Canadian Forestry Journal, November, 1919 



467 



CAN GERMANY PAY FOR FOREST VANDALISM ? 



By M. Huffel, in "Revue des Eaux et Foreis." 



The long war from which we are emerging 

 has terribly tried our French forests, formerly 

 so rich and beautiful. The fellings made for 

 the needs of the army, those made with in- 

 credible vandalism by the enemy in the parts 

 he occupied, which were precisely the best 

 wooded in the country, have impoverished and 

 ruined them for a long period. As to the 

 woods situated in the region of the front, there 

 remains too often nothing but a mere vestige 

 of them. 



The damage done to our forests cannot im- 

 mediately be restored by spending money. A 

 house may be rebuilt, a factory can be pro- 

 vided again with the essentials in a few years; 

 to reconstitute a forest there is required not 

 only money, but time. Our forests will not be 

 re-established at their past degree of high value 

 within a century. 



This situation is the more disquieting because 

 it is precisely at this moment, when the sources 

 of wood production are so much reduced, that 

 our needs have enormously increased. We have 

 to rebuild our houses and to replace our fur- 

 niture and appliances. It will be absolutely 

 necessary to take from the forests of the enemy 

 what we need, and which he owes us, to replace 

 what the war has caused us to lose. My object 

 is to work out, as far as possible, what the 

 enemy's forest resources are, and how we may 

 utilize them. 



From official statistics of 1900 the total 

 wooded surface of the German Empire (omit- 

 ting Alsace-Lorraine) was 13,556,037 hectares 

 (1 hectare equals 2.47 acres). The species 

 were as follows: Broad-leaved species of various 

 kinds — among which oak high-forest occupies 

 5.2 per cent of the total wooded area — cover 

 26.7 per cent of the area; conifers occupy 73.7 

 per cent (46.6 per cent Scots pine, 24.6 per cent 

 spruce, 2 per cent silver fir). 



If we consider specially the State forests we 

 obtain a total of 338 million cubic metres 

 (11,938,160,000 cubic feet) of timber avail- 

 able in the German State forests, of which 183 

 is in wood of over 100 years, 85 in wood of 

 from 81 to 100 years, and 70 in wood of from 

 61 to 80 years. More than a third of this en- 

 ormous amount of material is Scots pine, which 

 will furnish excellent timber for rebuilding the 

 houses destroyed by the vandal boche. A quar- 



ter, in beech, will give good carpentry material. 

 The spruce and silver fir will yield 3 milliards 

 of good planks, which will come in very handy 

 for our needs and to the relief of our own coni- 

 fer forests. The oak, too, will be very welcome 

 for our cabinet-makers, who are in danger of 

 failing to obtain this first-class material from 

 our own woods, impoverished, ruined and de- 

 stroyed as they are by the war. 



Is it possible to exploit this mass of wood of 

 which I have just given an idea? Is it morally, 

 that is to say, equitably, possible, and is it 

 materially possible? This it remains to me to 

 examine. 



The war has impoverished all our forests; it 

 has ruined many of them, and it has, alas, to- 

 tally destroyed a too large number in the zone 

 of the operations. The enemy is responsible 

 for all this — for what was used in the waging 

 of the war, and for what was destroyed by him 

 in a spirit of shameful vandalism. It was he 

 who brought about the war in order to assure 

 the domination of the universe by Germany: 

 "Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles, uber alles 

 in der Welt." 



The ruin of houses, the destruction of fur- 

 niture and implements can be compensated in 

 money; forest produce can only be replaced in 

 kind. We shall not find in the open world- 

 market the wherewithal to replace what we have 

 lost. Our forests will not recover their old 

 capacity of production within a century. We 

 must, therefore, make the enemy pay us in kind, 

 that we may be enabled to properly manage our 

 improvised forests on the one hand, and on 

 the other that we may reconstruct our ap- 

 pliances and rebuild our houses. 



The exploitation of the wooded capital of 

 the public German forests will not be an act of 

 vengeance, but of restitution and reparation. 

 It will be still less an act of spiteful hate, like 

 that which was done by the barbarous boche, 

 the son of the Huns and Vandals, when he broke 

 with hammers the sewing-machine of the seam- 

 stress, and destroyed the trade of the weaver, 

 when he rendered useless the plough and the 

 thrasher, when he sawed down the fruit trees 

 in the orchards. We may in all conscience ac- 

 complish an act of restitution, of reparation and 

 of justice in exploiting the public German 

 forests. 



