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!