Answer
Let us try to understand what happens in a battle, particularly in the context of the Mahabharata war. The Mahabharata describes a war that lasted for eighteen days, and Srila Prabhupada explains that it was essentially a world war, in the sense that the entire known world of that time was involved or represented through the opposing sides.
The armies assembled on the battlefield consisted of massive divisions of soldiers prepared for combat. This indicates the scale of participation and the enormous number of warriors involved.
During such fierce fighting, many soldiers would be killed, and others would take their place as reinforcements. In simple terms, just as in modern sports one player may be replaced by another when injured, similarly in battle there would be continuous replenishment of fighters as the war progressed.
However, the exact number of such replacements or movements during the battle cannot be precisely calculated or verified through ordinary methods. The events of such large-scale historical wars are not always amenable to modern arithmetic analysis.
Although the code of warfare generally restricted fighting to kshatriyas, in actual conditions of intense battle, due to anger, vengeance, and confusion, even non-combatants or those not strictly following the rules may sometimes be affected.
Therefore, it is not always possible to compute or verify every detail through calculation alone. The descriptions given in the scriptures are to be accepted on the basis of authoritative testimony.
The scriptures state that the total number of warriors who perished in the Battle of Kurukshetra was extremely vast—on the order of hundreds of millions—highlighting the immense scale of that historical event.
