es, and stables, were designed
to use available timber stocks. For a form of rapid construction we used
double walls six inches apart and filled the spaces with sawdust. This
proved very satisfactory and much faster than the local method which
calls for a solid log construction.

The supply of engineer material has presented many problems of
difficulty and interest. The distance to the nearest home base, England,
was two to three weeks voyage. The port was not opened to supplies until
after the 1st of June. Coupled with the necessary reshipment to the
various fronts by barge and railway before the freeze-up, this caused a
tremendous over-crowding of the dockage and warehouse facilities. The
congestion and inevitable confusion at the port and warehouses has
sometimes made it impossible to ever ascertain what had arrived.

The local stocks of engineer materials are limited to what can be found
in Archangel itself and in the subsidiary ports of Economia and
Bakaritza. In 1916 and 1917, tremendous stocks of all sorts of war
material were to be found here, mostly brought from England and destined
for the Rumanian and Russian fronts. In the spring of 1918, the
Bolsheviks, anticipating the Allies landing, moved out to Vologda and
Kotlas as much as they could rush out by the railway and river, and on
the arrival of the first troops here not more than five per cent of the
military material still remained.

The materials of most use to the engineers, which still remained, were
forty thousand reels of barb wire and cable. A large amount of heavy
machinery was also left behind, from which we have been able to locate
and put in use a considerable number of various sized electric
generators. A dozen complete searchlight sets, somewhat damaged by
weather, were among this equipment. We overhauled these and used them
for night construction work and also used several of the generator units
of these sets to illuminate the headquarters train, work train, and
hospital trains employed on the railway front.

The problem of transportation was one of the most difficult for us to
contend with. The rail and road situations have already been explained.
The country is very short of horses, the best specimens having long
since been mobilized in the old Russian Army.

With motor transportation, the situation is no better. The Bolsheviks
evacuated the best cars to Vologda before the arrival of the expedition
and it is alleged that most of those t