To reach Aldershot Camp, one crosses the Blackwater, the parting of Surrey and Hants, where the last great English prize-fight was fought between Sayers and Heenan on a meadow chosen for convenience of dodging either county’s police. The quarters extend for miles about the high-road running on from Farnborough station to Farnham, the North and South Camps being divided by the transverse line of the Canal. The bulk of the Camp is on Hampshire ground, but its ranges shoot into Surrey, where, on the Fox Hills or the Romping Downs, peaceably-minded strangers may be challenged by Roderick Dhus in khaki starting from copse and heath, or find themselves beset by the invisible rattle of skirmishers practising the game of war. Across a projecting tongue of Hants we come back into Surrey again; anyhow, it is not straying far from our theme to take a glance at this great military station.
Aldershot Camp, dating from after the Crimean War, has grown so much in half a century that it now sends out suckers to spring up on more remote commons, like those of Longmoor and Borden towards Selborne, where the soldier is understood to pine, exiled from the joys of Aldershot. His officers are not always much in love with the main camp, if one may judge from military novels like Lockhart’s Doubles and Quits; I have heard subalterns wofully grumbling that they had nothing to do here but work, while their seniors profess to be reminded of Aden rather than of Eden. Of Aldershot as it was in earlier days, we get lively sketches in Mrs. Ewing’s Story of a Short Life, this author having been familiar with the place before lines of barracks had replaced the huts, “like toy boxes of wooden soldiers,” in which it seemed not easy to “put your pretty soldiers away at night when you had done playing with them, and get the lid to shut down.” In that touching story she tells us at what a cost Asholt Camp was constructed.
Take a Highwayman’s Heath. Destroy every vestige of life with fire and axe, from the pine that has longest been a landmark, to the smallest beetle smothered in smoking moss. Burn acres of purple and pink heather, and pare away the young bracken that springs verdant from its ashes. Let flame consume the perfumed gorse in all its glory, and not spare the broom, whose more exquisite yellow atones for its lack of fragrance. In this common ruin be every lesser flower involved: blue beds of speedwell by the wayfarer’s path—the daintier milkwort and rougher red rattle—down to the very dodder that clasps the heather, let them perish and the face of Dame Nature be utterly blackened! Then: shave the heath as bare as the back of your hand, and if you have felled every tree, and left not so much as a tussock of grass or a scarlet toadstool to break the force of the winds; then shall the winds come, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south, and shall raise on your shaven heath clouds of sand that would not discredit a desert in the heart of Africa. By some such recipe the ground was prepared for that Camp of Instruction.... Bare and dusty are the Parade Grounds, but they are thick with memories. Here were blessed the colours that became a young man’s shroud that they might not be a nation’s shame. Here march and music welcome the coming and speed the parting regiments. On this Parade the rising sun is greeted with gun-fire and trumpet clarions shriller than the cock, and there he sets to a like salute with tuck of drum. Here the young recruit drills, the warrior puts on his medal, the old pensioner steals back to watch them, and the soldiers’ children play—sometimes at fighting or flag-wagging, but oftener at funerals!
Before the Crimean War, this obscure parish had only a few hundred people. The little church above Aldershot station betrays what a small place it originally was that has grown into a large town, its streets alive and alert with the varied uniforms of Mr. T. Atkins, some dozen or score thousand of him in ordinary times. The High Street, like certain more famous thoroughfares, has only one side, facing to the blocks of building and parade grounds of the South Camp on a ridge above the canal. The busier side streets bear such appropriate names as Union, Wellington, Victoria, while the blocks of soldiers’ quarters are inspiringly dubbed Corunna, Talavera, and so forth; and other names of military fame mark the Lines stretching over the canal to the North Camp, which has a station and “bazaar” quarter of its own. On very hot days, indeed, one might mistake parts of the camp for an Indian cantonment, till the eye catches ragged firs bordering this dusty maidan. The Cavalry lie to the west, beside the Winchester high-road, which is a boundary of the permanent barracks, while beyond it summer brings out mushroom-beds of tents for the volunteers and militia temporarily under training. On this side, to the south, opens the Long Valley, haunted by shadows of dust, where the Royal Pavilion makes a station for the Sovereign reviewing the troops in that “awful Campus Martius.” On a knoll in a hollow hereabouts has been hidden the statue of the Great Duke that was laughed off its old perch on the arch at Hyde Park Corner. Farther south, on the right of the high-road, stands out Hungry Hill, and beyond it the bluff called Cæsar’s Camp, from which at a height of 600 feet there is a wide view northwards. Cæsar has other doubtful camps in Surrey, whose border is recrossed on these heights. Hence, by a hedge of public-houses with which Hale tempts the British Grenadier, or through the quiet shades of the Episcopal park, we come down to the hop grounds of Farnham, and across the Wey’s gault beds may gain that other series of commons about Hindhead.
All along this western side of the county sand has been mainly in evidence. Where we cross the chalk, between Aldershot and Farnham, its ridge is so much narrowed and lowered as not to force itself on the notice of unspectacled eyes. This is exceptional, for elsewhere in Surrey nature lays her record open, plain to read, leaf after leaf, only here and there a little crumpled and dog’s-eared at corners by the careless hands of time. So we can see clearly on our next transverse section, made nearer the eastern border.
X
THE BRIGHTON ROADS
ALL the main roads running southwards from London would lead with more or less of a circumbendibus to Brighton; and the ideal way for a leisurely traveller might be to pass from one to another on short cross-roads, so as to pick out the best stretches of each. In Paterson’s road-book (1792) the Brighthelmston Road is indicated as going by Croydon, Godstone Green, East Grinstead and Lewes, fifty-nine miles, with a short-cut beyond Godstone by Lindfield, saving seven miles; but it also gives the “New Road” by Sutton, Reigate, and Crawley, fifty-four miles. A newer road by Croydon and Redhill, joining the Reigate route at Povey Cross, so as to save a mile or so, came in our time to bear the name of the Brighton Road par excellence, and was preferred by coaches and cycles, till the crush of Croydon traffic and tramways
