Do you like your daily work?
Even if it was a job that looked quite good in other people's eyes, or one you had chosen out of interest in the beginning, doing the same thing day after day would eventually become boring—like washing windows, or being a butcher.
Washing windows every day, slaughtering livestock every day—sooner or later, one would want a different job.
Soldiers were the same. The battlefield was their workplace. Not only were the working conditions atrocious, their lives were also in danger. Even though war could bring them abundant spoils, some still chose to desert or evade conscription.
Perhaps the people who hated war most were those most familiar with it, rather than pacifists. As for those who loved war...
Yet after leaving the battlefield, the skills they had learned were useless in a peaceful environment, much like housewives who, once they left the household and returned to society, found themselves unable to adapt and survive.
Such people lived in confusion and poverty, sleeping on the streets without even a roof over their heads to shield them from wind and rain.
This was perhaps unlike the world Madame de Staël had envisioned, ruled by the wealthy and cultivated. After all, not everyone in this world was wealthy and cultivated. Cooking was a privilege of the rich; the poor cared more about how to obtain food than how to make it delicious. Even animals that had died of illness would be eaten, and some diseases passed from animals to humans this way, then spread from person to person, expanding until they finally became epidemics.
Having seen death too often, doctors could also become numb to it. Though they had no guns, they had scalpels, and they knew how to end their own lives quickly, with absolutely no