All of the cemeteries named above were carefully located in the first place and carefully planned thereafter, art aiding nature in making them fit places for the permanent interment of American soldiers. In addition to them there were hundreds of others, laid out on a smaller scale, but no less carefully planned. When the concentration cemeteries were filled, American soldier dead lay sleeping in many American national cemeteries on foreign soil--in rugged Scotland, on the Irish coast, in peaceful English villages, in sunny Italian fields, under the snows of North Russia and of Siberia, in Germany and in Austria, and along the whole battle front in France and Belgium. In its search for bodies the Graves Registration Service came upon one common grave at Cirey, a village which had been held by the Germans. This grave was marked with a wooden cross bearing the legend in German: “_15 tapfere Amerikaner_” (15 brave Americans). The French inhabitants of Cirey swore under oath that these men had been prisoners massacred in cold blood by machine-gun fire. A complete investigation, however, made it seem likely that the villagers were merely repeating rumors, and led to the conclusion that the Americans had been members of a raiding party which, being surrounded, had preferred death to surrender. After a long investigation the Graves Registration Service succeeded in identifying all the bodies in the common grave. All fifteen were given separate burials. Upon the Graves Registration Service fell the duty of identifying the unknown dead, and in this work it rendered one of its most valuable services. The work was essentially detective work, the following up of clues and the assembling of circumstantial evidence. The case of L----, an aviator, demonstrates the methods used. The men of the Service found behind the former German lines a grave containing a body which had apparently been stripped of every identifying mark. The cross on the grave designated the occupant thereof merely as “A brave American.” The graves registration officers, examining the body minutely, found, pushed up so high on one arm that it had evidently not been seen by the Germans, a wrist watch engraved with the name L----. A subsequent investigation showed that one L----, an American aviator, had fallen to the ground within the German lines at about that spot; and thus the identification was made certain.