Hungary.
A few uninvited guests appeared in a small village that had not yet been touched by war. They were recruiters from the Hunnic Empire, and they had come for one reason alone: to enlist soldiers.
After several rounds of recruitment, there were no able-bodied young men left in the village. Since a month ago, even young women had been sent to the battlefield, supposedly to help cook and wash clothes.
Although the Hungarian government had explained the situation, in the eyes of country folk at the time, women belonged at home. Following the army—or even leaving their families—was immoral.
In nineteenth-century Europe, women's legal status and rights were restricted to a great extent. They were generally regarded as subordinate to men, who held guardianship over them.
In practice, with able-bodied workers gone, young women were shouldering most of the labor in the countryside. No family wanted to lose any more workers.
"Our great capital, Budapest, is under attack by the wicked Austrians! They are trampling our land and trying to snatch it from us!
"Heroes and heroines with Hun blood in your veins! How can we keep enduring this humiliation? We must take up arms and defend our homeland!"
The recruiter was shouting himself hoarse. To be fair, whoever had written the speech had some talent; the recruiter had been moved to tears by it long ago.
But the farmers here were unmoved. They had once been serfs, and even after the Hungarian government declared them freed, they remained the property of the landlord lords.
That was because the landlord lords had transformed themselves into parliamentary lords, who were clearly much more vicious. Landlord lords still had to abide by tradition, but parliamentary lords did not care about tradition at all.
One day, the parliamentary lord had suddenly been