Why Did Soldiers Fight? | Soldiers’ Lives

Get access to CuriosityStream for just a year by using code sandrhoman: The pike and shot era made war more deadly. As gunpowder weapons got more and more common from the 15th to the 17th, the number of casualties in battles also tended to increase. Losing a battle always cost many lives but now quite often even the victors suffered high losses. Simultaneously, campaigns became longer, and soldiers served farther away from home. Some even fought overseas in the Americas, which increased the risk of falling prey to diseases or bacteria unknown to the immune system. As the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes noted in his Leviathan (1651) life was “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short.” Given all these horrifying prospects, it is not clear at all why men chose to endure the extreme hardships of battle and what, in the first place, motivated them to join the army. In this video we will look into the reasons why men chose to become soldiers in the notorious