Not a man of the 2,000,000 passengers lost his life as the result of marine disaster after the armistice. The worst accident occurred shortly after midnight on January 1, 1919, when, during a blinding rainstorm, the great transport _Northern Pacific_, with a load of 2,500 troops, two-thirds of whom were sick and wounded men, went aground on the Long Island shore near the entrance to New York harbor. The sea was rough, the wind making, and as the ship turned port side to the beach and worked up on the sand, pounding heavily, rescue for the time was impossible. The weather was cold, the ship’s machinery was out of commission, and she was lightless and unheated. It took three days to rescue the passengers; yet, despite the severity of the experience, no person on board suffered seriously from it. The pounding had so damaged the ship’s hull that many of the plates had to be renewed. A more serious injury was a broken stern-post. In former marine practice such an injury meant the casting of a new post in steel. The Navy, as in the instance of the broken machinery in the interned German ships, resorted to the electric welding torch for repairing the broken stern-post, saving several months in time and perhaps $50,000 in money. [Illustration: _Photo by Signal Corps_ SAILING DAY AT ST. NAZAIRE] [Illustration: _Photo by Signal Corps_ TRANSPORT _MAUI_ LOADING AT ST. NAZAIRE] The A. E. F. sold most of its property in Europe. The cargo transports brought home about 850,000 tons of military freight--a small fraction of the property held by the expedition at the time of the armistice. The goods were sold abroad at a loss, the average recovery being considerably under that received from the sale of similar goods in the United States. Yet it was good policy to do what was done. Europe needed the supplies and we needed the ship-space for other purposes. If the materials had been returned to the United States for sale, out of the proceeds would have had to be deducted the transportation cost; and the Government was little, if anything, out of pocket by the transaction. [Illustration: _Photo by Signal Corps_ SOUVENIRS OF HIS SERVICE] [Illustration: _Photo by Signal Corps_ EMBARKING AT ST. NAZAIRE] Among the materials freighted home were 100,000 tons of road-making machinery. This the War Department turned over to the Department of Agriculture to be used in the construction of highways in the United States. The cargo transports also brought back large ordnance stores, principally artillery, much of it of British and French manufacture. The shipments included a large number of captured German cannon, brought back for distribution among American communities as war trophies.