The change from civilian to soldier is one that is not easily accomplished. We soon find that there are many new conditions to be faced, many new and uncongenial tasks to be undertaken, and all sorts of strange and novel regulations to which we must render the strictest obedience. In civilian life we become thoroughly independent. We come and go more or less as we please. We do not usually ask the permission of any one if we wish to depart a little from our customary habits. Not since we left school have we answered to roll-calls to any considerable extent, and only in the summertime, "for the fun of it," have we done our own housekeeping and submitted to domestic duties. In civilian life we have been allowed to work out our own salvation, and if we have been part of a machine at all it has been a huge social machine in which we did not figure as a cog but rather as an attachment. In military life things are all changed. We become at once cogs in the great machine. We have a definite work to perform. The smooth running of the plant depends on _us_. We lose much of our independence. We realise that other cogs depend on us, and, further, that there are many bigger cogs who drive us and whose bigness and authority we must thoroughly appreciate and recognise. In my own experience, after some years of being my own master to the degree that only the professional man understands, I found it much to my dislike to be obliged to get permission before I could leave the camp grounds for half an hour. A sentry with a fixed bayonet helped me a little in the appreciation of my new circumstances, and when in a few days' time I was the sentry myself, it did me the world of good and took the edge off my displeasure. Again it is not to the liking of the ordinary man to be told that he must rise at a certain hour, and much less is it to his liking to be told that he must be in bed at a certain hour after which talking is considered a misdemeanour and is punishable. _But_ a few weeks of enforced early rising makes one give thanks for the pure fresh air of the small hours of the day; and a few days of hard physical exertion in the process of training makes a man glad to conform to the rule of early to bed, and gives him reason to class as a nuisance the man who talks after "Lights Out" and thus prevents him from sleeping. In civilian life, too, a man usually chooses with scrupulous care his roommate or mates. In the army one may be placed in a tent or a billet with men who are by no means congenial, unless he is lucky enough to have been able to join a group of companions who form a unit. But even the experience of having uncongenial companions is not altogether without its compensations; for every civilian finds that he has need of rearranging his estimates of men when he enters the army. The sooner our own corners are rubbed off the better, and many of them are inevitably rubbed off when we are ten or thirteen in a tent!