If man, in all his wars, is predestined never to love and trust his Brass Hats, least of all can he struggle against this disability when he is warring in trenches. Why? Because trench life is very domestic, highly atomic. Its atom, or unit, like that of slum life, is the jealously close, exclusive, contriving life of a family housed in an urban cellar. During the years of trench war a man seldom saw the whole of his company at a time. Our total host might be two millions strong, or ten millions; whatever its size a man's world was that of his section--at most, his platoon; all that mattered much to him was the one little boatload of castaways with whom he was marooned on a desert island and making shift to keep off the weather and any sudden attack of wild beasts. Absorbed in the primitive job of keeping alive on an earth naked except in the matter of food, they became, like other primitive men, family separatists. Any odd chattel that each trench household acquired served as an extra dab of cement for the household's internal affections, as well as a possible _casus belli_ against the unblessed outsiders who dared to cast upon it the eye of desire. A brazier with three equal legs would be coveted by a whole company. Once a platoon acquired a broken, but just practicable, arm-chair; not exactly a stronghold of luxury; rather a freakish wave of her banner; and this symbol of lost joys was borne, at great inconvenience, from sector to sector of the front, amidst the affected derision of other platoons--veiling what was well understood to be envy. It was like the grim, ineffusive spiritual cohesion of a Scottish family soldered together to keep out the world. Constantly jammed up against one another, every man in each of these isolated knots of adventurers came to be seen by the rest for what he was worth, with the drastic clearness of open-eyed husbands and wives of long standing. They had domesticated the Day of Judgment. Many old valuations had to go by the board; some great home reputations wilted surprisingly; stones that the builders of public opinion on Salisbury Plain had confidently rejected found their way up to the heads of corners. Officers, watched almost as closely, were sorted out by the minds of the men into themes for contemptuous silence, objects of the love that doeth and beareth all things, and cases of Not Proven Yet. The cutting equity of this family council was bracing. It got the best out of everybody in whom there was anything. Imagine a similar overhauling of public life here! And the size of the scrap-heap! But to the outer world, which it did not half know, the tribunal was harsh, and harshest of all to the outer and upper world of army principalities and powers.