The heaths and woods of some districts of Surrey are scarcely more thickly peopled than the fells of Westmoreland; the walker may wander for miles, and still enjoy an untamed primitive earth, guiltless of boundary or furrow, the undisturbed home of all that grows or flies, where the rabbits, the lizards, and the birds live their life as they please, either ignorant of intruding man or strangely little incommoded by his neighbourhood. And yet there is nothing forbidding or austere in these wide solitudes. The patches of graceful birch-wood; the miniature lakes nestling among them; the brakes of ling, pink, faintly scented, a feast for every sense the stretches of purple heather, growing into scarlet under the touch of the sun; the scattered farmhouses, so mellow in colour, so pleasant in outline; the general softness and lavishness of the earth and all it bears, make these Surrey commons not a wilderness but a paradise. Nature, indeed, here is like some spoilt petulant child. She will bring forth nothing, or almost nothing, for man’s grosser needs. Ask her to bear corn or pasture flocks, and she will be miserly and grudging. But ask her only to be beautiful, enticing, capriciously lovely; and she will throw herself into the task with all the abandonment, all the energy, the heart could wish.
These quiet heaths and copses “saw another sight” during the Great War, when about Witley Common sprang up a huge camp, in which 30,000 raw soldiers could be trained for service at the front. Latterly, it was much occupied by Canadians, restlessly impatient allies, not altogether as welcome in the vicinity as in Flanders. Too many of them had nothing to do with their high pay but to waste it on liquor prohibited them at home, so the police, if not the publicans of Godalming, were glad to see the backs of these roisterers, who, once let loose upon the enemy, turned their high spirit to better purpose.
But, to be sure, tents and warriors are no novelty on Surrey commons, as will be shown in the next chapter.
IX
COMMONS AND CAMPS
COBBETT, so keenly appreciative of some aspects of English scenery, was only a little old-fashioned in his contempt for Hindhead. We know how writers of Johnson’s and Goldsmith’s school looked on such wilds, though Gray was already clearing the eyes of their generation, to which an elegant poet and philosopher lectured thus on the repulsive melancholy of the Highlands: “Long tracts of mountainous country, covered with dark heath, and often obscured by misty weather; narrow valleys thinly inhabited and bounded by precipices resounding with the fall of torrents, a soil so rugged, and a climate so dreary, as in many parts to admit neither the amenities of pasturage nor the labours of agriculture”—and the climax is, forsooth, “the grotesque and ghastly appearance of such a landscape by the light of the moon”—so much for the
