During his meals he always wore an air of blissful contemplation of the food he had swallowed.

His spirit seemed then to be communing with the viands.
He accepted new environment and circumstance with great coolness, eating from his haversack at every opportunity.

On the march he went along with the stride of a hunter, objecting to neither gait nor distance.

And he had not raised his voice when he had been ordered away from three little protective piles of earth and stone, each of which had been an engineering feat worthy of being made sacred to the name of his grandmother.
In the afternoon the regiment went out over the same ground it had taken in the morning.

The landscape then ceased to threaten the youth.
He had been close to it and become familiar with it.
When, however, they began to pass into a new region, his old fears of stupidity and incompetence reassailed him, but this time he doggedly let them babble.