>>43269141Yep.
>>43268808Morals kind of go out the window in war, and medieval style war is worse.
If you've say, been laying siege to some castle or city and just broken through, you're fucking miserable.
You've had liquid shits for days. You've been tear-jerkingly close to random death several times. People you know, your friends, have died in horrible, unfair ways, from having hot sand poured on them to dying from a random roof tile thrown by some peasant who didn't have the good sense to surrender.
You've had rocks dropped on you, been sniped at by crossbowmen, watched people dying painfully in fever and infection. You might have starved or eaten things you don't want to talk about for the last weeks.
When you finally knock down a wall or bust open a gate, and you've been running like an idiot fearing for your life every second and expecting an archer in every window or line of spears behind every corner, but somehow survived, and you finally got the fuckers, there's going to be hell to pay.
People don't get to surrender AFTER a siege, not after all the shit the besieging army has to go through to take the castle/city etc.
So when you're sitting there in the middle of the screaming and the fires, and watch your friends take turn raping some merchant's wife who's screaming about the rest of her family still inside her now burning house, you don't really give a fuck. She didn't have the good sense to open the gates, and she's probably been chucking rocks at you the entire time, you don't really care. What's happening to her is not worse than what you went through in order to get past the walls, and it's easy to tell yourself they had it coming, because they could have fucking surrendered, that's how sieges work. Surrender, or no quarter.
It's not about being evil or amoral, it's about how it's really fucking hard to care after having been through hell for 3 weeks and watching your friends die awful and meaningless deaths.
