Most soldiers where semi professionals(not nobles), corpse brigade reads to me as drawing from this middle class or as a risky peasant squad that gained prestige and experience as a result of wiegrafs leadership and are now uh deeply unhappy. Interesting to note they don't all seem to be on the same page though.
According to Delita, the Dead Men were assembled from 義勇兵, "giyuu-hei", which translates to "volunteer soldiers". I don't know how much this implies
unpaid volunteers, but given the talk about the Dead Men being abandoned after the war, and turning into the Corpse Brigade, I'm assuming the volunteer part is for "do you want to join this Order", rather than "do you volunteer your time for charity".
If it helps, the first two kanji, 義勇, means "loyal and courageous", and other such heroic and righteous meanings. The last kanji just means "soldier", so the literal translation of 義勇兵 is "loyal and heroic soldiers". Possibly it's the default assumption that anyone who volunteers to be a soldier is heroic.
The source for these volunteer soldiers are 平民, "heimin", which just means "common people" or "common citizens" or "commoners". It's used in contrast to "aristocracy" (貴族) or "high-class" (高級), so I don't know how much of it applies to medieval concepts of the middle class; current uses of 平民 includes stuff from McDonald's to Starbucks, so certainly middle class-ish. If I were translating FFT, I'd use "commoners", so "peasantry" as the WotL translation puts it would also fit. What they are
not is minor nobility knights, as 騎士団 would imply.
Meanwhile, back during the infodump Rumours about the 50 Years War, the term used for the returning soldiers is 職業軍人, "shokugyou gunjin". The 軍人 part just means "member of the armed forces", so it's usually synonymous with "soldier" 兵士. 職業 means "profession" or "occupation" or "job", so the whole phrase can be translated as "professional soldiers". Who weren't paid after the end of the war, leading to unrest, so on and so forth.
Thus, depending on how far we want to take the generalizations in the narration, we have the "professional soldiers" of the war, amongst whom were the soldiers who "volunteered for the Dead Men". As a subset of the whole, these volunteer soldiers were also professional soldiers.
I'm just a little hesitant, because we've seen how misleading the generalizations can be; Arazlam's narration, outside of the Rumours infodumps, implied
only knights were left without monetary support after the war. We had to go to the Rumours side content to get more accurate lore, and I'm wary about
even more granular and specific lore coming up in the future which would contradict our assumptions.
Also the Rumours about the Corpse Brigade in particular isn't helpful: they're just described as largely "former mercenaries" (元傭兵) and "criminals" (犯罪者). Basic labels, no indication of prior history.
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