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.
