what is the word

Yesterday I spent the day cooking a big pot of soup & watching movies. My friend came over with Barry Lyndon. Both of us had seen it before but for some reason it was as if neither of us had seen it before. We had forgotten everything.
Wait, the British army is on the same side as the Prussians? I asked. Who are they fighting anyway?
I don't know, he said.
Well, what year is it supposed to be? I wanted to know. The 1800s?
Something like that, he said.
I thought a minute. Aren't they dressed like George Washington? I said. I think that means it's 1776, I said.
I guess it could be, he said.
Or maybe it's the War of 1812, I said.
I don't think so, he said. Wasn't that one in America? he said.
I don't know, I said. I don't know anything.
We sat there for awhile sipping at our wine.
I'm confused, I said later. Are they still in England?
I'm not sure, he said.
Well, why was there a German woman in that village? I said.
I really don't know, he said. Just watch the movie, he said.
So we watched the movie. There was a war scene. Neat rows of men marched steadily across a field, towards the army who waited for them with their weapons cocked. It looked like a horrible thing even with the pauses in action because of the old guns that they had to stop & reload.
War is the difference between men & women, I said because I couldn't stop talking for some reason. If women ran things nothing would ever happen this way.
How would things get resolved? he said.
I don't know, I said. Any other way. Nothing justifies that, I said, looking at the violence on the screen. I was thinking about The Magus, which I am very very very close to being done with at last. There was a passage I liked that said:

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great difference between the sexes. Men see objects, women see the relationships between objects. Whether the objects need each other, love each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women -- and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.

I don't know that I wholly agree with some of the sweepingness there; i.e., I don't know that there is one great difference between the sexes, nor am I sure what J.F. means by "real women." But Barry Lyndon made me think of it, made me know the crux of the idea was true for me in an instinctual sort of way.
Anyway I looked it up this morning & it turns out they were fighting the Seven Years War. Who knew?