You had an age in which a battle amounted to lines of men walking up to within fifty yards of eachother and blasting away with muskets; obviously IQ was not something you wanted in a soldier at the time.You had an age in which a battle amounted to lines of men walking up to within fifty yards of eachother and blasting away with muskets; obviously IQ was not something you wanted in a soldier at the time.
May seem funny to you but that's the way it actually was. Friedrich der Grosse once told Voltaire that if any of his soldiers actually ever thought about what they were doing, they'd all be gone in less than ten seconds. It's not like you had causes to fight for or anything like that in those days; wars were basically fought between royal families to determine pecking order. That's just a really sorry thing to want to die for and the rollcall of German names you find in Pennsylvania attest to the desire people had to avoid such business.