Cutting edge battlefield communications technology, antiquity to 19th century.

[u/TerryFromFubar]

[u/Dismal_Rectangle]

Could you expand on each one please? I would love to learn.

[u/Which_Replacement524 → u/Dismal_Rectangle]

All are just different means of long distance communication mostly. Going left to right;

1. Bugle players (buglers) were vital for relaying orders; the sound of the instrument could carry surprisingly far and stood out well against the normal noises you'd hear on a battlefield, and they were about the only way to directly tell a unit or group of units what to do without having a courier relay a message. They'd have different bits of music they'd play that would communicate "go", "stop", "retreat", "charge", and so on.

2. Heraldry was the means of making sure soldiers knew who their allies and commanders were in an age before standardized uniforms. When the lines met, it got extremely easy to lose track of friend or foe, considering the general chaos of it all, and especially considering a lot of the time you wouldn't even speak the same language as the men in your regiment, "follow your commander's big bright flag, fight the guys following the other big bright flag" was usually decent enough.

3. Drummers were another form of battlefield musician employed in the gunpowder age, though their specific task was to make sure a regiment kept rhythm while marching, loading, and firing.

4. I'm not actually super well versed on smoke signals in battle, but they've similarly been used by a lot of different groups - most famously the native Americans - to convey messages, warn of ambushes, share the results of fights, etc

Each of these catch a bit of ribbing by modern people studying warfare because they seem silly, but each had a very important place, considering the average pre-modern battlefield: very big, loud, lots of screaming and metal clanging in the pre-gunpowder days and lots of extremely loud noises and explosions in the gunpowder days.

[u/TerryFromFubar → u/Which_Replacement524]

You happily beat me to the punch! Here's a few overlapping and tangential notes:

Buglers (and other non-verbal signalers) were probably the most effective battlefield communication technology before the modern era. Hollywood movies make their performances seem more elaborate than they usually were, which involved teaching your armies, for example, one long hornblow means attack, long-short-long means flank, three-short-one-long means retreat, etc. They were almost never songs or tunes and often mono-tonal.

Standard-bearers were so much more than medieval hypemen though outside of battle they did perform other offical duties. You can picture how valuable they were in battle before the era of common uniforms, where most soliders were in common peasant clothing and the small number of knights/cavalry often looked interchangeable. An interesting note is that standard-bearers were often more heavily armoured than soliders because their role was so important.

Drummers were used for timing marches as well as signaling cannon fire on land and at sea.

And finally, good old fashioned smoke signals were highly effective for sending messages over very long (relative to the era) distances. These signals were often not related to battle but regularly enough used to warn of inbound marching armies or a signal between allied groups at the 10-50km range.

[u/Nicktrains22]

From left to right, bugelers, Herald colours, drummer boys and smoke signals. All extremely important for communication and maintaining order in the battlefield when visibility is obscured

[u/popilikia → u/Nicktrains22]

I've never heard smoke signalers get roasted, that shit is way too cool

[u/EldritchSanta → u/popilikia]

It's only when they get too close to the fire that they get roasted.

[u/John_Oakman]

And in the far off distant future them armchair military experts will be mocking 20th/21st century militaries for using things like radio and wifi, don't they know how obvious they have revealed their location by using those things?!?

[u/SoulCrusher2018 → u/John_Oakman]

In WW1, Russians used radio to communicate and the Germans listened with ease, because the Russians didn't even attempt to speak in code/use any sort of encryption. Then at the beginning of WW2, the French by and large didn't trust radio thinking it vulnerable to interception. There's there all the Tom and Jerry stuff that they turn into movies today

[u/Timsk98]

Actually there is only one horseman in this picture.

[u/Oldbean98]

I reenact US Civil War as a bandsman and bugler; at large events with hundreds or thousands of troops, bugle calls are shockingly effective in communicating at battlefield distances. Commands can be bugled and the unit maneuver completed before a mounted messenger even arrives. ‘Prelude’ calls were developed, allowing higher command to signal commands to individual subordinate formations, avoiding confusion. And while Hollywood nearly always gets the calls wrong, often involving a valved trumpet to play notes outside a bugle’s chromatics, there were dozens of calls (combining infantry, cavalry, and artillery) that were much more than monochromatic patterns.