The days spent at sea by the returning troops were not time wasted. Although the embarkation officers in France did their best to send out with each soldier a complete record of his service, in the press of the work it was not always possible to attain this ideal. It was unjust to hold back a soldier from embarkation because his records were incomplete; yet before he could secure his discharge his papers had to be in perfect shape. The Transportation Service, through its debarkation camps in the United States, took it upon itself to perfect the individual records of the soldiers, and it did most of this work on the ships at sea. In special schools at Hoboken and Newport News the Service trained a force of traveling _personnel_ adjutants for assignment to the transports. As soon as a troopship started out from France the _personnel_ adjutant aboard opened an office, and from that moment until the ship docked he was busy from morning to night smoothing up the service records. He also compiled the papers which the debarkation camps would need and instructed the troops in the procedure to be followed after landing. Unexpectedly, the Transportation Service found itself obliged to bring home in first-class accommodations many more persons than it had carried to Europe in that style. Thousands of officers had crossed before the armistice in commercial liners, and so had crowds of red cross and other welfare workers. Numerous soldiers had acquired wives in Europe. Military regulation gave these women and their husbands accompanying them the right to occupy first-class quarters on transports. After the armistice several congressional committees and hundreds of experts employed by the Government in the peace negotiations traveled first-class on the transports in both directions. The result was that on July 1, 1919, at the ports in France awaiting first-class transportation to America there were 32,000 persons over and above the capacity of such accommodations in sight for several months to come. To have brought them all back in the state to which they were entitled would have made necessary the full operation of the entire transport fleet for three months beyond the time when the return movement actually ceased. To settle the matter the Service adopted the expedient of bringing home several thousand junior officers quartered in the troop spaces of certain of the larger and faster vessels. Although some outcry arose over this treatment, the majority of the officers were too glad to get home at all to be critical of the mode of their transportation.