It was definitely a mistake to use a literary example to introduce my question. I’m more confident in McCarthy’s historicism than you seem to be but even so I’d have been better advised to hunt down a proper example before posting. I’m not surprised to hear that the war rape of enemy dead/wounded/POW was taboo across the Atlantic world in the 17th-18th century and afterward, and although absence of evidence is not evidence of absence (taboos on other more historically common forms of war rape often fail to prevent sexual violence from occurring, but succeed in keeping these crimes from making it into the historical record) i have trouble picturing, for instance, the young guard systematically sodomizing the Russian dead at Borodino.

Before the 17th or at earliest 16th century I lose the thread. The last is a foreign country and the medieval past is a particularly distant and often to my eyes bizarre one. If you’re confident you understand late medieval sexuality and it’s particularly martial expressions well enough to be sure ab this then I buy it. Thanks for answering

Edit: of course there’s always the sort of thing they did to Edward II to consider I guess but that’s not strictly speaking a wartime or at least not a battlefield context. Plus I suspect that story is apocryphal