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.
Photo by Signal Corps
PREPARING CEMETERY AT BEAUMONT
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.