The military organization in the United States had nothing comparable to the A. E. F.’s Baggage Service to take charge of the baggage of traveling troops, but it did have an organization to handle lost baggage. This was not a branch of the Quartermaster Department, as it was in France, but an agency set up by the Transportation Service, an independent bureau of the General Staff’s Division of Purchase, Storage, and Traffic. It was called the Lost Baggage Section, and it operated exclusively at Hoboken. Although we had several other ports of debarkation for the returning expedition, Hoboken was designated to receive all the lost baggage from France. When, in late June, Hoboken received the vast accumulation of lost baggage which had been stored at Gievres and at the base headquarters of the A. E. F., the work of the Lost Baggage Section began in earnest. One of the great Hoboken pier-heads, with its echoing, barnlike storage room and adjoining offices, was given over exclusively to the Lost Baggage Section, which put to work more than two hundred clerks to handle the voluminous correspondence which sprang up immediately. Individual owners, their relatives, various soldier-relief organizations, and even members of Congress who had interested themselves in soldiers, deluged the Lost Baggage Section with enquiries. When the armistice was a year old the Section had handled 2,000,000 pieces of miscellaneous baggage, and had succeeded in delivering eleven pieces of every dozen received from France. [Illustration: _Photo by Signal Corps_ PREPARING CEMETERY AT BEAUMONT] [Illustration: _Photo by Signal Corps_ LOADING COFFINS ON COLLECTION TRUCKS]