THE DANGER OF DEFORESTATION
In a "white cut"
(From our special correspondent)

Chaumont, January 17.
The Ford advances in leaps over the streams of ruts made by the flat wheels of the heavy tractors that, loaded with trees, constantly go back and forth from the station to the felling.
In the past, it was oxen that pulled the cart: the car goes faster, says the driver. And the timber merchants have no time to lose. They multiply like mushrooms. Never have we seen so many as since the war!...
Under the tires, the thin layer of ice cracks and, sometimes, the crankcase hits the frozen clods.
We will drink coffee at the Puits des Mères! The team leader will surely be there for supplies.
The man is, in fact, in the village, in the inn. The water sings on the hearth, watched over by three girls, the mother and two boys. All these people are complaining, because a troop of Alsatian lumberjacks has been hired to cut down seven hundred hectares that a merchant has just acquired elsewhere.
— We don't have much longer here, us, declares the transalpine team leader.
All his comrades, who rushed from Italy this summer, will soon leave with the great savings made without difficulty, in the heart of the woods, on the fifty francs of daily pay.
— They will leave behind them "a real devastation", grumbles the boss. I no longer recognize my forest...
A few turns of the wheel take us to this forest. There is a felling of five hundred hectares (five million square meters) which has reduced the high forest and the coppice to a sort of "lace forest". Everything is gone, already, devoured the coppice like bundles, the big tree like "timber", and the rest, for the bakery, the railway tracks or the sawmill. The huts where the Apennine lumberjacks sleep can be seen from afar between the meager saplings, as big as the wrist, spared, which seem, on the bare ground, like lost orphans. All this wood, at 35 francs per cubic meter, has successively enriched the owner, the first purchaser, then the second, then the third. Because forests do not go away without speculation getting involved and profiting from them. What do you want? I am told. The owner is perhaps not entirely wrong, a forest only gives about 3% as a normal income, around here. It is not like in the Jura, where some communes of 300 inhabitants make 30,000 francs of income with the fir and, thanks to that, buy electricity, roads and even pay everyone's taxes to the taxman! A forest master in Côte-d'Or must be so rich that, without his forests in Aisne, which are profitable, the Duke of Guise, for example, would have had to sell all the wood he inherited here, to pay the duties!
Perhaps this is the main reason for so many current sales. Clearcutting everywhere. All of Yonne, all of Côte-d'Or, all of Haute-Marne are ravaged.
— The immense forest of Der, on the borders of Marne, has been terribly deforested for a year. Dozens of mobile sawmills have just set up around Wassy...
— We have to live! repeats the Italian.
And he lives: he kills trees. Further on, the Spaniards are ransacking. Nearby, Arabs are cutting down to the ground.
— You wouldn't find a man to reforest, anywhere, for twenty francs a day. But to drive the sawmill's toothed band, they offer all the wages... Now, strange thing, despite these fellings, despite these clearings by force, despite the incessant work of the wedge and the axe, the price of wood increases.
— How much per cubic meter, if I wanted to buy it? I said.
— If you had come last year, you would have had it for 20 or 22 francs per cubic meter. Now, you have to count at least 37. And you have to hurry. When the goods become scarce, the prices go up, it's well known.
— But there's still some wood!
— In surface area, yes. Only, you can see through it. We won't be able to cut down hundreds and thousands of hectares for twenty-five or thirty years. Everything is good for the axe: poplar, larch, oak. The saw for felling and cutting up trees never stops. And they build engines for sawmills that consume wood waste and spend barely a penny per horsepower hour. That's to say what facilities are provided for deforestation.
The high-yield saw bites and creaks. We leave.
— In Spain, says my guide, that's how they made the country arid. Only in Germany have they really fought to limit the damage. But in France, the massacre will last as long as they don't shout "daredevil!" in a voice so loud that everyone can hear it! It's about time...

EMMANUEL BOURCIER.