Photo by Signal Corps
2. ROMAGNE CEMETERY, MAY 30, 1919
The sites of the American concentration cemeteries were carefully selected by the French Government itself, which set up special commissions for that work. Each commission included within its membership various engineers and sanitary experts, as well as officers of the American Graves Registration Service. The first of the American concentration cemeteries was established soon after the action at Château-Thierry. Most of them, however, were created after the armistice. As soon as the site for a permanent cemetery had been secured by the A. E. F. and a few of its sections plotted and marked off, the Graves Registration Service set labor troops to work digging rows of graves, each five feet deep, and at the same time started out collection parties to bring in bodies. The concentration cemeteries gathered bodies in from distances as great as fifty miles. While the bodies were being brought in and reburied, engineers were at work laying out roads in the cemetery, grading, and perfecting the drainage, surveyors marked off new sections, and landscape gardeners planted shrubbery and prepared lawns.
The work of gathering the bodies fell into a dreary routine. Each collection party consisted of an officer and eight or nine men, and its principal piece of equipment was a motor truck. From each cemetery the collection parties ordinarily started out each morning before daybreak,[5] each party taking half a dozen empty coffins on its truck. The officer in command had with him cards showing the location of the bodies to be disinterred and transferred. Sometimes the party could obtain all six bodies from a single place, but more often it was necessary to visit four, five, or even six places to get the whole gruesome load. It was an experience common enough for a collection party which had started out before daybreak not to get back to the concentration cemetery until after midnight. In this way, 20,000 officers and enlisted men, operating 2,000 trucks, worked for months, until at the end they had visited 40,000 graves, scattered over 90,000 square kilometers of ground, and had removed all the bodies to new graves in concentration cemeteries.
The American concentration cemeteries designed to be permanent resting places for the bodies of such American soldiers as are to remain where they fell, are hundreds in number. The principal ones, their locations, and the number of American soldiers buried in each (December 31, 1919), are as follows:
| Name | Location | Number of burials |
| Argonne | Romagne | 23,061 |
| St. Mihiel | Thiaucourt | 4,233 |
| Sedan | Letanne | 774 |
| Seringes-et-Nesles | Seringes-et-Nesles (Aisne) | 3,792 |
| Belleau | Belleau (Aisne) | 2,045 |
| Ploisy | Ploisy (Aisne) | 1,954 |
| Fismes | Fismes (Aisne) | 1,712 |
| Juvigny | Juvigny (Aisne) | 411 |
| Bony | Bony (Aisne) | 1,766 |
| Waereghem | Waereghem (Belgium) | 689 |
| Villers-Tournelle | Villers-Tournelle (Somme) | 549 |
| Bouvillers | Bouvillers (Oise) | 297 |
| Vaux-sur-Somme | Vaux (Somme) | 234 |
In addition, 357 Americans were buried in the British military cemetery at St. Souplet, Nord, and 122 others in the British military cemetery at Poperinghe, Belgium.
All of the cemeteries named above were carefully located in the first place and carefully planned thereafter, art aiding nature in making them fit places for the permanent interment of American soldiers. In addition to them there were hundreds of others, laid out on a smaller scale, but no less carefully planned. When the concentration cemeteries were filled, American soldier dead lay sleeping in many American national cemeteries on foreign soil—in rugged Scotland, on the Irish coast, in peaceful English villages, in sunny Italian fields, under the snows of North Russia and of Siberia, in Germany and in Austria, and along the whole battle front in France and Belgium.
In its search for bodies the Graves Registration Service came upon one common grave at Cirey, a village which had been held by the Germans. This grave was marked with a wooden cross bearing the legend in German: “15 tapfere Amerikaner” (15 brave Americans). The French inhabitants of Cirey swore under oath that these men had been prisoners massacred in cold blood by machine-gun fire. A complete investigation, however, made it seem likely that the villagers were merely repeating rumors, and led to the conclusion that the Americans had been members of a raiding party which, being surrounded, had preferred death to surrender. After a long investigation the Graves Registration Service succeeded in identifying all the bodies in the common grave. All fifteen were given separate burials.
Upon the Graves Registration Service fell the duty of identifying the unknown dead, and in this work it rendered one of its most valuable services. The work was essentially detective work, the following up of clues and the assembling of circumstantial evidence. The case of L——, an aviator, demonstrates the methods used. The men of the Service found behind the former German lines a grave containing a body which had apparently been stripped of every identifying mark. The cross on the grave designated the occupant thereof merely as “A brave American.” The graves registration officers, examining the body minutely, found, pushed up so high on one arm that it had evidently not been seen by the Germans, a wrist watch engraved with the name L——. A subsequent investigation showed that one L——, an American aviator, had fallen to the ground within the German lines at about that spot; and thus the identification was made certain.