Demobilization

Even in the United States, with its well-developed trunk-checking and baggage-transfer systems, the management of any considerable amount of personal luggage gives concern to the traveler. In a foreign land, travel with baggage is nothing less than an ordeal; and the man who can convoy a fleet of trunks over a foreign tour and bring them all back without loss to the home port, may safely regard himself as an expert globe-trotter. What, then, of the A. E. F.? It was on foreign soil, in a land where military traffic had almost altogether superseded civilian, and the troops had little benefit of the services which ordinarily look out for civilians. The soldiers, by the nature of things, could not give personal attention to their baggage. You might multiply the troubles of the individual traveler by the two million men of the A. E. F., and still fall short of even half of the baggage problem of that organization.

The baggage problem was one of those unforeseen complications which arose to make the task of maintaining the expedition harder than it had at first seemed to be. It was by no means entirely a transportation problem, although whole organizations, when advancing toward France, often had to leave their baggage behind them to follow by train or ship, and this baggage, entrusted to unfamiliar hands, sometimes went astray. But the greatest losses occurred in France itself, where the troops were quartered. Units were often moved on short notice. Expecting eventually to return to the same billets, the soldiers left their effects where they were and traveled light; but seldom did it happen that they returned to that area again. Other organizations moved into the places thus vacated, themselves later on to move forward and leave baggage behind. In the course of time, literally millions of pieces of American military baggage in France became beautifully and thoroughly lost.

This state of affairs called into being a military unit strange to our army structure—the Lost Baggage Bureau of the A. E. F., established as a branch of the Quartermaster Department. Before the armistice the Lost Baggage Bureau had attempted to do little more than set up certain facilities, notably a central baggage depot at Gievres, the Q. M. headquarters of the A. E. F., in which divisions ordered up to the trenches could store their excess baggage. This arrangement did well enough until the fighting ended, and then for the first time the lost-baggage problem began to make its magnitude manifest. After the armistice tens of thousands of enquiries about lost baggage began to shower down upon the Services of Supply, making it evident that great quantities of American property must be scattered throughout the area occupied by the Yankee troops in France. The little one-horse Lost Baggage Bureau gave way to an extensive organization, known as the Baggage Service of the A. E. F. The function of the new Service thereafter was to manage the transportation of all troop baggage during the exodus from France and to locate, collect, and if possible restore to its ownership, all baggage lost by the soldiers of the expedition.

The Baggage Service went at the problem with a plan drawn true to scale. American troops had been quartered at one time or another in fifty-nine departments of the Republic of France. This great territory the Baggage Service divided for its purposes into twenty-one zones. In each zone it placed a local organization in charge of an officer whose instructions were to go over his district with a fine-tooth comb and collect and forward to the central office at Gievres all lost articles belonging to individual American soldiers or to the Army as a whole. The search which then ensued not only took in hotels, railroad stations, police headquarters, and other obvious places in which lost property might be expected to collect, but it involved also a house-to-house search of all areas in which American troops had been billeted upon the French population. Each day the zone officers sent to headquarters reports which contained the descriptions of the articles found. The central baggage office took this information and indexed it, together with the descriptions of the 90,000 pieces of baggage which had accumulated in the Gievres warehouse up to the time the armistice began. By May 1, 1919, all of the territory occupied by the Americans had been thoroughly searched over and cleaned up, and hundreds of thousands of pieces of baggage, once lost, had been catalogued and stored at the headquarters of the various base sections or in the central warehouse at Gievres.

Although most of this baggage was obviously the property of individual soldiers, the search also turned up a great deal of government property. This included some twenty rolling kitchens in good condition, abandoned for one reason or another, hundreds of rifles and pistols, numerous helmets, many uniforms still wearable, and even bags of mail which had never reached destination. The searching parties came upon a lone army mule resigned to its apparent fate of ending its days as an adjunct to an impressive manure pile in a French peasant’s dooryard.

By the time the search was complete and the baggage had been collected, the troops were then moving in such numbers up to the French ports of embarkation for their passage home to the United States that it was found to be impossible to restore their lost property to them en route. The Baggage Service in France was able to hand over to their owners only about 50,000 pieces of baggage. In early June, 1919, it was decided to ship all the remaining unclaimed baggage to Hoboken, where the owners could obtain it after their return to the United States. The baggage thus shipped filled sixty-three baggage cars and provided a large part of the lading of an entire cargo transport. With the baggage to Hoboken went the records from Gievres, to be used by the Lost Baggage Service at Hoboken in restoring property to overseas soldiers returned to the United States.

The A. E. F.’s Baggage Service, besides finding and caring for lost baggage, was charged with the important duty of acting as the baggage agent for the returning expedition. There was no counterpart to such an organization before the armistice. Had there been, the Expeditionary Forces would have had practically no baggage problem at all, so far as the loss of baggage en route was concerned; for, on the way home, thanks to the new Service, the troops lost scarcely any baggage. Here, then, was another new military organization called into existence by our experience in the World War; one which proved its usefulness and thereby won a place for itself in any plans for large military operations in the future. The Baggage Service saved its own cost over and over again, for the Government itself is often responsible for the loss of the personal baggage of soldiers and expects to pay in cash the claims presented. Indeed, many claims for lost baggage which had accrued at A. E. F. headquarters were settled by the restoration of the baggage itself to its owners.

In handling baggage for the traveling expedition, the Baggage Service set up branches at all the important A. E. F. troop centers and at all the American embarkation ports in France. The function of the baggage men at the troop centers was to see to it that when units departed their baggage went forward with them, properly marked and routed. The Service took charge, not only of organization baggage, but of the baggage of individual soldiers as well. At the ports its branches acted as checking, storing, and forwarding agents. Brest was the largest of our embarkation ports in France, and at Brest the official baggage office was operated by five officers and one hundred enlisted men. The official “baggage room” at Brest was a whole huge warehouse located on one of the jetties. The military passengers awaiting embarkation at Brest usually numbered well over 100,000, and it took an immense storage space to contain all their baggage.

Officers of the baggage organization met all troop trains arriving in the Brest area. On these trains were thousands of officers and enlisted men traveling alone or in small groups as casuals. From these the military baggage agents secured their railroad baggage checks, together with cards on which the travelers wrote identifying descriptions of their baggage. Thereafter the individual traveler had no further baggage worries. The Baggage Service secured the pieces from the railroad stations, loaded them on trucks and took them to the central warehouse, and then made out index cards identifying them and showing their location in storage. These cards were made out in the owners’ names and filed alphabetically. Whenever a transport was preparing to sail, the embarkation authorities sent to the Baggage Service a copy of the passenger list. The baggage people checked over this list against the record cards, and were thus able easily to assemble the baggage belonging to the passengers to sail on that ship. The baggage was taken out to the transport on lighters, and the canceled identification cards were thereupon stamped with the name of the transport and the date of sailing and then filed away in the dead file. The baggage of organizations was handled in the same way, except that the troop units did not abandon the practice of sending their own baggage details along with their baggage to watch it. These detachments of soldiers remained with the baggage at all times, even when it was stored in the warehouse.

The military organization in the United States had nothing comparable to the A. E. F.’s Baggage Service to take charge of the baggage of traveling troops, but it did have an organization to handle lost baggage. This was not a branch of the Quartermaster Department, as it was in France, but an agency set up by the Transportation Service, an independent bureau of the General Staff’s Division of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic. It was called the Lost Baggage Section, and it operated exclusively at Hoboken. Although we had several other ports of debarkation for the returning expedition, Hoboken was designated to receive all the lost baggage from France. When, in late June, Hoboken received the vast accumulation of lost baggage which had been stored at Gievres and at the base headquarters of the A. E. F., the work of the Lost Baggage Section began in earnest. One of the great Hoboken pier-heads, with its echoing, barnlike storage room and adjoining offices, was given over exclusively to the Lost Baggage Section, which put to work more than two hundred clerks to handle the voluminous correspondence which sprang up immediately. Individual owners, their relatives, various soldier-relief organizations, and even members of Congress who had interested themselves in soldiers, deluged the Lost Baggage Section with enquiries. When the armistice was a year old the Section had handled 2,000,000 pieces of miscellaneous baggage, and had succeeded in delivering eleven pieces of every dozen received from France.

In the United States, among the troops quartered at the cantonments, camps, posts, and stations of the war-time establishment and traveling over the American railroads, there was no such baggage problem as had fretted the A. E. F., but nevertheless there was one of considerable size. Shortly after the armistice the Transportation Service took cognizance of an accumulation of reports which it had received telling of baggage, ostensibly the property of soldiers, which was remaining unclaimed at railroad stations and at posts formerly occupied by troops. It happened that about that time the general baggage agents of the principal American trunk lines held a convention in Washington. The Transportation Service seized the opportunity of this meeting to request the coöperation of the railroads in returning lost baggage to soldiers. The baggage agents agreed to secure a complete report from the whole United States of all military baggage on hand at parcel rooms, express rooms, and baggage rooms. At the same time the Transportation Service ordered the commanders of all the military camps in the United States to send to Washington inventories of unclaimed baggage at the camps. The next step was to find out what soldiers had lost any baggage. Newspapers and service journals gave publicity to the project of the Transportation Service, and the various welfare societies added their assistance, with the result that the Service was able to restore hundreds of pieces of lost baggage to their rightful owners. Again the United States was saved a considerable sum of money which otherwise it would have had to pay out in settlement of claims.

One task of the military authorities, similar to the restoration of lost baggage, but much more delicate and requiring a high degree of tact and sympathy in its administration, was that of returning to bereaved relatives the baggage of soldiers who had been killed in battle or who had died on foreign soil. This was so obviously a work of its own kind, requiring men peculiarly adapted to the handling of it, that it was placed in charge of a special service, both in France and in the United States. In France the Effects Bureau, as the organization was called, was part of the Quartermaster Department; in the United States a bureau of the same name, and virtually the successor of the overseas organization, was attached to the Transportation Service, and, like the Lost Baggage Section, operated exclusively at Hoboken.

As long as the A. E. F. was in France in force the overseas Effects Bureau handled most of this work. It set up headquarters at the embarkation port at St. Nazaire, and there it checked up all the baggage it could find which was the property of deceased soldiers and forwarded it to the United States. Many of these effects were found in the general search of France for lost baggage, but thousands of pieces were stored at military hospitals and with troop organizations.

The work of restoring the effects to heirs in the United States and elsewhere did not attain any great size until after the armistice, and then it was handled almost entirely by the Effects Bureau at Hoboken. In July and August, 1918, for instance, the shipments of deceased soldiers’ effects received in the United States were fewer than one hundred in number: in the month of May, 1919, alone, Hoboken received more than 15,000 packages of such effects. By that date the work of disposing of this property was engaging the attention of one of the largest individual offices connected with the Port of Embarkation of New York. All through the summer of 1919 the Effects Bureau handled a correspondence that averaged 1,000 letters a day.

It was not enough for an officer in the Effects Bureau to be well meaning and kindly intentioned—to fit his place, he had to possess a rare tact, an instinctive knowledge of what to do in circumstances that constantly varied. Early in the episode the Bureau witnessed a striking example of how not to deal with a bereaved family. One of our aviators had been killed in France when his plane crashed to the ground. At the time he had in his pocket six 100-franc notes. These were badly charred in the flames that had nearly incinerated the airman. The misguided effects officer who took charge of the dead aviator’s baggage, thinking he was doing a kindness, replaced the mutilated notes with six new ones and forwarded these to the aviator’s family, telling in a letter what he had done. The family promptly returned the new notes with the request that the charred currency be sent instead, because they would prize the burned money as a keepsake more highly than they would any amount of new money.

This incident apprised the Effects Bureau, at the outset, of the extraordinary value which the relatives of deceased soldiers were likely to attach to the most apparently trifling possessions. The men of the Bureau had to understand this fact. Moreover, they had to be men of scrupulous honesty. In the effects of men who had died abroad was a great deal of money in cash, and under the circumstances there could be no check upon the people handling this cash. The opportunities of pilfering from the dead were wide open. Consequently the Army picked only men of the highest quality to serve in the Effects Bureau.

The Bureau at Hoboken was compelled to accept responsibility for many unfortunate occurrences in which it was not at fault. The procedure behind a letter telling relatives in this country of the existence of property which they had inherited upon the death of a soldier was approximately as follows: after the man died the officers of his immediate organization made up an inventory of his property; and this inventory, together with the baggage itself, eventually reached the Effects Bureau. It was usually this original inventory which went to the relatives. Often enough, however, the dead man’s property was not all in his possession when he died. Perhaps he had been billeted in villages where he had left souvenirs and other cherished but not easily portable trinkets, intending to go back some time and secure his property before he started back for the United States. He was unlikely to have left among his effects any record of these articles; and yet his relatives were quite likely to know of the existence of the property from the soldier’s letters home. The baggage search in France raked together a considerable quantity of this property, the ownership of much of which could not be determined by any identifying marks. Consequently, when relatives wrote to the Effects Bureau to reproach that service with not having returned all of the deceased soldier’s property the Bureau was often able to find the articles among the lost baggage at Hoboken. Frequently, however, the Bureau had to confess itself unable to locate the lost articles and to bear the brunt of any displeasure that followed such an admission.

After the Tuscania disaster the British authorities shipped to Hoboken a miscellaneous collection of unidentified articles of value, such as watches and finger rings taken from the bodies of drowned American soldiers. It seemed to be an impossible task to restore these trinkets to the relatives of the rightful owners, but the Effects Bureau nevertheless made the attempt to do it. The Bureau wrote letters to all the next of kin to the soldiers who went down with the Tuscania, asking them to send in descriptions of any articles known to have been in the possession of the soldiers when they boarded the ship. The replies brought back duplicate prints of photographs carried in watch cases, dimensions of finger rings, descriptions, and other identifications, which enabled the Bureau to restore many of the articles to the proper heirs in this country.

After an arrival of identified effects in Hoboken, the Effects Bureau wrote letters to the immediate relatives or other heirs of the deceased soldiers describing the property on hand. With each letter went a legal form, to be filled out and executed before a notary public, establishing the right of the proper heirs to receive the effects. Upon the receipt of executed forms, the Bureau sent forward the effects at the expense of the Government.

The effects piled up in the Hoboken pier contained many a pathetic reminder of the invincible curiosity and enterprise of the American boys in France and of their passion for souvenirs of the war. The dead men had collected from almost every part of Europe thousands of keepsakes of every description. In the baggage of one deceased soldier was found a German machine gun which he had acquired in some manner and had succeeded in identifying as his personal property. Occasionally those going over the effects found the contraband loaded shell and grenades. These were confiscated and destroyed, because of their dangerousness, but all other property was reverently handled and protected. Because of the complete lack of identification for some thousands of parcels, it was impossible to make complete restoration of the effects to the heirs of the American dead. Nevertheless, by the end of 1919 the Effects Bureau had delivered more than 35,000 sets of personal effects of deceased soldiers to their families.

In winding up the affairs of the American Expeditionary Forces in France, there was a final, mournful task for the Quartermaster Service; one of large proportions and unusual difficulty—that of disposing of the soldier dead. During the fighting it had been taken for granted by many that the Americans who fell would be interred in great American cemeteries in France, to be maintained and kept beautiful forever by the American Government; but after the armistice there developed in this country, among those bereft of their sons and brothers, a powerful feeling that the bodies of these boys should be returned to final resting places within the United States. The country, or that part of it immediately interested in the question, divided into two opposite camps and attempted to force the War Department into a definite policy one way or the other.

When the aviator Quentin Roosevelt was killed, his father, the late Theodore Roosevelt, quoted the words of the rugged Old Testament Preacher: “In the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be.” This was perhaps the strong attitude, and a considerable number of bereaved relatives of soldiers felt as did Roosevelt; but they were, after all, the minority. Thousands of mothers, sisters, and sweethearts on the farms and in the hamlets, towns, and cities of the United States held rather with the poet, Theodore O’Hara:

In this contention the War Department took no sides. It did not adopt the wishes of the majority as a government policy, nor yet those of the minority; but it allowed each bereaved family to have its own way. If the family asked for the return of the body, that the War Department agreed to. If the family were willing to have the body remain buried in France, the War Department guaranteed that the grave should always be a hallowed and beautiful spot.

As soon as the A. E. F. began reaching France in force and its command realized that American troops were to bear their full share of the future fighting, the importance of identifying the slain and their graves asserted itself as a major problem. The experiences of the other armies had not been pleasant in this respect, and the command of the expedition did not underestimate the difficulties. The British Army, for instance, had lost the identification of fully 40 per cent of its dead. This was not due to the lack of identification of the dead at the time of burial so much as it was to the obliteration of cemeteries by shell fire as the battle front surged back and forth over many kilometers of ground. After the American Army reached the front in force in the summer of 1918, it never knew a major retreating action; its movement was always forward, and its cemeteries, always in the rear, were never destroyed. The result was that the A. E. F. maintained an extraordinarily high percentage of identification. Less than 2 per cent of its graves, after all the evidence was in, housed unknown dead.

The first step taken by the A. E. F. to accomplish this result was to establish, in the summer of 1917, a Graves Registration Service in the Quartermaster Department. The original plan was for this Service to send out field units to take complete charge of the disposition of remains—burying the dead on the battle fields and elsewhere, acquiring land for cemeteries, keeping the records of burials, and maintaining the cemeteries in the future. Sentiment among the troops themselves brought about a change in this arrangement. As soon as the divisions suffered their first casualties, the comrades of the dead men could not bear to have their friends buried by strangers, even though the strangers were Americans in the American uniform. Consequently G. H. Q. modified the original order, saying that “the dead must necessarily be buried by the units themselves. These units perform this duty as tribute to their dead.” Thereafter the Graves Registration Service merely recorded all burials and grave locations and looked after the graves.

Such a system was maintained until the early autumn of 1918. Then the fighting reached its most intense stage, and our advancing forces could spare neither time nor energy for the proper burial of the slain. At this juncture the field units of the Graves Registration Service stepped in voluntarily, without waiting for special orders, and assisted in searching the ground for dead men and in burying them, enlisting such aid in the work as they could find on the spot. This was the time of the heaviest American casualties, and the units of the Graves Registration Service buried in all some 10,000 dead American soldiers.

The work of the Graves Registration Service was rendered particularly difficult by the width and the separation of the areas over which the American troops fought. It was not as if the front had been a continuous line. Some Americans had fallen in Belgium, others with the British at the Franco-Belgium border, and still others at the southern extremity of the line, where it entered Alsace-Lorraine; but most of the American casualties had occurred in the Argonne when, during the final weeks of the war, the A. E. F. had forced a passage of that rough, forested, and traditionally impenetrable terrain.

In those last weeks in the Argonne the advancing troops had been too exhausted to make any thorough search of the battle areas for the bodies of their slain comrades. Consequently one of the first acts of the command of the A. E. F. after the armistice was to order an immediate, thorough search of all ground where our troops had been in action. Large numbers of divisional soldiers were assigned to help the Graves Registration Service in this work. Through the wreckage and débris of the Argonne went the search parties, sometimes finding unburied bodies and frequently bodies poorly and even only partially buried. To these the Graves Registration Service gave proper interment, marking all these temporary graves so that the identity of their occupants would not be lost. While this was going on, similar searching parties were at work in all the other battle areas in which American troops had been in action, and still other units of the Service followed up behind the Army of Occupation which was advancing through Luxembourg to the Rhine, in order to discover and identify the graves of any Americans who might have died, as prisoners or otherwise, behind the former German front. And the searchers were not content with a single examination of the ground: they went over every square yard of it three times, the final search being a check of the accuracy of the preceding two. Largely to the thoroughness of this work was due the completeness of the identification of the A. E. F. dead.

After the widely scattered graves were located, it was next the task of the Graves Registration Service to concentrate the bodies of the slain into as few cemeteries as possible. The American dead had been buried in approximately two thousand principal places. The concentration of the bodies was able to reduce the number of American cemeteries to about seven hundred. Not only were the bodies in isolated graves brought in to the concentration cemeteries, but sometimes entire cemeteries were abandoned and all the bodies in them removed. This was particularly true when the emergency cemeteries had been poorly located. The Graves Registration Service would not allow even the elements to be unkind to the bodies of our fallen soldiers. At Fleville the divisional troops had buried a number of their comrades in an emergency cemetery located between a small stream and an embanked road. During the first winter of the armistice the stream overflowed its banks and flooded the little cemetery, leaving only a few crosses sticking up out of the water. The Graves Registration Service sent a force of two hundred men to the place. In three weeks they had built a dam around the entire cemetery and had pumped out the water, after which the bodies of eighty-seven Americans were disinterred and removed to a better burial ground.

The sites of the American concentration cemeteries were carefully selected by the French Government itself, which set up special commissions for that work. Each commission included within its membership various engineers and sanitary experts, as well as officers of the American Graves Registration Service. The first of the American concentration cemeteries was established soon after the action at Château-Thierry. Most of them, however, were created after the armistice. As soon as the site for a permanent cemetery had been secured by the A. E. F. and a few of its sections plotted and marked off, the Graves Registration Service set labor troops to work digging rows of graves, each five feet deep, and at the same time started out collection parties to bring in bodies. The concentration cemeteries gathered bodies in from distances as great as fifty miles. While the bodies were being brought in and reburied, engineers were at work laying out roads in the cemetery, grading, and perfecting the drainage, surveyors marked off new sections, and landscape gardeners planted shrubbery and prepared lawns.

The work of gathering the bodies fell into a dreary routine. Each collection party consisted of an officer and eight or nine men, and its principal piece of equipment was a motor truck. From each cemetery the collection parties ordinarily started out each morning before daybreak,5 each party taking half a dozen empty coffins on its truck. The officer in command had with him cards showing the location of the bodies to be disinterred and transferred. Sometimes the party could obtain all six bodies from a single place, but more often it was necessary to visit four, five, or even six places to get the whole gruesome load. It was an experience common enough for a collection party which had started out before daybreak not to get back to the concentration cemetery until after midnight. In this way, 20,000 officers and enlisted men, operating 2,000 trucks, worked for months, until at the end they had visited 40,000 graves, scattered over 90,000 square kilometers of ground, and had removed all the bodies to new graves in concentration cemeteries.

The American concentration cemeteries designed to be permanent resting places for the bodies of such American soldiers as are to remain where they fell, are hundreds in number. The principal ones, their locations, and the number of American soldiers buried in each (December 31, 1919), are as follows:

In addition, 357 Americans were buried in the British military cemetery at St. Souplet, Nord, and 122 others in the British military cemetery at Poperinghe, Belgium.

All of the cemeteries named above were carefully located in the first place and carefully planned thereafter, art aiding nature in making them fit places for the permanent interment of American soldiers. In addition to them there were hundreds of others, laid out on a smaller scale, but no less carefully planned. When the concentration cemeteries were filled, American soldier dead lay sleeping in many American national cemeteries on foreign soil—in rugged Scotland, on the Irish coast, in peaceful English villages, in sunny Italian fields, under the snows of North Russia and of Siberia, in Germany and in Austria, and along the whole battle front in France and Belgium.

In its search for bodies the Graves Registration Service came upon one common grave at Cirey, a village which had been held by the Germans. This grave was marked with a wooden cross bearing the legend in German: “15 tapfere Amerikaner” (15 brave Americans). The French inhabitants of Cirey swore under oath that these men had been prisoners massacred in cold blood by machine-gun fire. A complete investigation, however, made it seem likely that the villagers were merely repeating rumors, and led to the conclusion that the Americans had been members of a raiding party which, being surrounded, had preferred death to surrender. After a long investigation the Graves Registration Service succeeded in identifying all the bodies in the common grave. All fifteen were given separate burials.

Upon the Graves Registration Service fell the duty of identifying the unknown dead, and in this work it rendered one of its most valuable services. The work was essentially detective work, the following up of clues and the assembling of circumstantial evidence. The case of L——, an aviator, demonstrates the methods used. The men of the Service found behind the former German lines a grave containing a body which had apparently been stripped of every identifying mark. The cross on the grave designated the occupant thereof merely as “A brave American.” The graves registration officers, examining the body minutely, found, pushed up so high on one arm that it had evidently not been seen by the Germans, a wrist watch engraved with the name L——. A subsequent investigation showed that one L——, an American aviator, had fallen to the ground within the German lines at about that spot; and thus the identification was made certain.

A much more remarkable feat was the identification of the body of Private Walter L——, a former member of one of the infantry regiments of the First Division. Near the isolated grave of an unknown American at Ploisy one of the graves registration men found on the ground an old, faded, water-soaked, and nearly illegible letter addressed to the single name “Walter” by one who was evidently a sister living in California. The Graves Registration Service communicated with this woman and learned that her brother was Private L——, of the —— Infantry. The chaplain of that regiment offered evidence that L—— had been killed in action near the place of the unknown grave. Thus another grave was identified.

Second Lieutenant T——, an aviator, was killed in action early in November, 1918. The Graves Registration Service found a lonely grave in the commune of Letanne marked “Unknown First Lieutenant, A. S., U. S. A.” The body was examined. The uniform bore the mark of a manufacturing tailor at Rochester, New York. A letter to this tailor from the Graves Registration Service induced him to make an independent investigation among the retailers who had sold his uniforms during the war. About three hundred retail clothing establishments answered to his enquiry. Several dealers, judging from the description of the dead man, thought they might have sold him the uniform; but one retailer in Texas said he had sold a uniform to a man answering the description, who was then an aviation cadet in training. His name was T——. This seemed to the Graves Registration Service to be a good clue. Pursuing the line of enquiry in the Air Service, the Service established that T—— had been last seen alive flying toward Letanne, and, since he never returned from that flight, he might have been shot down at Letanne. This circumstantial evidence together with other corroboratory details, justified the Graves Registration Service in identifying the unknown dead man as T——.

Upon the Graves Registration Service fell the duty of communicating with the kinsfolk of fallen American soldiers to learn their wishes as to the final disposition of the remains. The Service sent out nearly 75,000 letters to the relatives of deceased soldiers. In reply 44,000 asked for the return of bodies to the United States; 19,000 expressed willingness to leave the bodies in Europe; and some 300 others requested the removal of bodies to cemeteries in countries other than the United States. The rest did not reply.

On the first anniversary of the signing of the armistice a transport reached New York bringing the bodies of 115 American soldiers who had died on foreign soil. These bodies, the remains of men who had died in northern Russia, were the first to come home. The French law prohibited the disinterment and shipment of bodies until after the expiration of a considerable period of time after burial, and for that reason the return of remains to the United States did not begin immediately. At present (1921) frequent shiploads of bodies are arriving in the United States. They are received at New York and from there they are transported under military guard to the cemeteries chosen for their final resting places.