Guns have taken away all the honor and nobility of war
203 replies, posted
:fireman:
If you want to fight with a axe, fine, but when your facing a machine gun and dare say the exact same thing again, war isn't nobility it is who is left/survives.
Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reasons.
Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would send him dancing.
Miniver sighed for what was not,
And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam's neighbors.
Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.
Miniver loved the Medici,
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
Could he have been one.
Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing:
He missed the medieval grace
Of iron clothing.
Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.
Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.
Not my work, its by Edwin Arlington Robinson but I feel it relates to the OP.
[QUOTE=mapreader;21913027]It seems like guns have taken away all the honor and nobility of war. Where once it was heroic knights valiantly engaged in hand-to-hand fighting for their King or Queen, now it's just illiterate peasantry shooting each other from hundreds of metres away. No more strong castles and legendary sieges. No more Lords of the Realm on great horses charging headlong into the enemy. No more legendary swords made by master craftsmen. Sigh.
War has lost all its Romance.[/QUOTE]
Seriously? Gun's have lowered the mortality rate during War by ALOT. Gun wounds are alot easier to fix up then a fucking sword slash across your chest or a pike in your gut. Using weapons people can survive/kills them instantly is alot more honorable then Medieval weapons that often led to prolonged bleeding and painful infections before death.
There were never any "legendary sieges", sieges realistically often lasted months to years and led to disease and starvation.
And finally, most soldiers back then were peasants. Not only were they illiterate, they were forced into service, starving, rarely armed with more then light weaponry and NO armor and were executed if they tried to flee a battle. Knights made up a tiny percentage and rarely participated in battles(like Officers today).
I hope that you're just a troll, if you honestly believed what you said then you're an idiot.
War might sound poetic and other bullshit like that 50 years on, but if you were on the front lines while "your comrades get snuffed out like candles" and you were charged with the next attack, would you really go in with a sword just so you can feel like the bigger man?
You play too many computer games. Even in the medieval times people were pouring burning oil on each other. Thats not very romantic a war you have there.
The rules of war has always been the same dude, bigger gun=bigger win
Fuck nobility if you can win a battle.
The only thing terrible about war is that they create weapons to induce terror and not kill people, only wound.
[QUOTE=Eluveitie;21917138]The only thing terrible about war is that they create weapons to induce terror and not kill people, only wound.[/QUOTE]
Well few weapons are intentionally designed to wound rather than kill, it's just that it's fairly difficult to design a weapon that kills in a reliable manner.
A rifle will kill you instantly of course and so will a sword or an arrow or a spear, the problem is it needs to hit something vital, either wise the victim of that weapon is left trapped in a badly damaged body until they die hours or days later.
Living things are surprisingly resilient even if that resilience ends in futility as a result of a wound.
[QUOTE=Eluveitie;21917138]The only thing terrible about war is that they create weapons to induce terror and not kill people, only wound.[/QUOTE]
there's no such thing as a weapon designed to "wound".
Any idiot can shoot a gun
It takes a skilled marksman to actually hit a target 1000 meters away from him with one shot
[QUOTE=mapreader;21913027]It seems like guns have taken away all the honor and nobility of war. Where once it was heroic knights valiantly engaged in hand-to-hand fighting for their King or Queen, now it's just illiterate peasantry shooting each other from hundreds of metres away. No more strong castles and legendary sieges. No more Lords of the Realm on great horses charging headlong into the enemy. No more legendary swords made by master craftsmen. Sigh.
War has lost all its Romance.[/QUOTE]
Yeah, chivalry went pretty much out the window when you could kill a guy from a mile away. :colbert:
There are so many things wrong with the OP I don't know where to start.
[QUOTE=BCell;21917684]Any idiot can shoot a gun
It takes a skilled marksman to actually hit a target 1000 meters away from him with one shot[/QUOTE]
Guns do narrow the playing field greatly though. Try and attack a trained swordsman and you stand a very good chance of being killed.
Attack a modern rifleman, even with a 100 year old musket to his modern assault rifle and you stand a much better chance.
[QUOTE=Madman_Andre;21917739]Yeah, chivalry went pretty much out the window when you could kill a guy from a mile away. :colbert:[/QUOTE]
Chivalry was never a commodity found on the battlefield, it was for pompous nobles who reserved it only for friends and people they grudgingly considered equals.
War...war never changes...
What is better, cut someones arm off letting him die slowly by bleeding or killing him in under a sek with a headshot.
Besides there is NOTHING like a honorable war
[QUOTE=MadMaxJ;21918341]War...war never changes...
What is better, cut someones arm off letting him die slowly by bleeding or killing him in under a sek with a headshot.
Besides there is NOTHING like a honorable war[/QUOTE]
Last post last page mate.
[QUOTE=cheesedelux;21913190]Oh what a lovely romanticised view you have there. War was always brutal, the illusion of fairness you're seeing never existed and armies consisted of scores of men forced into the army to suffer then die gruesome deaths of the battlefield.
[b]Modern weapons have probably decreased the death rates in war by a fuckton.[/b] Great face-to-face battles would result in hundreds of dead left out in a field to rot.
Also knights were a tiny fraction of a medieval army, it would mostly consist of hastily armed 'illiterate peasantry' except in those days those men would never return home.[/QUOTE]
Nah. But agree with the rest of your post.
The only reason one would have less relative deaths in modern times is because we no longer mass hundreds of combatants in a single head on battle of attrition. But also, Medieval battles had not so much deaths on the battlefield, but mostly people dieing from their wounds after the battle.
[editline]11:59AM[/editline]
[QUOTE=RR_Raptor65;21917770]Guns do narrow the playing field greatly though. Try and attack a trained swordsman and you stand a very good chance of being killed.
Attack a modern rifleman, even with a 100 year old musket to his modern assault rifle and you stand a much better chance.
.[/QUOTE]
Eh too many variables on both scenarios.
The real middle ages were bloody disorganized times of darkness.
People lived to their 30s, drank beer and prayed to god.
The knights were brutish prats and fuckbags who looked down on the poor like the wankers they were.
In war the peasants got their own back, they used muskets and longbows and crossbows to shoot the fuckbags down off their inbred horses.
By the end of the 1800s we had machine guns to make sure cavalry never reared it's fat arsed fugly face again.
There is but one truth about war.
People die.
[QUOTE=Mr. Scorpio;21913664]You realize that knights were a bunch of pillaging dickspurts who'd loot and rape their way to victory while riding on a bed of conscripted peasants like you?[/QUOTE]
And now I want to be a knight
[QUOTE=Loen;21917531]there's no such thing as a weapon designed to "wound".[/QUOTE]
Torture devices, but they aren't part of actual warfare.
But explosives are mainly what I was talking about, many times an explosive will blow off limbs or shrapnel will get lodged in people so they die slow agonising deaths. Fragmentation grenades are made to kill but more often than not they wound their intended target.
i can see what op means, i used to think that too, but war is... well.. war
it's bloody and horrific, and seeing that, you could never call that honourable and noble
giving someone a quick death, that truly is noble and honorable
Wow, how stupid can you be to post a topic like this? You sir, are downright wrong. Medieval times? Swinging swords? Please, get real. A sword is a romanticized knife. They weren't made by 'legendary craftsmen' - they were made by the thousand so that a lot of people could cause a lot of very messy wounds to each other. Heroic knights? Yes, sure. You mean barons that ruled over stink-ridden villages full of peasants (who were, in fact, the main fighting force and were forced into pointless charges). Yes, they rode horses and carried lances, but only because it kept them high and dry above the action.
And then there are guns. For gods' sake, man. Has it occurred to you that a bullet through the head has to be a million times faster and neater way to die than being trampled to death by a maddened horse, with a sword in your leg and most of your internal organs in tatters? War? Romance? You been playing Runescape or something?
I mean, I'm not swapping the phrase around; not saying that war is romantic now. It never has been. And we should never, even for a second, encourage it.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to pretend to be a medievalist on CSS.
Hurrr my katana is way better than ur deagle brand deagle!!1 my sword will cut yo bullets in half!
-snip
[QUOTE=mapreader;21913027]It seems like guns have taken away all the honor and nobility of war. Where once it was heroic knights valiantly engaged in hand-to-hand fighting for their King or Queen, now it's just illiterate peasantry shooting each other from hundreds of metres away. No more strong castles and legendary sieges. No more Lords of the Realm on great horses charging headlong into the enemy. No more legendary swords made by master craftsmen. Sigh.
War has lost all its Romance.[/QUOTE]
No soldier who has ever fought in a war, whether medieval knight with a bright sword or line grunt toting an M-16, would ever call war 'noble' or 'honorable'. There is no glory in bloodshed. We soldiers fight for many different reasons, but only fools enlist for glory. They soon have their illusions shattered. Read the poem "Dulce Et Decorum Est" and you'll understand a little.
That said, if the Romance of war was completely gone, young fools like myself would never have enlisted any more. The faces, weapons and politics change, but never war itself.
How bout we notch it back to a few years ago.
We could always use nukes?
[QUOTE=Loen;21913437]OP is a weeaboo[/QUOTE]
shut up
I love it when Americans talk about medieval history.
[QUOTE=Zenreon117;21913684]I agree that skill of a warrior has really been downgraded, now anyone with 20 20 vision and steady hands can land lucky shots to a seasoned veteran who is really more of an up to now lucky veteran. Back in the times of melee fighting if someone wanted you dead they would need to get pretty close (atleast bow range) and you had a chance to stop it, now the 5 mile range snipers can pick off anyone.[/QUOTE]
Snipers are a select breed of people that are probably as rare as the knights of back then. Their job is very demanding and stressful and also probably more tiring and mind-numbing as sword fighting. They can't just pick off anybody, they have to calculate their shots depending on how important they are. They also have to make corrections to their aim depending on conditions (range, weather, etc.) and go through a lengthy procedure to fire the shot.
And, while everyone has a chance to get a lucky shot, everyone had a chance to get a lucky stab.
I like the idea of warfare now. We at least get training, armor, support and decent weapons rather than back then when all you got were your clothes and a simple weapon.
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