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.