After the widely scattered graves were located, it was next the task of the Graves Registration Service to concentrate the bodies of the slain into as few cemeteries as possible. The American dead had been buried in approximately two thousand principal places. The concentration of the bodies was able to reduce the number of American cemeteries to about seven hundred. Not only were the bodies in isolated graves brought in to the concentration cemeteries, but sometimes entire cemeteries were abandoned and all the bodies in them removed. This was particularly true when the emergency cemeteries had been poorly located. The Graves Registration Service would not allow even the elements to be unkind to the bodies of our fallen soldiers. At Fleville the divisional troops had buried a number of their comrades in an emergency cemetery located between a small stream and an embanked road. During the first winter of the armistice the stream overflowed its banks and flooded the little cemetery, leaving only a few crosses sticking up out of the water. The Graves Registration Service sent a force of two hundred men to the place. In three weeks they had built a dam around the entire cemetery and had pumped out the water, after which the bodies of eighty-seven Americans were disinterred and removed to a better burial ground. [Illustration: _Photo by Signal Corps_ 1. ROMAGNE CEMETERY, APRIL 10, 1919] [Illustration: _Photo by Signal Corps_ 2. ROMAGNE CEMETERY, MAY 30, 1919] The sites of the American concentration cemeteries were carefully selected by the French Government itself, which set up special commissions for that work. Each commission included within its membership various engineers and sanitary experts, as well as officers of the American Graves Registration Service. The first of the American concentration cemeteries was established soon after the action at Château-Thierry. Most of them, however, were created after the armistice. As soon as the site for a permanent cemetery had been secured by the A. E. F. and a few of its sections plotted and marked off, the Graves Registration Service set labor troops to work digging rows of graves, each five feet deep, and at the same time started out collection parties to bring in bodies. The concentration cemeteries gathered bodies in from distances as great as fifty miles. While the bodies were being brought in and reburied, engineers were at work laying out roads in the cemetery, grading, and perfecting the drainage, surveyors marked off new sections, and landscape gardeners planted shrubbery and prepared lawns.