THE AMERICAN LUMBERJACK IN FRANCE 



1101 



tionary Forces for "cruelty to machinery." But the Hun 

 wanted war^ — and, by the shades of the forest primeval, 

 he should have it. It is difficult to stop in recording 

 these instances of how the American lumberjack "tied 

 into" their work in France. The 6th Battalion, working 

 for the British Army at Castets, cut 124,242 feet in nine- 

 teen hours with a twenty-thousand Canadian sawmill, 

 and 72,697 feet in twenty hours with a French bsmd mill 

 whose makers would have been aghast at such perform- 



gineers contain records of twenty thousand foot mills 

 set up and running fourteen days after the first ma- 

 chinery arrived ; of a ten-thousand mill dismantled, 

 moved fifty miles, re-set, and sawing on the eighth day ; 

 and of another "ten" mill moved about half that distance 

 and sawing its first log forty-seven hours after the last 

 log left its carriage at the old set. These were not holi- 

 day contests, staged after weeks of preparation. They 

 are cited to illustrate the spirit of the 20th Engineers ; 



A LOG LANDING OF A 20th REGIMENT DETACHMENT IN ONE OF THE FORESTS OF FRANCE 



ances. The 13th Company, at Brinon, cut 1,361 pine 

 logs on a "ten" mill in twenty hours, with a yield 53,895 

 feet of lumber. Many of the American "twenty" mills 

 "•cut steadily upwards of 1,200,000 board feet per month, 

 ; and several of them exceeded 2,000,000 feet monthly on 

 ' their best runs. The spirit of "hitting her hard" per- 

 vaded every camp. The 19th Service Company, at 

 Collonges, not to be outdone by the chesty mill crews, 

 organized a fuelwood contest in which 100 black soldiers 

 averaged 6.31 cubic meters of cut wood daily for a week. 

 It is even rumored 'that a red-headed captain of the old 

 •Tenth, learning from his own spies that his monthly 

 record was in jeopardy, connived with his men to put 

 on a Sunday night shift, something strictly tabooed by 

 the Forestry Regulations. The annals of the 20th En- 



but the great service of the regiment lay in its sustained 

 effort, month after month, on exacting physical labor, 

 much of it under the incessant rains and in the indescrib- 

 able mud of France. 



In the spring of 1918 came orders to furnish 15,000 

 piling in lengths up to 100 feet, with all possible haste. 

 These timbers could not be brought from the United 

 States and were essential to complete the docking facili- 

 ties required by the rapid increase in the American Ex- 

 peditionary Force. Again the resourcefulness of the 

 forest engineers was put to the test, for every nook of 

 France had to be scoured for long timbers and prac- 

 tically every tree that was large enough had to be cut 

 — no matter where it stood. The 2d Battalion^ — up in 

 the Vosges Mountains — covered itself with glory, get- 



