1188 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



in France in December, 1918, and there was a steady flow 

 of forest and lumber troops from America to France 

 until by midsummer, 1918, there were about eighteen 

 thousand Americans at work in the French forests. 

 From the small amount of timber produced at first the 

 output increased rapidly until for the month of Septem- 

 ber, 1918, it consisted of forty-two million feet of sawn 

 material, including four hundred forty thousand railway 

 ties, of thirty-six hundred pieces of piling mostly over 

 fifty feet long, of five hundred sixty thousand poles and 

 of thirty-eight thousand cords of fuel. By this time 

 there were eighty-one American sawmills at work. But 



able record in lumber production. At Pontenx, a lumber 

 camp near Bordeaux, a set of curves showed graphically 

 just what each shift at each mill accomplished each day ; 

 each shift and each mill was trying for the high record, 

 and the palm often changed hands. High monthly rec- 

 ords were more prized than high daily records. To keep 

 up the interest between districts in which the lumber- 

 jacks were working, the central office of the regiment 

 at Tours sent out each month the records for each of 

 the eighty-one American mills finally operating in 

 France. 



The best single day record is that of the twenty-M 



INTERIOR OF AN AMERICAN SAW MILL IN FRANCE, SHOWING ONE OF THE LOG CARRIERS WHICH THE FRENCH CHILDREN 



NEVER TIRED OF WATCHING 



still the prospective timber demands of the ever increas- 

 ing American Army were not fully assured, and when 

 the armistice brought fighting to an end in November 

 work was well under way in the United States to more 

 than double the number of forestry troops in France, and 

 units amounting to twenty-four thousand men were being 

 organized. 



Americans never work so happily and effectively as 

 when they make a game of the job and compete with 

 some one else or some other group doing the same sort 

 of work. This characteristic helped win the war by 

 driving more rivets and building ships faster than such 

 work had been done before ; it helped in France building 

 warehouses, unloading vessels and in reducing salients ; 

 it was a valuable asset in the forest operations of the 

 Twentieth Engineers (Forestry), which made a remark- 



mill at Levier in the Vosges. This mill, which had been 

 overhauled and improved somewhat, cut 163,000 feet 

 in twenty-four hours. The many other good records 

 made by American mills in other parts of France, as 

 well as the many different types of forest encountered 

 and the different methods of operation will make the his- 

 tory of the Twentieth Engineers an exceedingly inter- 

 esting one. 



Before the work of the lumber regiment was well 

 under way in the Landes a few small political clouds 

 appeared momentarily in the sky. Timber was being 

 acquired rapidly, but under the policy that not more than 

 one year's cut would be bought ahead of any single mill ; 

 the delay in the arrival of equipment made it look for 

 a time as though the regiment would fall far behind the 

 program ; some of the French were skeptical of the abil- 



