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Evan
Real Crusades History
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Comments by "Evan" (@MrEvanfriend) on "" video.
My understanding is that no matter your social class, the Templars did not make any knights. If you wanted to be a knight within the order, you had to already be a belted knight before joining. Also, I understand that people, specifically married men, could join the Templars for a set period of years as opposed to for life, with some caveats.
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Except for the fact that the Templars were considered highly trained and disciplined troops, whereas the Foreign Legion is essentially a number of competing ethnic/linguistic prison gangs who are wearing the same clothes and have guns, yeah, it's a little like that. And the massive fuckup at Hattin was similar in strategic stupidity to the massive fuckup at Dien Bien Phu I suppose.
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@AK-hi7mg Yeah. "Elite". They're essentially a bunch of prison gangs formed along ethnic/linguistic lines, given guns, and thrown into battles where France doesn't want to waste its own troops, which they then go on to invariably lose. They're tough, I'll give them that. But beatings alone do not a competent unit make. And nobody would mistake the FFL for a competent unit. Poorly trained, poorly led, zero cohesion, barely able to communicate with each other. They're a mess.
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@AK-hi7mg And strangely enough, the world gets the idea that they're "elite" from all that snap/pop parade bullshit they do. Because anyone can do that, you don't need to understand the language to learn what "left face" or "present arms" means. So yeah, the FFL can do the snap/pop nonsense. They just can't fight. Small unit tactics tend to require communication - both to learn them, and to execute them effectively. And when you have a unit where nobody speaks the same language, and you're communicating in broken French without much deep understanding of anything being said, communication isn't effective. And so training is replaced with beatings. Yeah, it toughens them up. Prison gangs are tough too. But toughness without tactical competence is still something that isn't hard to crush in actual combat.
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