coS 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



There were no floors to the tents, there were no bunks 

 nor cots, no stoves soon the mud was about like that 

 Flanders mud we've read so much about. It was rather 

 sloppy lining up in the dark mornings for roll call whde 

 someone held a lantern back of the top sergeant while 

 he read the orders of the day. On one of their especially 

 dark and wet mornings, a private, routed out of his tent 

 by the sounds of "Reveille," inquired as he came out of 

 his tent, "What it is a night attack ?" But in spite of the 

 rain, damp clothes, wet feet, wet woods and the mud, 

 the work went on. 



Here at this Camp the Company had its first Thanks- 

 giving in France, and although the turkey and fixings 

 were late in reaching Camp, they did arrive, and the cooks 

 did themselves proud by spending the entire night before 

 Thanksgiving cooking tur- 

 key for 250 men no small 

 undertaking in the army 

 field ranges, under a tent 

 fly with wet wood ! But the 

 turkeys were cooked and 

 every man had his fill of a 

 real Thanksgiving dinner. 



The Company remained 

 at this Camp for about two 

 months, getting out special 

 timbers, felling sawlogs and 

 cutting cordwood, then 

 moved to its present Camp, 

 a well drained and better 

 site. Before moving to the 

 new Camp a barn, a mess 

 hall, kitchen and store 

 house had been put up, 

 floors had been made for 

 all the tents and the stoves 

 had arrived, so that when 

 the men came to the new 

 Camp, just before Christ- 

 mas, they began to live, and 

 life took on a rosier hue, 

 especially after another fine 

 turkey dinner and the ar- 

 rival of many Christmas 

 packages and letters from 

 home. On New Year's eve 

 a snow came to make it 

 seem more like winter, the first snow, the local people 

 said, in twenty years. 



While waiting for the mill machinery to arrive a small 

 French sawmill was leased by the Company and sawing 

 began, night shifts only, in the first few days in January, 

 and the first sawn product from the Battalion was loaded 

 out by Company , as they had previously been the first 

 to cut and ship the first war timbers. It was an inter- 

 esting experience for the sergeant and his squad of eight 

 men sawing logs with an old French sawmill, with saw- 

 mill machinery certainly unlike anything they had ever 

 encountered before, but they turned out the lumber and 



THE WATER TOWER 



Cleanliness being next to godliness, this thirty-foot tower is held in high 

 respect by our forestry soldiers, for it makes possible the shower baths 

 they so thoroughly enjoy. 



beat the crew of Frenchmen who used the mill during 

 the day time in the meantime the felling of sawlogs 

 and the getting out of hewn ties was going ahead in the 

 woods. The parts for the Company's mill (20,000 ft. 

 B. M. capacity) were dribbling in, and finally, on Feb- 

 ruary 27, 1918, the first log was sawn in Company 's 

 mill, the first 20,000 foot mill of the Engineers to be 

 completed. And here a word of appreciation is due the 

 Battalion Engineer Officer, the Master Engineer and the 

 crew of Company millwrights who worked untiringly 

 and enthusiastically to get the mill completed and running, 

 but who were held up by delays in the receipt of parts, 

 delays as unavoidable as they were exasperating, for 

 building a sawmill in France, in wartime, over 3000 miles 

 from a source of supplies, is not an easy matter. How 



pleased every man in the 

 Company felt when the 

 saw hit the first log and 

 they heard its music as it 

 went singing its way 

 through the first big mari- 

 time pine ! The Sergeant 



Sawyer , who handled 



the lever, was duly im- 

 pressed by the occasion and 

 handled matters like the ex- 

 perienced sawyer that he is. 

 Company 's timber 

 consists of three different 

 tracts and, while joining, are 

 very irregular in shape, and 

 the three tracts contain 80,- 

 000 trees covering some 11,- 

 000 acres. Here it may be 

 said that timber is sold in 

 France by the tree and not 

 by the board foot. All 

 trees are cut on these 

 tracts ; clear cutting or as 

 the French call it, "couper 

 a blanc," is followed ; the 

 area will be planted again 

 to pine later. About 85 

 per cent of the trees are of 

 saw timber size. The mill 

 being located on the main 

 wagon road a narrow gauge 

 railroad was necessary to haul the lumber from the mill 

 the 2J/2 miles to the shipping point. The mill is built on 

 leased land about a half mile from the edge of the Com- 

 pany's timber, so a narrow gauge railroad was necessary 

 to transport the logs from the woods to the mill, some 

 10 miles of logging railroad being required on account 

 of the irregular shape of the tracts and the distance from 

 the mill. The farthest timber is some five miles dis- 

 tant. Two "Dinkey" engines are in use, a 10-ton one 

 to haul the logs from the woods to mill and a 20-ton one 

 to take the lumber from the mill to the shipping point. 

 The woods work is carried on under the supervision of 



