PICKING UP AFTER THE ARMY
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soil, in a land where military traffic had almost altogether superseded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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
COMMON GRAVE NEAR CIREY
(See page 89.)]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
LOST MILITARY BAGGAGE AT HOBOKEN]
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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
PREPARING CEMETERY AT BEAUMONT]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
LOADING COFFINS ON COLLECTION TRUCKS]
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:
“Your own proud land’s heroic soil
Shall be your fitter grave.”
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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
1. OVERFLOWED AMERICAN CEMETERY AT FLEVILLE]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
2. TWO MONTHS LATER--BODIES ALL REMOVED]
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.
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
1. ROMAGNE CEMETERY, APRIL 10, 1919]
[Illustration:
_Photo by Signal Corps_
2. ROMAGNE CEMETERY, MAY 30, 1919]
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:
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| _Name_ _Location_ _Number of burials_|
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
|Argonne Romagne 23,061 |
|St. Mihiel Thiaucourt 4,233 |
|Sedan Letanne 774 |
|Seringes-et-Nesles Seringes-et-Nesles (Aisne) 3,792 |
|Belleau Belleau (Aisne) 2,045 |
|Ploisy Ploisy (Aisne) 1,954 |
|Fismes Fismes (Aisne) 1,712 |
|Juvigny Juvigny (Aisne) 411 |
|Bony Bony (Aisne) 1,766 |
|Waereghem Waereghem (Belgium) 689 |
|Villers-Tournelle Villers-Tournelle (Somme) 549 |
|Bouvillers Bouvillers (Oise) 297 |
|Vaux-sur-Somme Vaux (Somme) 234 |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
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.