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For five years this heath was the site of a camp. Where from time immemorial had been nothing but briar and bracken, row upon row of wooden huts, churches, shops, and theatres sprang up in a week or two. Where only the lapwing had cried or the skylark sung, the drill-sergeant's word of command rang out. The whole place became a populous town. Tens of thousands of Canadian soldiers sojourned there. One contingent after another arrived, the men often soaked with rain or moiled* with heat, and always cramped from the close quarters of war-time transport. There they had a breathing space, saw a little of the "old country," and learned to love it. They were drilled upon those open spaces so flattened by their feet that even now the heather has scarcely begun to grow again. Then each battalion in its turn passed singing along that same main road to its fate. In the course of these operations such flower and bramble roots as were left were cut back to earth and received a dressing of all kinds of camp residue. When auction sales and motor lorries had removed the last vestiges of the buildings, and a small army of workmen had laboured for months removing rubbish and filling in holes, Nature set to work to heal the scars; and almost the first growth was the long green shoots of the blackberry brambles. The fruit, when it followed, was of the finest - cultivated fruit indeed and cultivated at what tremendous cost! Now the bushes are full-size again. Bracken has grown up and filled the rents made by bomb-practice. The heather has returned in waves, a purple sea. Very soon all will be as it had been for countless ages before war broke out, and only the avenue of maple trees the Canadians planted by the roadside will mark any difference between the heath and a score of others by that same roadside. *Moiled: Wet, worried, harassed, weary, etc. (The Canadian military camp was on Bramshott Common, and even today signs of it can still be detected there. Three hundred Canadian servicemen who died of wounds in the First World War are buried in Bramshott Churchyard.) Flora Thompson: "The Peverel Papers" (Author of "Lark Rise to Candleford") FINAL WORDS There is hope for any man who can look in a mirror and laugh at what he sees. (Anon.) Humour results when society says you cant scratch certain things in public, but they itch in public. (Tom Walsh) Our hopes, often though they deceive us, lead us pleasantly along the path of life. (La Rochefoucauld) Tony Scammell Editor