Photo by Signal Corps
1. OVERFLOWED AMERICAN CEMETERY AT FLEVILLE
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.
Photo by Signal Corps
1. ROMAGNE CEMETERY, APRIL 10, 1919
