The government planned to have all the airplane stock from the Northwest cut at the one great cut-up plant at Vancouver, near Portland. This huge mill, the largest in the world, was built by the army in forty-five days and has handled more than a million and a half feet of lumber in twenty-four hours. But with the extension of the airplane programme, whereby the Spruce Division was called upon to furnish stock for all the Allies, more capacity was required and three other great plants of almost equal size were planned, one being ready for opening, one almost completed, and one projected when the Armistice was signed. These four huge mills would, it is estimated, have furnished the United States and her allies with close to 100,000,000 feet of airplane lumber a month. The silent, peaceful forests of the Northwest seemed separated from the war by a million miles, a score of generations. But when the word was flashed from Washington to Disque to “Go ahead,” the primeval silence of the woods was suddenly shattered by a million bellowing echoes of battle. The war had come to America. Almost overnight the battle-front moved 6,000 miles westward—from the forests of the Argonne to the forests of Oregon. The trucks were brought in—endless caravans of grunting, straining monsters; the soldiers came, 30,000 in all; the loggers, graders, hard-rock men, sawyers, surveyors, engineers; the pile-drivers, the donkey-engines, the steam-shovels perched on wheels, the train-loads of food and tools and powder; the patient, sweating horses and the creaking wagons, thousands upon thousands of them. The wood roads were black with traffic; they fairly smoked with the fierce fight for speed. The highways were dust in the early fall, where the 5 or 15 ton loads ground the roads to powder. Then the wet weather came—fogs, mists, drizzles, showers, floods—the rainy season that grows the incomparable forests of the Northwest. They splashed through it all, soldiers and Legionaries alike; they waded, they swam, they shivered and swore, and beat their hands over the brush fires—but the stream of supplies never stopped nor checked. The railway gangs, following close on the heels of the axemen, laid their twin lines of steel through the dripping forest faster than Kitchener laid down his desert railway to Khartoum, the locomotives crawling one mile, two miles, deeper into the wilderness each night. Night and day the forest trails were busy. Shuttling back and forth, loaded both ways with materials and men, teams and trucks and trains struggled for speed. Headlights, lanterns, shouted warnings, guided the night traffic along the sombre, shut-in ways. Clankings, clatterings, gasoline coughings, the honk of horns and the hoot of locomotives filled the air. The silent forest became a bedlam of sound, of action.