The baggage problem was one of those unforeseen complications which arose to make the task of maintaining the expedition harder than it had at first seemed to be. It was by no means entirely a transportation problem, although whole organizations, when advancing toward France, often had to leave their baggage behind them to follow by train or ship, and this baggage, entrusted to unfamiliar hands, sometimes went astray. But the greatest losses occurred in France itself, where the troops were quartered. Units were often moved on short notice. Expecting eventually to return to the same billets, the soldiers left their effects where they were and traveled light; but seldom did it happen that they returned to that area again. Other organizations moved into the places thus vacated, themselves later on to move forward and leave baggage behind. In the course of time, literally millions of pieces of American military baggage in France became beautifully and thoroughly lost. This state of affairs called into being a military unit strange to our army structure--the Lost Baggage Bureau of the A. E. F., established as a branch of the Quartermaster Department. Before the armistice the Lost Baggage Bureau had attempted to do little more than set up certain facilities, notably a central baggage depot at Gievres, the Q. M. headquarters of the A. E. F., in which divisions ordered up to the trenches could store their excess baggage. This arrangement did well enough until the fighting ended, and then for the first time the lost-baggage problem began to make its magnitude manifest. After the armistice tens of thousands of enquiries about lost baggage began to shower down upon the Services of Supply, making it evident that great quantities of American property must be scattered throughout the area occupied by the Yankee troops in France. The little one-horse Lost Baggage Bureau gave way to an extensive organization, known as the Baggage Service of the A. E. F. The function of the new Service thereafter was to manage the transportation of all troop baggage during the exodus from France and to locate, collect, and if possible restore to its ownership, all baggage lost by the soldiers of the expedition.