There was a time before the advent of modern, hygienic warfare that men went to battle wearing whatever they could strap to themselves to prevent the enemy from breaching their integumentary hulls and carrying whatever they thought might breach their enemies'. How did it work? How were  battles actually fought? How could anyone tell who was fighting, or who won? What I know about battle makes it seem that every ancient military victory was nothing more than propaganda, because if you couldn't tell one side from another, the first guy to yell "I win" must have won.

Here's what I know about ancient warfare, gleaned from years, nay decades, of watching war movies and reading schlocky fantasy novels:

1. It's not "us" vs. "them." It's "us+our righteous, valiant and brave allies who love truth and value justice" vs. "them+whatever unreconstructed hyena-whelps they've enchanted to fight on their side and will therefore burn in hell." The upshot of this is that it's very likely that you don't know by name or sight the guys fighting on your side any better than you know the guys fighting on the other side.

3. Battle plans are good for five minutes. After that, all bets are off. You've formed your guys up into nice ranks, everyone facing more or less in one direction (presumably at their guys). Your enemy has done the same. You run at each other like those lovers you always see in movies, your arms outstretched (only you're filthy, it's nighttime, it's raining, and you're both shrieking like crazy people), and you're waving your stone, stick, spear or sword (the "Four S's" of hand-to-hand combat). But then, the minute your gang meets their gang, everyone starts getting all fancy. You don't just stand facing someone, poke a hole in him, and then move to the guy behind him. You start twirling around, showing off both to your side and to the other side, and dancing around like the Rudolph Nureyev of Doom (who led the little-known 614th Ballet Brigade in the Korean War). I envision being in the heat of battle like being in an avalanche. Once you've stopped moving, how do you tell which way you're facing? And when everyone around you is waving weapons, if you don't, you're likely to get the worst of it, aren't you? The likelihood of someone killing at least one of their own guys seems to approach 1:1.

3. The generals (ostensibly the brains behind these wars) aren't anywhere near the fighting. This is more true in books than in movies, which like to show the highers-up of both sides as being right in the thick of things - first to lead the charge, first to strike a blow. But in books, the generals are always several miles away in comfortable pavilions drinking brandy and staring at large, hand-drawn maps, pointing with meaty fingers and arguing from under their bushy mustaches. A soldier might know the face of his general or lord or king, but if that guy is nowhere near you, how is it clear which guys are whose?

4. It doesn't matter what rags you're wearing when you get to the battle, because it's going to be nighttime, raining, and you'll have marched for three days through a mud bog to get there. The opposing armies could come together facing each other in neon pink and green, but it won't matter. By the time they stand facing each other, they'll all be an identical filthy brown, practically invisible to each other and the opposing army.

Back in the day when you and your kinsmen banded together to fight off a neighboring hoarde, your group made up stories about their group - about how they lived in filth and slept with sheep and didn't know which knife to use when eating fish. It made them a little easier to kill, because you could tell yourself, as you looked into your enemy's eyes, that he deserved to die. You could convince yourself that he was not like you, even though you really couldn't tell your own kinsmen from his.

Nowadays, thank goodness, we know better. If we kill, it's during the day, at a civil distance, and for a good reason: because his uniform is nowhere near as good as our own.