The work of gathering the bodies fell into a dreary routine. Each collection party consisted of an officer and eight or nine men, and its principal piece of equipment was a motor truck. From each cemetery the collection parties ordinarily started out each morning before daybreak,[5] each party taking half a dozen empty coffins on its truck. The officer in command had with him cards showing the location of the bodies to be disinterred and transferred. Sometimes the party could obtain all six bodies from a single place, but more often it was necessary to visit four, five, or even six places to get the whole gruesome load. It was an experience common enough for a collection party which had started out before daybreak not to get back to the concentration cemetery until after midnight. In this way, 20,000 officers and enlisted men, operating 2,000 trucks, worked for months, until at the end they had visited 40,000 graves, scattered over 90,000 square kilometers of ground, and had removed all the bodies to new graves in concentration cemeteries. The American concentration cemeteries designed to be permanent resting places for the bodies of such American soldiers as are to remain where they fell, are hundreds in number. The principal ones, their locations, and the number of American soldiers buried in each (December 31, 1919), are as follows: +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ | _Name_ _Location_ _Number of burials_| +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Argonne Romagne 23,061 | |St. Mihiel Thiaucourt 4,233 | |Sedan Letanne 774 | |Seringes-et-Nesles Seringes-et-Nesles (Aisne) 3,792 | |Belleau Belleau (Aisne) 2,045 | |Ploisy Ploisy (Aisne) 1,954 | |Fismes Fismes (Aisne) 1,712 | |Juvigny Juvigny (Aisne) 411 | |Bony Bony (Aisne) 1,766 | |Waereghem Waereghem (Belgium) 689 | |Villers-Tournelle Villers-Tournelle (Somme) 549 | |Bouvillers Bouvillers (Oise) 297 | |Vaux-sur-Somme Vaux (Somme) 234 | +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ In addition, 357 Americans were buried in the British military cemetery at St. Souplet, Nord, and 122 others in the British military cemetery at Poperinghe, Belgium.