The soldiers of Valmy, Austerlitz, Eylau and Waterloo marched to war out of a civilian world that was squalid, impoverished and dangerous. A contemporary observer of the poorer parts of Paris saw an overcrowded city perfused by the stench of household animals, excrement and carcasses. People lived and ate under a visible haze of thick ‘fetid’ air. There were catastrophic levels of infant mortality and, on the eve of the Revolution, overall life expectancy was twenty-eight years. The citizens of France’s greatest enemy were no better off. In London, more than half of the deaths were in children under five years and old age was a rare cause of mortality, less common than afflictions such as tuberculosis, fevers, smallpox and ‘convulsions’. The medical care in both capitals was rudimentary. In the Hôtel Dieu in 1788 it was commonplace to cram as many beds as possible into one room and to put up to six people into each bed. The Westminster Hospital was prone to flooding and notorious for fevers, malaria, typhoid and infectious diarrhoea.