How does the speaker characterize the inn in the poem, The Man He Killed?

The speaker characterizes the inn as a place of camaraderie and sympathy early on in the poem, the place where “We should have sat us down to wet / Right many a nipperkin!” (3-4). While the battlefield is cold, callous, and inhumane, filled with unfeeling metal machinery and new technologies that render war more deadly than ever before, the “old ancient inn” is homely and a setting of long established familiarity.