Bear Ribs
Well-known member
Very few people (without experience) actually understand that battles are won mostly via morale rather than actually killing everybody. After all their closest experience is probably playing Starcraft and your space marines never break and run, they always cheerfully keep shooting the Zerg to the last HP of the last troop. Thus as long as you have more troops than the enemy has bullets, you are guaranteed to win*.He does know that watching the person next to you get their brains blown out all over you and the people behind you, and well the couple people behind them as well, is definitely not good for morale, especially those not trained for it. Soldiers hardly are but we are trained to finish the mission, and sometimes we still cant.
It's usually easy to tell who has actual combat experience and who doesn't from how well they deal with morale. Just contrast Lord of the Rings, where most of the battles are about courage as much as actual stabbing.
wherever he [Gandalf] came men’s hearts would lift again and the winged shadows pass from memory…and yet – when they had gone, the shadows closed on men again, and their hearts went cold, and the valour of Gondor withered into ash
Or, most notably when the Black Ships show up at Gondor:
filled with a new lust and fury they [The Orcs] came yelling to the onset
Then they realize that it's not reinforcements, it's Aragorn and his army on those ships:
the hosts of Mordor were seized with bewilderment…and a black dead fell on them, knowing that the tides of fate had turned against them and their doom was at hand
Nothing in the actual position, weapons, etc. changes but the entire battle changes direction multiple times based on morale because Aragorn unfurled his banner or Gandalf gave a good showing, and it affects how everybody fights dramatically.
Meanwhile in A Song of Ice and Fire we run into everything being about actual numbers killed, morale rarely matters and the death toll tends to be so high Westeros should be suffering from demographic collapse (Daenerys loses half her Unsullied and Dothraki in a single battle at Winterfell and we see multiple armies destroyed entirely on the field.)
*People (without experience) also have no idea how much ammo a typical gun owner can go through in a single afternoon at the range and will not comprehend that it's hardly unusual for such a typical gun owner to have thousands of rounds on-hand.