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Comment by LordHeini | Hacker News Reader

I doubt that standing there as a poor peasant with a spear, while getting charged by a horde of knights on massive battle horses in full armour is any less traumatic than the crack of a snipers bullet whizzing over ones head.

And medieval combat was quite a gruesome affair, cleaving people into peaces with axes and swords, in an age without proper medical care...

What has changed though, is the staying power of armies which nowadays can stay in contact for long times with somewhat low intensity fighting going on all the time. This of course changes the whole psychology aspect, its not the stress of one battle going on for a day or so, but the stress of a battle going on for weeks.

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> This of course changes the whole psychology aspect, its not the stress of one battle going on for a day or so, but the stress of a battle going on for weeks.

All quiet on the western front describes this phenomenon quite well. The continues stress of being on or near the front lines with constant shelling all around you. The artillary barages where so severe that areas of the ground are poisoned with metals from artillery shells..

To give you an idea about the frequency of shells getting fired.[1]

[1] https://codatocoda.com/blog/making-a-new-world-armistice-sou...

Mmmm I'm deeply wary of an absence of evidence about a condition which civilization today still can't actually acknowledge properly existing being evidence of its absence.

"Gun cleaning" accidents, as the socially accepted cover for male suicide by people everyone wants to ignore were suffering from depression or PTSD.

> "Gun cleaning" accidents, as the socially accepted cover for male suicide by people everyone wants to ignore were suffering from depression or PTSD.

There's no doubt that happens, but on the other hand gun cleaning injuries (e.g. to limbs) are far from unheard of, as well as people accidentally putting holes in their house. Those are doubtlessly accidents, so I have no doubt that some of the "gun cleaning fatal accidents" truly were accidents. Any of these accidents should be prevented by dogmatically following basic safety procedures, but obviously sometimes some people don't. And sometimes, that has fatal consequences.

See fan death in korea.

Sure, but I'm guessing that not a lot of the people who endured the latter situation lived, and they certainly were not doing a lot of writing about their experiences.

I would argue that we know that most people who did lived. Most people, even on the losing side, of ancient battles survived the experience. Formations tended to break and people flee long before all people were dead.

And usually, most of the killing happened after the rout.

Casualties during the battle proper would be surprisingly low.

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