This book adds to our understanding of military culture and military life in peacetime in the nineteenth century.
The practice of travelling to observe foreign armies, the exchange of military knowledge and experience, and military men’s practice of reporting on ‘foreign’ exercises were commonly to lead and teach but also to learn.

About the Camp:: First and sole permanent military camp in Europe, built in brick, where the different branches of the armed forces can manoeuvre together, First to construct a narrow railway closed circuit throughout the camp (115km long, 600mm gauge (1879)), First to build a modern military hospital consisting of separate pavillons (1848), First to equip the site with elctricity, central heating(1913).

A brief history:
The French general Hurel –who played a significant role in the organization of the Belgian army after the creation in 1830 of Belgium as an independent Nation- was charged, with identifying a suitable area for a permanent site for the joint manoeuvres of the country’s
armed forces. Together with his colleague general Magnan, he recommended King Leopold 1 to choose an area of empty land and sand dunes in the Campine region, North-East of the country. In October 1834, the King visited the region and immediately decided, not at least for strategic reasons, for the place called Beverloo, near the Dutch border, the construction and extensive use of a central training camp for all Belgian recruits. He had to create and develop a spirit of national unity (“L’union fait la force”), of patriotism, of pride among the Belgians. As a former lieutenant-general of the Russian Imperial Army, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who, with the backing of Great-Britain, had been offered the throne of Belgium, knew that he had to build an efficient and modern army superior in quality to compensate for the inferiority in numbers of soldiers by comparison to the experienced, standing armies of the larger Continental Powers. One important pillar of his strategy was the construction of the first permanent military camp in Europe. It was built in brick, which signaled its permanent character.
Command over the manoeuvring troops was in the hands of numerous French and to a lesser extend of Polish officers. During his visit to the camp, British Army Major Harvey hahd observed a période de manoeuvres, which he described in great detail to his (presumably military) British audience. In his reports the Belgian army is depicted as a kind of laboratory for military training in Europe. Harvey considered the site of Beverloo the ideal place for British officers to make educational observations – not least because it was so easy to reach. British officers could, according to Harvey “at a very trifling expense, avail themselves of the means of improvement laid open to them by a friendly nation”. Moreover, because the Belgian army was so small, it was easier to observe and understand than those of the greater armies of Russia or Prussia. “Some of our officers are in the habit of plunging at once into the movements of immense masses of Troops, such as are assembled in Austria, Russia, and Prussia, but they err in so doing : for I maintain that with a ‘Corps d’Armée’ outnumbering 14,000 or 15,000 men, they will be unable satisfactorily to follow up the details of the different manoeuvres, and they will fail either to comprehend their application, the thorough combination of the three Arms, or the choice of ground”.
The unfortunate composition of the Belgian army offered, furthermore, an exceptional example of what could be achieved by rigorous and steady practice. “When we consider the drawbacks under which the Belgian Army labours (…) it becomes a matter of surprise to see the precision with which such mere recruits are taught their Drill in so short a period”. In short, Harvey seems to have agreed with many of the optimistic notions of the triumph of the project of a national training camp and the practice of joint manoeuvres that prevailed in the Belgian military press, and with local criticism of the law of conscription. He considered the Belgian army and Beverloo Camp exemplary instances of military unification, to be contrasted with the “constantly dispersed state of our [British] Army”. He ended his report with a particularly explicit reference to the notions of political and military unity, which dovetailed with those in Belgian military discourse. Citing the Belgian motto “L’Union Fait la Force”, he stated that “the union of practical instruction, energy, and talent, constitutes the real strength of armies”.
Harvey’s glowing report was probably at least partly motivated by the major’s twofold goal of encouraging reform in the British army and showing (possibly diplomatic) gratitude to his Belgian hosts, but it also suggests that the manoeuvres achieved some of their objectives. Between 1830 and 1880, the practice of manoeuvres in Belgium remained largely the same, and it was geared toward three main goals. First, the military manoeuvres were intended to make a unified force out of inexperienced recruits and unite the three branches of the armed forces. According to Belgique militaire, “[only] at the camp, where they live together, can the members of the great military family get to know, value and love each other”.
Second, they were designed to prepare this unified army for the protection of the nation’s independence (in the 1830s this mainly meant protection against the Netherlands; however, after 1839 the notion of independence became closely connected to the country’s forced neutrality and its position between Europe’s most powerful nations). Third, the manoeuvres were intended to create moments in which the armed forces could publicly present themselves, not only to the Belgian civilian (and political) population, but also to foreign observers.
As the nation’s independence became more established, the presence of numerous foreign officers – who, as Harvey remarked, received a particularly ‘liberal’ welcome – offered opportunities for international communication and rapprochement in an area explicitly represented as neutral. In 1896, the following list of foreign officers permitted to observe the Belgian manoeuvres was published : “Colonel de Smaguine, Russian military attaché; Lieutenant-colonel Douglas Dawson, attaché of the British army; Captain Haillot, French military attaché; Captain count de Hacke, German military attaché; Captain Reichart of the federal Swiss army; Captain Petraru, Romanian military attaché; Captain Castendyck, envoy of Germany; Lieutenant Harris, military attaché of the United States of America. [Willem De Heusch, Les manœuvres en Flandre en 1890, Les grandes manœuvres en 1896, 1897, p. 13) [Source: Hoegaerts, J., & Dierckx, B. (2016). Exercising Neutrality: Maneuvering Practice in the Belgian Army before the Great War. Revue Belge d'Histoire Contemporaine, XLVI(2), 22-47]. The practice of annual manoeuvres at a fixed and permanent place where recruits throughout the armed forces could come together was increasingly presented as a particularly Belgian stroke of genius, and Beverloo was favorably compared to the areas used by other nations for military exercises.
Gradually an infantry, a cavalry and an artillery camp grew, as well as an ambulance and engineer park. There was accommodation for 20,000 soldiers. A "palace" for the king and the Minister of War and pavilions for the generals were also essential. The camp was ready at the end of July 1835 and in August the first 20,000 soldiers came to practice, in the presence of King Leopold 1.

Old lithography of the “carrés” (“squares”) from 1837
In 1846, Pierre Emmanuel Chazal, then Minister of War, sent the company 'sans floche', a disciplinary company, to the camp to scoop the sand from the heath to the peat layer. A royal park of 40 hectares was created and was lined with tree-lined avenue
Construction of the definitive camp began around 1850. In the infantry camp there were eight sections, each of which could accommodate 2,500 soldiers. Important logistics facilities were also built: a bakery with a capacity of 6,000 loaves per day, a slaughterhouse, a butcher shop and showers with a capacity of 6,500 baths per day.

The most modern military hospital of its time
The military hospital, built around 1848, consisted of separate pavilions. This hospital was then the first and the most modern of its kind in Europe

The first Decauville military Camp railway
A military narrow gauge network with 115 km of track was even built through the camp. This allowed the soldiers and equipment to be easily transported. The railway stock and trainsets came from the workshops of the French engineer Paul Decauville. It was operated from 1879 to 1940.
Modernization culminated in 1913 with the construction of several large messes, equipped for the first time with electricity and central heating. At the outbreak of the First World War, people were fully engaged in the installation of electricity throughout the camp.Just before the First World War, Beverlo Camp had grown into the largest and most modern military camp in Europe. It had barracks for 40,000 soldiers and 4,000 horses, very large mess complexes, spacious training fields and shooting ranges.

Bourg Leopold
The camp became attractive to citizens with a pioneering spirit and soon a new district was created with mainly cafes, mansions and small folk theaters to soften the life of soldiers. Victorien Bourg, member of a famous French industrial family, who had already designed the first squares as a residential area in Belgium in 1836 (being a working-class area with perpendicularly intersecting streets and sloping corner houses, consisting of 166 houses with cold and warm running water, very modern and hygienic for that time). was also asked in 1841 by the Ministry of War to design the plan for a new city center, fixed against the camp of Beverlo. The subdivision constructed for this purpose was soon given the name 'Bourg' in popular speech. In 1850, this district would be included by royal decree on the list of Belgian municipalities as Bourg Léopold (with reference to the first Belgian king and renamed Leopoldsburg in the 1830s ).