What do you think were ancient battles really like?

From what I can tell, very few people would ever die in the "battle" part of the battle. Most deaths ocurred when one side turned and ran and got routed.

It was more that back then, combat was infrequent. Yeah battles could be horrific but you had days or weeks of marching/camping between them, and non-siege battles rarely lasted more than a day.

Thanks to modern transportation and warfare, a soldier can be in combat constantly.

>I heard that the time period in which killing was the least likely to cause psychological trauma for the killer was actually during the age of smoothbore guns.
>Contrasting with the previous and subsequent eras, most of the time, when you killed somebody you couldn't actually tell if it was your bullet that did him in.
I believe this is part of why in the firing squad, the shooters aren't told which one of them has the bullet and not a blank.

I think anti climatic would be the best word to understand for someone in our times.

You march many miles for weeks or maybe even months to fight this enemy, living on stale bread and river water. You're some cannon fodder in the 4th rank and can barely even see the enemy or know whats going on during the actual battle. The only battle plan you are aware of is to not run, not die and try to kill the enemy.

Arrows rain down on you randomly but if you had armour you were probably safe.

At some point you get pushed to the front where you and some other loser on the other side try to trade blows before you sink back into your lines. If you caused a wound that would be something slightly impressive.

At some point one side gives and the rout is where most of the killing takes place.

Of course your experience would be different as the elite cavalry or royal guard. But most ancient armies padded their lines with whatever local levys were available. If you are middle class, you would prob have been a spearman with some half decent old hand me down equipment. If you're a poor NEET you would be a slinger or if totally unlucky, you would be the javalin skirmisher (youd be archer and cavalry bait)

Something movies and games can't really represent is the time it takes to move large armies around. Fighting alone could take hours and that is only after hours of maneuvers and skirmishing. Sometimes armies would only maneuver and stand opposite each other for hours and even days at a time (taking breaks when the sun set).

You're right that battles weren't a single engagement. They were often lead up to after weeks of commanders trying to trap the enemy army or maneuver their own army to a better position to fight. During this period skirmishers would also be used. So for most battles there were weeks of skirmishers and maneuvers.

This should also help explain why fighting at night is very rare, coordinating a small group of people through the dark is hard. Trying to maneuver thousands of men at night to attack is very difficult. It also helps explain why armies typically fought according to set seasons, marching thousands of men and animals through the mud is slow and tiring, it will also give the men wet feet which will give them blisters and raw skin on a longer march. Speed and healthy troops require warm dry earth for marching.

There's an even simpler reason why it's worse now: explosions. The shockwaves from high explosives can cause microtearing in the brain, which exacerbates things. Soldiers are basically getting brain damaged from the stuff.

According to Homer, half of every battle was stripping dead dudes of their armor.

Correct, but what if those events weren't considered traumatic back then?

>PTSD was totally a thing its just that nobody ever wrote about it and any direct references to wars conveniently left it out
Stop

>It also helps explain why armies typically fought according to set seasons, marching thousands of men and animals through the mud is slow and tiring, it will also give the men wet feet which will give them blisters and raw skin on a longer march.
Honestly, a bigger reason is economic. Professional soldiers were few and far between, and you often had to time your wars around agricultural cycles, since most of your manpower were farmers most of the rest of the time. On one hand, you don't really want an army in the field around planting or harvest time. On the other, it's often the threat of burning crops (or actually doing it), that forces enemies out from their fortified positions, and that's easier done when the fields are almost ripe. You ideally tried to time most campaigns as close to the wire as you could to get your men back just in time for the harvest.

You might want to buy any fucking book on ancient warfare.

Try "Attrition: Aspects of Command in the Peloponnesian War". Good overview of what these battles were like, or at least the objectives of them and how they were conducted.

Pic not related. Different war.

Pretty sure there was an account of a soldier suddenly losing the ability to see after a battle in one of the Greek histories as well.

forgot my pic

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There was a lot more soldiers running around and stabbing enemies who were already engaged in the back than is represented in popular culture.

It is from Herodotus. 6.117

>There fell in this battle of Marathon, on the side of the barbarians,
about six thousand and four hundred men; on that of the Athenians,
one hundred and ninety-two. Such was the number of the slain on the
one side and the other. A strange prodigy likewise happened at this
fight. Epizelus, the son of Cuphagoras, an Athenian, was in the thick
of the fray, and behaving himself as a brave man should, when suddenly
he was stricken with blindness, without blow of sword or dart; and
this blindness continued thenceforth during the whole of his after
life. The following is the account which he himself, as I have heard,
gave of the matter: he said that a gigantic warrior, with a huge beard,
which shaded all his shield, stood over against him; but the ghostly
semblance passed him by, and slew the man at his side. Such, as I
understand, was the tale which Epizelus told.

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You mean flanking? Because it was a pretty organized maneuver. If some guy just tried to run around the side he'll probably have a cavalry contingency to deal with.

Pic Unrelated

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Well you fought in a formation (at least in a good army), and front line was rotated. Exhaustion is a highly important thing to consider when engaged in physical combat.
Casualties were usually low during the actual combat, most occured once one side broke and routed.

Line rotation was only common in Rome. It was not practiced by the Greeks, Persians, Carthaginians, or Egyptians. Alexander didn't really do it in any organized fashion, either, but it is recorded as happening.

pic not related

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I think modern wars are certainly more terrifying also.

Seeing your friends blown into a red mist and having huge explosions go off around you are far more psychologically damaging than sword wounds.

But imagine watching your friends die slowly - in agony from mortal wounds. Imagine having to witness your childhood friend bleeding to death with an arrow lodged in their mouth and sticking out the back of their neck, crying unintelligible words while spitting up torrents of red.
"Sweet is war to those who know it not."
- Pindar

Anticipating and then having a front row seat to being physically disemboweled by your engaged enemy is easy to go through now?

Actually levied soldiers were few and far between and professional soldiers were the standard. There are a select few examples of levied peasant soldiers, most soldiers through history were full time professionals that were either fed by the their lord or they held their own land and paid for their own equipment and food.

It is only really in times of crisis that men are levied to fight. Most of the time the majority of the population work to feed and equip a much smaller professional elite.

Levied masses of men was largely made possible in the mid to late 18th and early 19th centuries once training, equipping and feeding massive armies of men was cheap and easy. This is thanks to the industrial revolution which made production of uniforms, weapons and food surpass anything before it.

Messy

Both swords and bullets or shrapnel wound in grievous ways, so modern soldiers just get to experience both the sudden and drawn out.

Pilots are probably a better case for the sudden as encounters are quicker and you usually drop from the sky before a drawn out death can take place. But I don't know any comparisons of PTSD rates between pilots and infantry so I can't say one way or another.

The closest we can get is watching riots and perhaps the footage of combat of tribes in PNG. Despite one just being hooliganism and the other truly intending to cause death, they share a lot of similarities, and confirm a lot of what is implied though ancient literature.

A) Most people in the fight are passive and defensive. There are only a handful of standouts that are truly aggressive and offensive. Even with the feeling of power that comes from herd mentality, most people just want to keep their head down and make it through the fighting unharmed.

B) There isn't much death/serious injury in the actual 'carnage' of the fight. In the PNG footage, hundreds of people come together fighting unarmored with lethal weapons with the preknowledge that they might hopefully only kill one member of the opposing tribe. Had the fighting not been ritualistic, it's easy to imagine the winning tribe chasing down their fleeing opponents and killing most of them in the disorder of the rout. This lines up perfectly with common theories about casualties in ancient warfare, where 95-99% of them happen during the rout, not the battle.

C) Fights are decided by psychology more than any other factors. Great chain reactions can begin by just a couple members of one group getting cold feet. If this happens in line 'battles' without flanking maneuvers, it's easy to imagine how great units of cavalry smashing into one wing can cause the line of dominoes to fall. Already known yeah, but still neat to actually see in action.

youtube.com/watch?v=0BzqwOBneC4

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>Deimos was a god in Greek mythology, personification of terror (his name meant "dread"). He was the son of gods Ares

this.
In Romania, there is no gun culture, so drunk peasants and gypsy inter-gang warfare is pretty much "groups dumbasses fighting with axes and swords".
Shockingly, this doesn't result in pic related, but in one guy, or a couple of people ending up on the news with a couple of random slash wounds.

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It would appear form are experience in ww1 and 2 that human psychology lacks proper defence against unnatural continuous explosions and the concept of dropping dead suddenly from no discernible source.
At least in ancient warfare we have some defence in being biologically geared to it with are fight or flight response and herd mentality.

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the hardest part for me to imagine is the feigned retreats

Retard.

"At the command of the god Ashur, the great Lord, I rushed upon the enemy like the approach of a hurricane...I put them to rout and turned them back. I transfixed the troops of the enemy with javelins and arrows. Humban-undasha, the commander in chief of the king of Elam, together with his nobles...I cut their throats like sheep...My prancing steeds, trained to harness, plunged into their welling blood as into a river; the wheels of my battle chariot were bespattered with blood and filth. I filled the plain with corpses of their warriors like herbage."

"For a distance of a month and twenty-five days' journey I devastated the provinces of Elam. Salt and sihlu I scattered over them... The dust of Susa, Madaktu, Haltemash and the rest of the cities I gathered together and took to Assyria... The noise of people, the tread of cattle and sheep, the glad shouts of rejoicing, I banished from its fields. Wild asses, gazelles and all kinds of beasts of the plain I caused to lie down among them, as if at home."

I guess cancer didn't exist until the first clinical diagnosis of it. Makes perfect sense.

Quality post

Bullshit, battles lasted typically for several days, sieges for months.

While your post does make some sense you can't really compare mobs and tribal savages with organized armies fighting in formation, with a proper chain of command and everything.
Though the part about morale is correct.

Battles themselves lasted hours, the preliminar skirmishing and manouvering which included raiding, scouting, foraging, fortifying and harassing lasted for days.

You're conflating two wildly separate things. In Medieval Europpe, which is one megaculture in one time period, levies among the bottom rung peasantry were very rare. Levies among the better off people in the manorial systems would still form the basis of most armies in a given lord's retinues. And of course, once you extend out of Medieval Europe, the ball is completely out the window. Pre-Marian Rome fought entirely with militias. The overwhelming majority of the pre-Macedonian Greek world fought with militias. The Persians had a comparatively small force of a king's guard supplmented with an enormously larger force of "whatever the fuck they could lay their hands on". Han China had a 20,000 man professional force supplemented by regional militias called up for campaign.

In fact, your own reasoning works against you. Professional soldiers were rare in pre-modern times precisely because of the economic difficulty involved in keeping thousands, or tens of thousands of men in mostly small polities economically unproductive so they could be full-time soldiers.

Depends on the society and era.

The PNG comparison may apply to archaic Greece where there is a similar fighting style to the one found in PNG. In Greece fighting in homogeneous heavy infantry formation didnt develop til the Persian Wars and the phalanx was absent from depictions and literature of archaic Greece. See Hans van Wees Development of the hoplite phalanx for an indepth look:
academia.edu/29666767/Development_of_the_hoplite_phalanx.pdf

In Classical Greece most Greek armies had piss poor organization and virtually no training and little disicpline. In fact i think describing Greek armies as mobs is apt. The only thing that truly set it apart from a mob is that the could initially deploy in ranks and files. However this order was lost on the move since Greek armies generally lacked the bare training to keep in formation and thats not accounting their fondness of running into battle.

This is wrong. Ashoka (the indian king who propagated Buddhism) was left with shock from his war. All the blood/dead bodies forced him to change his view on life and adopt a Buddhist lifestyle. War shock affected even early kings, let alone lower members of the society.

Like "PTSD" as a diagnosis is a modern invention due to our understanding of modern mind, the symptoms/experience of a horrors of war stretches back to prehistory itself. Sure life was much harder back then, but even in the much harder times, it could still become a nightmare scenario. Human minds are fundamentally seek stability and peace, so when that is disturbed to the xth level, it creates a trauma.

Sieges were COMMON, battles were RARE ;)

I'm pretty sure the soldiers in a macedonian syntagma would be able to rotate in and out. There was obviously a system for replacing people who fell etc., so a similar system for soldiers rotating in the front lines is not difficult to imagine. After all, the syntagma had like 11 officers to it.

Greek Phalanx not so much, but their battles never lasted that long to begin with.

I really thought the GoT Bolton vs Stark Battle of the Bastards' episode was brutal as fuck. If there was any recorded account of a medieval battle I could see it going something like that. The extreme chaos of it, the smothering of trapped bodies, etc.

This is dumb. Battles lasted for days sometimes, most Americans who go to war aren't in combat for cumulative days. Suicide is actually more common in non combat vets now, although it could be selection bias.

More important , soldiers back then had to live off the land, which is had all sorts of violence and moral problems associated with it.

>This is dumb. Battles lasted for days sometimes

your definition of battle is modern. The Battle is the all out frontal clash where all forces fully commit to a make-or-break push, not the general skirmishing and fighting taking place in preparation, which was mostly done by lighter support units and cavalry while infantry reserved itself for the big push

>most Americans who go to war aren't in combat for cumulative days.

during Guadalcanal, during Iwo Jima, during the bulge, during the Italian campaign, in Korea, in Vietnam, and most certainly during the siege of Fallujah, Mosul and in the mountains of Afghanistan, US soldiers have had to fight for several days constantly advancing or holding off waves of attackers, you have everything you've said backwards.

>The Iliad and the Odeysey are both PTSD allegories
>LMAO ptsd didn't exist they loved killing!!

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Ancient combat was manly and honorable, modern combat is ugly and disgusting with nothing in your control.

Ptsd is mainly.by the reason for fighting, capitalist countries simply aren't meant to wage war as tgey are founded in passibity, egalitarianism and such.

Ancient societies were based on glory, honor, and death was not something you you chose to get into, death awaited you without war and misery, there were no comforts.

When at home theres bandits, north afrixan slave raiders, malaria, diseases, plague, battle looks good.

Getting into war now is uneccessary and traumatic in our comforts and safety.

Modern wars are fuelled by propaganda not reality.

There is no reason to invade sandppls houses and murder a mother and child because they oppose militant invaders in their country.

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Wut

U wot m8?

>something tells me people didn't just fight all the time once forces met for the melee, but that there was constant engagement and disengagement.
that something is fucking retarded because when two lines joined they would enter a melee till one side broke and routed to be reinforced.
Also
>engagement and disengagement
could mean literally anything in a fight.
is a route a disengagement?
Then every fight consisted of this and your idea of a battle means nothing since it could be captured by simply saying "battle".

If you're asking about grinding down two sides till one has little to no men left.
Sometimes.

>those replies
Yes there are some accounts of people having PTSD, but by an large they would have recorded if 90% of combat vets had PTSD.
They didn't. So we can't say that PTSD as it exists now really existed back then.

>people write about cancer like things
>thus there is cancer
>no one writes about PTSD

>inb4 le battle fatigue and seeing ghosts
Listen numbnuts, before we started cracking down on violent people 5% of society was comprised of literal psychopaths evolutionarily bred for blood, suffering, and killing.
These people made up the majority armies.
They don't get PTSD.

First year of college huh?

This is extremely interesting and makes sense but what about actual organized fighting forces like the Roman Legions. I know that they weren't hyper disciplined killing machines but everything written about them and what we know about their tactics puts them far ahead of this tribalistic mob that we see with the PNG tribes. I imagine this is what the Germanic and Gallic tribes would have acted like but surely the Romans had a much more organized and disciplined force with their cohorts when it came to fighting. Though with communication breaking down in combat I'm sure they mobbed up too.

Well the romans certainly had a more well drilled military than the germanic and celtic peoples.
Another vital part of the military discipline of the legions were the fact that the common soldiers were taught to fear their commanders more than they feared the enemy. This in combination with having unit commanders that were taught to act on their own initiative if the situation called for it allowed the various sub-units of a legion to be able to function without breaking down even if the battle itself had turned into chaos.

>lindybeige

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>PTSD and other psychological issues from veterans of combat are basically unheard of in ancient warfare.
>Reason for this was that killing was glorified in ancient societies while nowadays killing is looked down upon even through people cheer soldiers for their bravery.

Absolutely, completely insane point. Have you even considered the obvious change of scale and form of warfare between WWI and wars after it and everything before it? Jesus christ, yeah, all of these cunts got shell shock because they weren't feeling society's goodwill. Fucking hell.

that's incorrect, there are accounts of soldiers who would see "ghosts on the battlefield" long after the fighting was done and effectively break down psychologically

PTSD was a thing it just wasn’t acknowledged because psychology wasn’t a thing yet, personal records weren’t as common due to illiteracy, and the official records couldn’t mention them because every society worth a damn was reliant on war

Soldiers in the old days would not be constantly exposed to this.

Drone operators can get hefty PTSD without even facing danger for the same reason - the sheer impersonality of it is really nasty.

Thanks to modern transportation and warfare, a soldier can be in combat constantly.

Give me one decent reason why people would get PTSD now but not back when they were personally driving spears into each other's guts? Saying that it didn't exist makes 0 sense

On the topic of Celts, some people think that Cú Chulainn exhibits certain symptoms of PTSD in the Irish mythological cycles. There's one part where he's challenged to a series of duels, with rules agreed upon in accordance with Irish Law, but as the duels go on, the enemy combatants start to break the rules in more and more flagrant ways, until at the end of it Cú Chulainn suffers what appears to be something similar to a mental breakdown, throwing down his weapons and collapsing to his knees, declaring that he can't take anymore and that he feels the whole world is set against him.

There's also an interesting case earlier on in the cycles, where Cú Chulainn first receives his name, and is informed of the prophecy that declares he will have a glorious life, but will die young. Upon hearing this, he ventures out into the woods "looking for danger", and when he returns, threatens to slaughter the entire court at Emain Macha unless someone comes forward to fight him. This is really interesting because in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, it was recorded that veterans would sometimes go wandering around the streets of their home cities challenging strangers to fight them.

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Is there any footage of this modern romanian combat?

Heh, there was some guy who had been in Vietnam as a combat medic and later a psychologist or something, this guy had an interest in norse mythology and stuff related to it like Berserkers and the thing he noticed was that some of the PTSD cases acted in a similar manner to the "bear shirts", they would get up and just start firing on the enemy with no concern for any sort of defensive tactics like staying low to the ground or having most of your body behind a rock or something like that. I think he wrote a book about it or something, but I don't remember the guy's name or the title of the book in question.

Melees would rarely last until a rout. It would go on for a couple of minutes at best before the lines sort of naturally separated to catch their breaths. One side would maybe be worse off and the other better, but that's different from a rout.

>The Iliad and the Odeysey are both PTSD allegories
jesus christ, the absolute state of nu-males

It was probably like a football game or wrestling kinda like a scrum or someshit

Here is some gypsies attacking each other with swords.
Yes, it looks clumsy and stupid(though, if you have ended up at the stage where you are settling criminal disputes with gypsies, your prospects aren't bright, one way or another).
youtube.com/watch?v=QPUbL3rtiY0

And here is some malaysian stuff that is semi-gore tier.
youtube.com/watch?v=NAHn8MjAWXw

GoT battles probably took a lot from accounts of Hundred Year War battles like Agincourt. There are severall good descriptions about that battle.

idk read a primary source from someone who was a veteran back then?

Not the same user , but I think the human brain is more adapted to deal with the sight of "natural" wounds like sword slashes and spear cuts than the sudden explosions of modern warfare.

Good video.
This is how human warfare has been for 94% of our existence, considering we have existed for 100k years and civilization only for 6k.

This is interesting, i hope you find the book in question

It's because it wasn't called PTSD it was called battle fatigue or anything along those lines before then shell shock and now it's PTSD. It's been depicted way back in Mesopotamian times actually. And yes it was glorified, but they were brutal times also so the symptoms of being twitchy and aggressive wouldn't be seen as horrid as it would now.

It's worse today though because in ancient times if you were in a hostile country you wouldn't be under constant archer fire for your entire stay there, it'd be isolated to battles and if you unfortunate enough you'd maybe see a siege for a couple months. Now like how it was in Iraq and Afghanistan you'd go kill the enemy, do patrols get shot at with bullets whizzing over your head, then get waken up in the middle of the night to either more gunfire or worse mortar rounds shelling around you panicking you to jump onto the ground for your dear life over and over for the course of 9 to 12 months. There'd be no stop too, the same routine of gun fire, mortar, and rpgs every week. War then was to kill, now with terrorist it's a mental game.