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one any longer attempted to till.  They would not support even enough wild vegetation to hold the topsoil, so it kept washing away.  Wherever the ground sloped deep gullies were cut into the red clay subsoil.  Between the gullies grew broomsage and stunted bushes of sassafras and persimmon.  In December of 1918, on a hospital train going from Newport News to Atlanta, I saw for the first time rural sections of South Carolina and Georgia.  The desolation there was even worse than in Tennessee.

People of your generation and younger never saw those ruined fields.  You may have thought that the messing up of our environment is a recent problem.  It is not.  But by 1917 rural counties in the south were beginning to hire graduates from schools of agriculture, "county agents".  They eventually taught the farmers to stop abusing their land and to bring the old broomsage fields back into cultivation.  But when I went to France Cheatham county did not yet have an agent.  The agents in other counties had not yet had the time to make any visible impression.  I had no way of knowing that they were about to change the outlook.

When Herbert Jones and I began to take those Sunday walks we made some interesting discoveries about the French forests.  The trees grew in rows, evenly spaced like stalks of corn in a field.  The trees in a given row were of uniform size, presumably of the same age.  The larger the trees the farther apart they were spaced in their row  The forests grew in sections, completely separated from each other by fire lanes where only grass grew.  In short, those trees obviously had been planted by hand, close together at first.  They had been thinned out as they grew larger.  It was all part of the French pattern of bearing in mind the welfare of generations to come.

Throughout WW1 France suffered from a shortage of fuel.  (Excuse me if my expressions are so obsolete as to be confusing.  I mean an energy crisis.)  The best French coal mines had been overrun early by the Germans, or were in territory being fought over.  France was importing coal to keep her munitions plants and Railroads running.  Coal for households was scanty and rigidly rationed.  Nobody anywhere yet used oil for heating, and France had no oil anyhow.  The French used lots of gasoline for transport, but every liter of it had to be imported.  Algeria was still French, but its oil fields in the Sahara