WAR GEOLOGY 171 



Brooks came from Captain Lacroix^ a mining engineer. More recently 

 Captain Wallace Lee, Lieutenant E. S. Knappen, Lieutenant Crooks, Lieu- 

 tenant Kirke Bryan, and possibly others, have been transferred to the geo- 

 logical service of which Lieutenant-Colonel Brooks is in charge, as chief 

 geologist. It is known that had the war continued a short time longer 

 several other well qualified geologists selected for this work would have 

 been added to this special service. 



We must wait for an authoritative statement from Colonel Brooks as 

 to how the geological war service of our army has grown, what it has done, 

 and how it has operated ; but we may be sure that valuable work done by 

 him individually, during his first year with the army, had much to do 

 with this development, reinforced by the knowledge that our allies and 

 enemies found it worth while. 



I am not aware of any special development of geological service in the 

 Italian army. For the various armies of the eastern front it seems prob- 

 able, on several grounds, that no expert force of this kind has been formed. 

 It has been recently announced, however, that our member, Major R. W. 

 Brock, formerly of the Canadian Geological Surve}^ is chief geologist of 

 the British army in Palestine. 



GEOLOGICAL SERVICE ON THE WESTERN FRONT 



It has been my privilege, in connection with work of the National 

 Research Council, of which I shall presently speak, to learn something, 

 primarily in a more or less confidential way, of the use made of geology 

 in several of the principal armies engaged in this war. It is not fitting, 

 even if time permitted, for me to enter into details of specific work accom- 

 plished, but we may hope that in due time a full discussion of the actual 

 work done by geologists may be given by persons qualified by experience 

 in the field to speak on that interesting topic. I will endeavor, however, 

 to outline my understanding of the character of the war geologist' s work, 

 as it has developed in four years of fighting. A practically new field of 

 engineering geology has developed during the war, and while we may hope 

 that a need to cultivate this exact field may not appear again, the general 

 engineering features of much of the war geologist's work are closely anal- 

 ogous to those of many civil engineering projects — a fact it is well to keep 

 in mind for future consideration. 



Let us start with the line of trenches along which the German army in 

 19] 4 stayed the counter attack of the Allies. It must be supposed that 

 even the Germans did not utilize detailed geological knowledge of the 

 terrain in locating or digging in on this line ; but we know that this front 

 has developed in the years into several parallel systems of trenches, com- 



