The Baggage Service went at the problem with a plan drawn true to scale. American troops had been quartered at one time or another in fifty-nine departments of the Republic of France. This great territory the Baggage Service divided for its purposes into twenty-one zones. In each zone it placed a local organization in charge of an officer whose instructions were to go over his district with a fine-tooth comb and collect and forward to the central office at Gievres all lost articles belonging to individual American soldiers or to the Army as a whole. The search which then ensued not only took in hotels, railroad stations, police headquarters, and other obvious places in which lost property might be expected to collect, but it involved also a house-to-house search of all areas in which American troops had been billeted upon the French population. Each day the zone officers sent to headquarters reports which contained the descriptions of the articles found. The central baggage office took this information and indexed it, together with the descriptions of the 90,000 pieces of baggage which had accumulated in the Gievres warehouse up to the time the armistice began. By May 1, 1919, all of the territory occupied by the Americans had been thoroughly searched over and cleaned up, and hundreds of thousands of pieces of baggage, once lost, had been catalogued and stored at the headquarters of the various base sections or in the central warehouse at Gievres. Although most of this baggage was obviously the property of individual soldiers, the search also turned up a great deal of government property. This included some twenty rolling kitchens in good condition, abandoned for one reason or another, hundreds of rifles and pistols, numerous helmets, many uniforms still wearable, and even bags of mail which had never reached destination. The searching parties came upon a lone army mule resigned to its apparent fate of ending its days as an adjunct to an impressive manure pile in a French peasant’s dooryard. By the time the search was complete and the baggage had been collected, the troops were then moving in such numbers up to the French ports of embarkation for their passage home to the United States that it was found to be impossible to restore their lost property to them _en route_. The Baggage Service in France was able to hand over to their owners only about 50,000 pieces of baggage. In early June, 1919, it was decided to ship all the remaining unclaimed baggage to Hoboken, where the owners could obtain it after their return to the United States. The baggage thus shipped filled sixty-three baggage cars and provided a large part of the lading of an entire cargo transport. With the baggage to Hoboken went the records from Gievres, to be used by the Lost Baggage Service at Hoboken in restoring property to overseas soldiers returned to the United States.