Unless you have been in the Northwest during the rainy season you can have no adequate conception of the difficulties under which the spruce squadrons labored. The coastal districts of Oregon and Washington have one of the heaviest rainfalls recorded anywhere on earth. Unkind people have said of the Pacific Northwest that it has but two seasons—the rainy season and August. But that is an exaggeration. The local newspapers alternately boast of and apologize for the reputed 180 inches, or 15 feet, of annual precipitation. With that as a basis for one’s calculations, the old man who sold the town site of Simescarey, the terminus of the spruce road which the government has built into the Olympic Peninsula, has had 450 feet of water descend upon his head—for the inhabitants of that region scorn umbrellas—in the thirty years that he has resided there. After a winter spent in the Northwest—and having passed one there, I know whereof I speak—one might easily believe that the sentry at an Oregon spruce-camp was not joking when he came in to the commanding officer to report the damages done by the rain. “Sir,” he apologized, “I don’t like to be a pessimist, but things ain’t going right to-day. Most of the fish in the lake are dead since last night’s rain. The lake raised so fast that some of ’em got beyond their depth and was just naturally drowned; the rest couldn’t swim up fast enough, and bein’ surface fish and not used to much depth, their bladders busted and there ain’t a fit fish left in the whole bunch. Every duck but one is dead, too; the rain beat their heads into a mush—all but the one that got caught in a steel trap set for a muskrat and that saved his life—he stayed under water where it was dry. Believe me, sir, that was the wettest rain last night I ever see.” * * * * * Because, as I have already explained, the lumbermen did not consider spruce a profitable wood to handle, few of the spruce forests had been penetrated by railroads. So Disque and his Legionaries set out to build railways themselves—13 lines with more than 300 miles of trackage. The forests tapped by these new lines and their branches have, it is estimated, an ultimate production of 33,000,000,000 feet of lumber, a quantity almost beyond the comprehension of the human brain. In order to visualize it, it must be translated into commonplace, every-day terms. Let us assume that it requires 20,000 feet of lumber to build an average 5 or 6 room house. Taking this as a basis, the railways built by Disque and his spruce squadrons have brought within the reach of commerce enough timber to build almost 2,000,000 of these comfortable American homes, with sufficient waste wood to keep them heated for a generation. When the war ended, 174,000,000 feet of aircraft lumber had been cut and shipped—enough to build dwellings for the inhabitants of a good-sized city.