Perhaps one of the greatest influences which transformed Doggie into a fairly efficient though undistinguished infantryman was a morbid social terror of his officers. It saved him from many a guard-room, and from many a heart-to-heart talk wherein the zealous lieutenant gets to know his men. He lived in dread lest military delinquency or civil accomplishment should be the means of revealing the disgrace which bit like an acid into his soul. His undisguisable air of superior breeding could not fail to attract notice. Often his officers asked him what he was in civil life. His reply, "A clerk, sir," had to satisfy them. He had developed a curious self-protective faculty of shutting himself up like a hedgehog at the approach of danger. Once a breezy subaltern had selected him as his batman; but Doggie's agonized, "It would be awfully good of you, sir, if you wouldn't mind not thinking of it," and the appeal in his eyes, established the freemasonry of caste and saved him from dreaded intimate relations. "All right, if you'd rather not, Trevor," said the subaltern. "But why doesn't a chap like you try for a commission?" "I'm much happier as I am, sir," replied Doggie, and that was the end of the matter. But Phineas, when he heard of it--it was on the East Coast--began: "If you still consider yourself too fine to clean another man's boots----" Doggie, in one of his quick fits of anger, interrupted: "If you think I'm just a dirty little snob, if you don't understand why I begged to be let off, you're the thickest-headed fool in creation!" "I'm nae that, laddie," replied Phineas, with his usual ironic submissiveness. "Haven't I kept your secret all this time?" Thus it was Doggie's fixed idea to lose himself in the locust swarm, to be prominent neither for good nor evil, even in the little clot of fifty, outwardly, almost identical locusts that formed his platoon. It braced him to the performance of hideous tasks; it restrained him from display of superior intellectual power or artistic capability. The world upheaval had thrown him from his peacock and ivory room, with its finest collection on earth of little china dogs, into a horrible fetid hole in the ground in Northern France. It had thrown not the average young Englishman of comfortable position, who had toyed with aesthetic superficialities as an amusement, but a poor little by-product of cloistered life who had been brought up from babyhood to regard these things as the nervous texture of his very existence. He was wrapped from head to heel in fine net, to every tiny mesh of which he was acutely sensitive. A hole in the ground in Northern France. The regiment, after its rest, moved on and took its turn in the trenches. Four days on; four days off. Four days on of misery inconceivable. Four days on, during which the officers watched the men with the unwavering vigilance of kindly cats: "How are you getting along, Trevor?" "Nicely, thank you, sir." "Feet all right?"