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8. Bringing Them Home
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73 8 Bringing Them Home The year 1920 brought increased impatience and renewed attempts by Congress to flex its political muscle. in February, Charles Pierce was called to testify before a House expenditures subcommittee, where, as chief of the Grs, he struggled to justify delays abroad in response to questions from his harsh interrogators. indiana republican oscar e. Bland posited, “i am of the impression that . . . practically all the high officers in the A.e.F., not only were of the opinion that it was not advisable to bring these bodies home, but that no provisions at that time [were] made to do it. Am i right in that?” Pierce attempted to remain circumspective , but Bland repeated the accusations more forcefully the second time: “The whole bunch, Connor, Pershing, . . . did not consider that we would undertake the job of bringing these bodies home and were not in sympathy with it![?]” Pierce replied, “i would rather not answer that question in that way.”1 over fifty professional embalmers, supervisors, and assistants had been sent to France in December 1919, Pierce explained, so that they might be used as replacements for the forces maintaining cemeteries. “Why the necessity for these men in Paris—in France—expert embalmers?” Bland asked, as if to doubt the service chief’s explanation. “You were not embalming anyone,” the congressman asserted. The Grs repeatedly expressed concern within the organization that a public demand would be made for the embalming of all the AeF dead. Aside from the practical conditions of combat, doing so would have incurred additional costs for supplies and involved a sizeable increase of trained staff.2 in Pierce’s early plea for overall control of the cemetery work, he insisted that his current staff include a large percentage of embalmers and undertakers who could perform these tasks quite well.3 Although the public was repeatedly told that embalming was practiced, it seems it seldom was. The issue became increasingly relevant once families began pressing for permission to open coffins as bodies began arriving home. 74 Bringing Them Home “Commercialized patriotism” was how Pierce referred to the funeral industry’s rhetoric when he wrote to the AeF’s chief quartermaster. in an attempt to obtain policies and procedures regarding the disposition of the dead, Pierce feared the government would dispatch undertakers to France to “take over.” Memories of antagonism between himself and rhodes must have been on his mind when he wrote in 1918, “it is presumed that this service [Grs] may be able to give to the project of removal more intelligent and practicable supervision than any imported corps of inexperienced civilians could possibly do.” He concluded with a warning of the political agitation that would soon be occurring in the states, “in view of the vast financial profits involved.”4 The need to maintain control seems to have been Pierce’s priority, although one can understand the War Department’s reluctance to incur the steep costs of contracting work to eager morticians. Perhaps this animosity was an inherent disinclination bound to occur between two antithetical professions, made all the more acrimonious by the potentially lucrative position of funeral directors likely to profit from inevitable military losses. Nevertheless, Bland’s patience reached its limit once Pierce admitted that his team of experts had yet to do anything with the dead, claiming it had been impossible to get the materials with which to do the work. “Do you really know whether or not there was any real French objection to the removal of the bodies from the interior of France?” he asked Pierce pointedly. in his defense, the colonel simply replied that it was an “utter surprise” to him when the French claimed recently that they had no objection to the removals. Pierce reluctantly told the committee of the many delays his service encountered: the lack of caskets and coffins, restrictions on railway use in France, problems obtaining local labor, the lack of serviceable trucks for transporting coffins, and the objections many servicemen felt toward having their dead moved to central cemeteries so far from where they had fallen. He went on to explain that there were so many dead that the one cemetery planned for suresnes (Paris) was now clearly insufficient for American needs and that more land would be needed. Pierce presented his idea of establishing several primary cemeteries in each of the regions where Americans fought, to include Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood, and the Argonne, but admitted that there were problems...