Were earlier wars more brutal than modern ones?

>>1581991

How are you defining "brutality"?

>>1582009
This. You mean in terms of blood and guts spilled everywhere? Or number of soldiers killed vs civilians killed?
"brutal" is such a subjective term senpai

>>1582033
i mean the involvement of civilians, did civilians were targeted more often in earlier times and was the idea of a "civilian" during war even thought of?

>>1581991
in terms of warfare, I'd speculate yes, just because it would take far longer for someone to die and their death was typically slower and more gruesome. I'd also bet that civilians were targeted more as we didn't have international laws about crimes against humanity, blah blah blah you know the drill

File: 1469068835412.jpg (95KB, 564x804px) Image search: [Google]

95KB, 564x804px

>>1581991
Front row sound of thousands of men chokes and screams with the deafening noise of sword and metals smashing against each other.
Imagine being trapped inside the utter chaos of a football field size mass of men shoulder to shoulder unable to lift arms high enough to protect yourself during the slaughter of Cannae.
Imagine being emotionally exhausted and driven mad from the sounds of panic that you bury your own head in the ground to suffocate yourself to death so it's finally all over.
Much rather bullets being thrown at me from a distance.

>>1581991
Yes. In the literal sense of the word 'brutal', I would say so.

File: battle-borodino15.jpg (2MB, 2292x1419px) Image search: [Google]

2MB, 2292x1419px

>>1581991
Well, look at pic related
Does that seem like something your modern US army princess would ever experience?

Are there any estimates on how much casualties armies would generally take before routing in the pre-firearm age?

>>1582190

Yes, but they're somewhat speculative.

Usually somewhere in the 2-5% killed, and another 10 or so percent wounded.

>>1581991
It's hard to say because over time people get more efficient at warfare, but they also get better at not dying like flies.

For example in June 1941 the population of the Soviet Union was 196,700,000 and in January of 1946 it was around 170,000,000 and within 10 years the population was already higher than its pre-war level.

Compare that to the Three Kingdoms period of China, whose population was 56,500,000 at the outbreak of hostilities and around 16,000,000 million at its conclusion, many decades later. It was a much more slowly moving disaster, and most of the loss was caused by famine and disease.

So what sounds more brutal to you: dying because the Nazis rolled into town and summarily shot everyone with your ethnicity, or dying of starvation after some warlord's thugs made off with your crop and didn't leave enough for you or your family to live on?

>>1582070
"Civilians" still partake in warfare oversees in the middle east.
It happend with the russians during ww.
It happend in vietnam quite a lot too.

>>1582206

WW2 on the eastern front didn't last 96 years.

>>1582209
Makes me think of the whole peasant soldier hunting thing from Sengoku period Japan

Does anyone know if it was common elsewhere too for civilians to hunt stragglers after great battles to steal their shit?

>>1582206
I would think that being born in a time of war and then experiencing decades or a literal century of war is worse than 4 years of war.

>>1582175
>>1582175
And yet Borodino lasted only a day while the Somme lasted far and far longer

>>1582372
Or even worse than the Somme: Verdun

>>1582233
But at a far less intensity.

Very few actual deaths would have been caused by people dying in battle, more people would have died from infections or camp squalor. The worst part about living in those decades would have been the continuous grinding poverty for all but a small handful of warlords.

>>1582747

Not him, but if you're talking about 3 kingdoms China, most deaths would have been civilian, not military, and caused by famine: Rampaging armies destroyed a lot of the canals and irrigation that supported the large Chinese population, and endemic starvation was a fact of life in the 2nd century there.