shell-swept roads on roaring motorcycles, of wig-wagging and semaphoring word of the enemy’s movements from in front of the armies, were shipped westward instead of eastward, were given axes instead of Enfields and peaveys instead of pistols, and fought their share of the war in the gloomy depths of the primeval forest, or on the logging railroads and in the sawmills which they built in bitter cold and driving rain. Labor conditions were undeniably bad in the Northwest at the beginning of the war. There is an old proverb that “A farm lease is a conspiracy on the part of the tenant and the absentee landlord to rob the land.” Lumbering was almost as bad. The owners were avaricious and arrogant, the men stubborn and defiant. The owners would not make camp improvements because “the men would not stay on the job,” and the men would not stay because “the owners didn’t make things decent.” And, to make things worse, the paid German propaganda was rampant, unchecked in the woods, for the Wilhelmstrasse fully realized how vital it was to cripple the American air programme. Germany knew better than we did the war possibilities of the Pacific Northwest. She couldn’t buy spruce there for her planes, but she could mobilize her spies and trouble-makers and hinder the production for and the delivery of spruce to the United States and her allies. And she did her worst. Some day there will be told the story, the “inside” story, of the campaign waged in the Great Woods by the secret forces of Germany—a campaign consisting of strikes, I. W. W. demonstrations, forest-fires, railway wrecks, dynamited bridges, damaged machinery, infernal machines, shootings, systematic intimidation, and all the other deviltries of a vicious and unscrupulous enemy. The spies and secret agents which Germany planted in the forests of the Northwest formed a part of the vast army of which the Kaiser boasted to Ambassador Gerard. But the Hun made a miscalculation. There were not enough spies; there were too many Americans. The War Department has rarely shown greater wisdom than when it gave a colonel’s commission to Brice P. Disque, an ex-captain of Regulars who had left the army to accept the wardenship of the Michigan State Prison, and put him in charge of spruce production. Captain Disque had his blanket-roll packed and aboard ship for service in France when he was called to Washington, just as the transport was setting sail, and ordered to go to the Northwest and investigate lumbering conditions. His report showed that the right man had been found to direct the Titanic job of getting out the spruce; he was commissioned a colonel and later a brigadier-general, and the story of the spruce production tells the rest.