How did ordinary people survive in wars in ancient times?

There has been a saying in China since ancient times: "It is better to be a peace dog than to cause trouble and leave people." Those in high positions cannot understand this sentence. Only ordinary people will deeply understand the pain and despair involved.

How do ordinary people save their lives in troubled times? This is a tough question.

When war comes, first the government recruits troops and the people have to perform military service. Being a soldier means you may lose your life, so if you want to survive, you must avoid military service.

In ancient China, as long as it was not a war related to the life and death of the country or an outrageous troubled time, conscription was basically in compliance with the laws and regulations, and only young and strong men were required to serve as soldiers.

But sometimes when we encounter an outrageous era, such as the Warring States Period, there will be a military system for all people. In the Spring and Autumn Period, the number of troops used by various countries was usually only tens of thousands, but in the Warring States Period, there were often hundreds of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of troops. The reason for the sudden increase in the number of soldiers during the Warring States Period was not only the sudden increase in the population base, but also the fact that almost all the people were soldiers. This situation reached the late Warring States period. It is even more exaggerated. Qin always leads millions of troops when going abroad, and the number of other heroes is also hundreds of thousands. Nearly one-third of the country's population went to war. Except for the old, weak, sick and disabled, imagine how small the chance of the remaining people escaping military service was.

When the war breaks out, in order to avoid the war, most people will flee the war and leave their homes, becoming miserable refugees wandering around the world, hungry, and precarious.

What will the refugees encounter?

Hunger, plague, and rebellion.

It’s nothing to eat Guanyin soil, bark, grass roots, and sometimes even people cannibalize each other. If there are a large number of refugees, it will also cause diseases and plagues, which will spread from one to ten or ten to a hundred, resulting in a large number of deaths.

What is even more frightening is that if you encounter those generals who want to use the heads of innocent people as military supplies or those who rebel against the army, it will be even more like falling into hell.

For example, the Qin State adopted Shang Yang's suggestion and established twenty levels of knighthood, and sergeants were awarded knighthoods according to the number of enemy heads they captured in battle. Therefore, many officers and soldiers of the Qin army killed all enemy civilians regardless of age or sex in order to have as many heads as possible and claim military merit.

During the war, many people would choose to stay in the city and be with the city.

However, if the city is strong, the soldiers defending the city are strong, and victory is in sight, it will be fine. If it is a long-term offensive, or the city is defeated, the ending will be quite miserable.

The battle to defend the city was as brutal as the Battle of Suiyang in the Anshi Rebellion. Zhang Xun used only 7,000 remaining soldiers to resist the siege of 130,000 troops and held on for as long as 10 months. However, among them, the soldiers and people in the city "When the horses were first killed and the food was gone, they killed their own concubines and gave them to the soldiers; and when the women were old and weak, they ate 30,000 mouthfuls." The horror was unbearable!

There are countless massacres in history. For example, Cao Cao massacred hundreds of thousands of people in Xuzhou during the Three Kingdoms; p> Most of the people who lived peacefully as docile people in the war ended miserably, so many ordinary people were forced to have no choice or due to other reasons, such as they like to rebel and hope that the times will create heroes, so they "rise up" and no longer take any part in the war. Ants manipulated or slaughtered by others.

The risk of this choice is too high, but the reward is also relatively huge. It can be regarded as a better choice for the people when they are desperate. At least they have hope.

Countless peasants have risen up in history, but unfortunately many of them are not "sons of the plane". Most of them follow a strong man who rebelled. Starting from the grassroots, as long as they survive In the cannon fodder stage, there is basically hope of being promoted to a small leader. But it is estimated that most people will not survive.

Secondly, it is also crucial to choose the "Ming Zhu". If you follow the wrong people, such as Huang Chao, Zhang Xianzhong, Hong Xiuquan and others, you will eventually be destroyed.

Following the "protagonists" of the past dynasties such as Liu Bang, Liu Xiu, and Zhu Yuanzhang, as long as you survive the war and survive, you will basically be rewarded one day, but it also depends on luck. What if you are Han Xin!

Of course, people can also choose to live in seclusion, such as imitating the people in the Peach Blossom Spring and live in seclusion in unknown places outside the world; or they can directly immigrate overseas, such as to Nanyang. This kind of restriction is due to geographical location. If you are in the Central Plains or far sea areas, or in plains without mountains, it is basically impossible to avoid the scope of the war.

From this point of view, for thousands of years in Chinese history, wars have separated life and death, and countless ordinary and innocent people have shed their blood and tears!

They can only angrily lament to the sky: "It is better to be a peace dog than to cause chaos and leave people.

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