The speaker looks back on his time as a soldier with a mix of fondness and loss. Back then, fear existed alongside bright honour and pride. He felt set apart from ordinary people who lived and died in houses. Even hardship had a kind of bracing clarity: misty mornings, deep exhausted sleep, food that tasted intensely good.
Now that life is gone. He will never again see his company marching easily over heathery land. What remains is a different, smaller fear — the anxious, nagging worries of money and civilian life, which he calls “maggots in the head.” The mood is nostalgic but curdled by disappointment. Military life, for all its difficulty, gave him purpose and identity; peacetime has left him restless and diminished.