Rare, not nonexistent. The World Wars are the main recent exception I was gesturing towards, although more extreme examples exist on a smaller scale: the Napoleonic Wars killed somewhere on the order of a third of French men eligible for recruitment, for example. And they were rarer before modern mass conscription, although exceptions did exist.
Rare, not nonexistent. The World Wars are the main recent exception I was gesturing towards, although more extreme examples exist on a smaller scale: the Napoleonic Wars killed somewhere on the order of a third of French men eligible for recruitment, for example. And they were rarer before modern mass conscription, although exceptions did exist.