The work of the Graves Registration Service was rendered particularly difficult by the width and the separation of the areas over which the American troops fought. It was not as if the front had been a continuous line. Some Americans had fallen in Belgium, others with the British at the Franco-Belgium border, and still others at the southern extremity of the line, where it entered Alsace-Lorraine; but most of the American casualties had occurred in the Argonne when, during the final weeks of the war, the A. E. F. had forced a passage of that rough, forested, and traditionally impenetrable terrain. In those last weeks in the Argonne the advancing troops had been too exhausted to make any thorough search of the battle areas for the bodies of their slain comrades. Consequently one of the first acts of the command of the A. E. F. after the armistice was to order an immediate, thorough search of all ground where our troops had been in action. Large numbers of divisional soldiers were assigned to help the Graves Registration Service in this work. Through the wreckage and débris of the Argonne went the search parties, sometimes finding unburied bodies and frequently bodies poorly and even only partially buried. To these the Graves Registration Service gave proper interment, marking all these temporary graves so that the identity of their occupants would not be lost. While this was going on, similar searching parties were at work in all the other battle areas in which American troops had been in action, and still other units of the Service followed up behind the Army of Occupation which was advancing through Luxembourg to the Rhine, in order to discover and identify the graves of any Americans who might have died, as prisoners or otherwise, behind the former German front. And the searchers were not content with a single examination of the ground: they went over every square yard of it three times, the final search being a check of the accuracy of the preceding two. Largely to the thoroughness of this work was due the completeness of the identification of the A. E. F. dead. [Illustration: _Photo by Signal Corps_ 1. OVERFLOWED AMERICAN CEMETERY AT FLEVILLE] [Illustration: _Photo by Signal Corps_ 2. TWO MONTHS LATER--BODIES ALL REMOVED]