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Comment by DenisM | Hacker News Reader

In the “War and Peace” there is a passage reading “having quickly finished off the injured, soldiers cleared out the gate so the [transport] could pass unimpeded”.

Read this a few times, and then return to the rest my comment...

... execution of wounded prisoners did not even warrant a whole sentence. That’s literally all Tolstoy wrote about it.

I don’t think he was callous, I think at the time it was the norm and didn’t warrant a mention except in this case the unpleasant task was delaying the transport.

^ citing from memory

^^ this is the Napoleonic war of 1812. At least 100 years later the brutality deserved mention.

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It's possible he was echoing the callousness by not expounding on it. I don't think word count is the best way to measure importance in literature. Understatement is a tool authors use.

You’re right!

In all probability the callousness in tone was the point. It’s also a common device in Russian literature of the time to gloss over such brutality and hardship. It’s a bit of a trope at how commonplace suffering was made to seem in stories and other writing by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and other contemporaries. See also: God Sees the Truth, But Waits

When Henry ordered all the prisoners killed because he needed every man to fight and could spare none to watch it warranted a mention http://www.shakespeare-online.com/plays/henryv_4_7.html

At Agincourt the prisoners that were executed were all noblemen or landed knights. The custom was for these prisoners to be taken, because they could be ransomed back to their wealthy families. It was a shocking event because it broke the conventions of the times.

It would have been very unlikely that common men would have ever been taken prisoner. They'd have just been slaughtered on the battlefield, if they did not run away.

operative term being if they did not run away I think.

At any rate the breaking the conventions of the times is the thing that draws a mention, in the same way that a man biting a dog does.

Allegedly the same happened at Aljubarrota; prisoners were killed to let more soldiers fight on the front line.

What an amazing world-changing battle! Brother versus brother, English longbows versus French heavy cavalry (again) . . . Try to imagine a world without a Henry the Navigator.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Aljubarrota

I was not aware the Castillan forces were commanded by the brother of Nuno Álvares Pereira. He's less known nationally than the mythic Brites fe Almeida.

Why don't the history teachers drop these snippets during classes?

Maybe back then killing the injured was mostly an act of mercy.

There was no one coming to heal them. Modern medicine wasn't invented. They were spared hours of slow death.

Nope. The rest of the book showed plenty of the wounded being treated (however well, still not killed). And this was in Moscow just as it was conquered - plenty of places to treat and there were enough inhabitants in the city who would see to it.

But even if you’re right, don’t you think it deserved more than half-sentence?

OK, just trying some contrarian speculation, as I do.

As someone who also often engages in contrarian speculation and is often wrong about it, my advice to you is to thank the person with the correct perspective for sharing it. If they are sufficiently civilized, they will thank you for adding to the discussion even though it was wrong.

For your purposes, it would be more useful to recognize when you're doing this kind of probably-wrong analysis and make the relevant qualifying announcements in your post. It's useful to do, it's even more useful when done in a self-aware fashion.

Particularly, it makes it easier for the person with the correct understanding to share it without feeling like they're pissing into the wind. My new favorite phrase is, "correct me if I'm wrong here, but..."

You were pretty much guaranteed to die if injured and lying there in the Napoleonic wars. It was an act of mercy.

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