Well, yes, in "Wild Horse Woman"
there is a heavy emphasis on how
a battle/war campaign is a hellish experience,
so I guess that was partly the point of the Blacktooth malady.

Note, also, that there are mysticism of different sorts.
What we have in the later Leibowitz book
is a bunch of warrior cultures,
so this is warrior mysticism, all about life and death,
victory and defeat, survival and slaughter.

The one character who conceives and gives birth
does so while there is a war going on,
and only the "wandering Jew" character is there
to see that she does not die giving birth.
Everybody else is either fighting, strategizing, or in hiding.