while being shot at but flee from bayonet charges unless disciplined or really dug in. They even have this convo in countless WW1 books, "would you rather get hit by the machinegun or take a bayonet to the gut," people chose the machinegun.

You just did it. The enemy was not human. Or at the very best, a sub-human. You knew that if you did not gut them like a fish, they will gut you. Then they would rape your city-state's women and sell the children into physical/sexual slavery. Those factors outweigh how scared you might be in the moment

Most armies did not, at any point, fight to the death outside sieges. In most ages of warfare it was downright unlikely to die unless your side lost.

tribal warfare is often highly symbolic and lethal force rarely used

how did they decide a victor then, if all the combatants were merely injured?

The fuckin state of Veeky Forums I swear.

nah they both suck

At our core we are hunters. We seek to subjugate the natural world and assert our dominance over it. These primal urges are kept in check by our conscious mind and the lessons society imbues in us. When you are faced with the breakdown of these checking mechanisms in the heat of battle, the beast inside us is unleashed. We can slaughter a fellow man and face death unflinchingly because we are operating on the purest instinct of fight or flight and in this regard hand to hand combat is the most brutal and horrific of combat because it makes us realize how much closer to the animals and savages we really are, and it's not easy to live with that...

morale.

few fatalities were actually inflicted during the melee. The bulk of them were inflicted after one side broke and ran, during the rout.

>that painting
fucking savage. The sheer hatred glistening in that Roman's eyes as he shanks that forest ape stirs some ancestral memory hidden deep within my psych.

good post, too

This better be bait.

Discipline is one hell of a drug, don't believe me? Ask Alexander, and after him, the Romans.

Here’s your (You)
No please stop shitposting

Not being a bitch like you, op.

life wasn't all that before modernity. if you went hungry every other year and had a real chance of randomly dying horribly from some disease risking violent death for practical reasons might simply start looking like an acceptable option.

Even now I seriously think life is not worth it for most people

on one hand at least you've got a chance of getting out of a battle unscathed if you're better than everybody you go up against

whereas theres no blocking or dodging machine gun fire

There's a lot you can do to minimize the risk of getting hit though, WW1 vets hugged that bombed out earth and stayed out of the field of fire as much as possible.

Going prone and taking cover is hiding from the existential threat, in a manner of speaking. Whereas meeting the bayonet is literally charging into the existential threat, and you have to fight and rely on your most primal abilities to survive that.

There is no element of chance there like with the bullets whizzing by, if he overcomes you you're gonna die under the absolute power of an enraged madman who hates your guts and has a sharp thing on a stick.

>untill the fifty-eleventh animal's organs showed signs of good things to come.
what did he mean by this?

This is bullshit. At least a large chunk of deaths occured in the first few minutes of engagement. Routing would occur only after one side had clearly been witnessed to be insuperior to enemy.

This is a good post.

This. It's one thing to throw rocks at each other. Its another thing entirely to charge each other with those rocks in your hand

Because not fighting would mean people you care about get raped
Because you were friends with your fellow soldiers and you pussying out would mean they could die
because your god is better
because in the frenzy of fighting the adrenaline gets you high as a kite and you dont feel it when you get hit
Because the brave soldier gets better rewards
because the coward gets punished

Google "divination"

Cav chase down routers and kill them

that was back before everyone was a reddit pussy with anxiety

people were less nihilistic back then and believed in an afterlife they were absolutely sure was real. People today think that when you die it's just black nothingness so suddenly dying becomes a lot more scarier.

What? Is firearm warfare not brutal? Have you seen the power that a musket ball can do to a person? Or the fact that musket balls can go through multiple people at close range. And that's not including things like cannons.

Likewise most deaths in melee combat came from the routing army. Pitched battles have always been about breaking the morale of your enemy.

Artillery shrapnel can fuck you up worse than any sword or spear.