In other instances allotments were made to persons residing in enemy countries or in countries cut off from mail communication, Russia being the principal one of the latter class. Failures to deliver allotments for this reason resulted in claims.
As to soldiers’ pay, there were many reasons why payment was not always accurate. Sometimes amounts were withheld by the Government erroneously as court-martial forfeitures or because of alleged losses of government property. Men upon promotion often failed to note on their pay vouchers that they were entitled to the advanced pay, and so failed for a time to receive their increases. Some failed to receive the increase in pay due for foreign service, and some did not get their cash commutations of rations and quarters while on leave at the recreational areas in France. In all there were fourteen major classes of claims for back pay.
There were claims of still another class—claims for personal baggage lost by the Government in transporting the Army.
Although the individual soldier’s affidavit was largely used in the settlement of claims, still such a short-cut method of arriving at a judgment was permissible only when the official records were missing. The gradual concentration of records after the armistice, and sometimes the discovery of lost records as the disbanding Army cleared up its quarters, often brought to light papers that had been missing when the troops were discharged. Every claim submitted involved on the part of the Finance Service a search of the records. Since many of the records on which the claim depended were in the possession of the A. E. F. in France, it was impossible for a long time to do much in Washington with such claims. The A. E. F. records returned to the United States in the early autumn of 1919, but it was several months thereafter before they were properly sorted, filed, and made available for research.
During the first fifteen months after the armistice, the claims submitted to the War Department by former enlisted men totaled 184,256. Of these, about 64,000 were paid in that period, 33,000 declined, and 6,400 transferred to some other branch of the Government for settlement—103,000 claims disposed of and 81,000 still in process of adjudication and settlement.
CHAPTER VI
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.