Didn't the British also recruit heavily from the "dregs" of society? I seem to recall a quote by Wellington describing the common British troops as the "scum of the earth." The officers were mostly from the better-off parts of society (since they could afford to be commissioned) but as I understand it most of the troops were either from the poor (the only people desperate enough to want to join) or criminals (given the option of joining the army or going to prison or hanging). You take a bunch of criminals, put them in a highly stressfull situation, give them weapons and minimal supervision then set them loose on the population and you can pretty much expect unpleasant things to happen.Thanas wrote:That was pretty much commonplace among every army in the west until the advent of professional militaries. This, btw, was one of the reasons why armies of the 17th and 18th centuries seem so small to us today - they were professionals who had to be paid highly and regulated highly. The Prussian drill served as much to protect the populace from soldiers as it did to form the line of battle, as an example. As a result, such incidenced declined steadily until the Napoleonic wars, when mass armies and conscription reversed that process. The armies of Napoleon and the British quickly gained a reputation, the Prussians less so because they still preferred professionals over mass conscriptions (those pesky citizens should not have guns).
And when it's not santized, it's only the "bad guys" whose soldiers commit atrocities. The "good guys" would, of course, never condone such behavior. I've only run across a few fiction authors that actually depict the militaries associated with the protagonists plundering, raping, and burning. Of course, weren't those activities generally encouraged or at least deemed inevitable for most of history?Really, a lot of warfare is idealized and sanitarized in modern depictions. If you actually read the source documents it gets much harder. For example, I reard a letter from a mercenary applying for work in the 15th century. His list of deeds of which he freely boasted in a letter consisted of among other things raping peasant girls, killing a noblewoman who resisted and then defiling the dead body in the same way. Brutality was not considered a vice, but a virtue.
