Bisbee daily review., 1919-07-27

ter shops were opened for building eauip-
 ment that could not be bought. New de-
 partments were created. new postoffi, os
 were established. and more and more soI-
 diers became mailmen. When fhe armis-
 lice came. four months after the estab
 lishment Of the P. T.. S.. the America, ! army in France had a mail service that was Tn keeping with American military Ideals. It was doing a bis job in q bi- way. In the great majority Of cases the
 mails were getting through and the le.-
 ters were heing delivered promptly and
 satisfactorily. It was no unusual thing
 Tor Garcia. and even Smith. to get letters
 from home in less than tlTre weeks. and
 Garcia had been in hospital twice and Smith had belonged to three different or- ganizations.
 How the Letters Came.
 It is interesting to note the various stages through which a letter passed rom the sender in the Tinted States to the addressee in the trenches. Tine pos,- marked letter was forwarded to the Chelsea Terminal in New York. to be sorted. loaded aboard ship and started for France. At Bordeaux. St Nazaire or Brest it was unloaded. sorted ,rain and started inland by train to the l,ostoffice of the region or division to which it was addressed.
 Up to this point the letter may have had fairly successful ca' eer hut when trouble came it generally started here. From the army postoffice tfe letter pass ed out of the hands Of the P T. & and into the hands Of the division's own DOS tal organization and its mail orderlies. IT the addressee was one of those rare soldiers who had been continuously in the same unit all was well. But if He had been transferred or seht to a hospitaI or his unit had suddenly decam rod over night. the chances are there wasn't A wisp Of record as to his whereabouts. The letter would he turned back to the Postal Express Service for deliv ry.
 Right here the chief source of diffl- culty in handling army ,'ail was expe- rienced If the postal organization had been designed to include the mail orderly the job Of mailman to the army would have been much simpler. The mail order ly Is the most important link in tke postal chain. With the mail orderly not i'm The postal organization the F. L. & could neither insure his being properly qualified and directed nor fix responsibility on him nor make certain that his records of for warding addresses were properly kept.
 ReaddressIng Mall.
 With the undelivered letter back in it's hands. the Postal Express Service saw that 1t would have to seek elsewhere for knowledge of the addresses location. Just at this time the Central Records office at Bourges was getting ready for business. So a central postoffice was established there and all mail returned to the P. F.. ;. for readdressing was forwarded to the new office. But it was naturally he. cI- can task to keep the Central Records of- ice files up to date. Often a letter thus -edirected would reach It's new ,iestina ion only to find the addressed still two jumps ahead.
 One of the most baffling problems the :. P. O. had to contend with was the of the mail of casuals and re- 'lacements. Over 125. .00O officers and men anne to France in casual and replace nent units that ceased to exist as sooa IS they joined the A. F.. F. These units were broken up and the meu scattered throughout the army. IL was necessary O make directory search and readiness ach individual letter coming to these nen. Thus redirection work was tre- nendously increased at just that period 'hen heavy troop movements and casu- lties were already flooding the c. r. O. Iith thousands of letters for men sep rated iron, their units or in hospitals. was necessary for the postal men to do Il their redirectory work at night SO as ot to interfere with the Ce ltral Rec rds office force in keeping the card files D to date. It should be remembered lso tlat there were frequently hundreds cards bearing identical names. There -ero SS1 John Smiths in the A. E. F.. 6 William Jones and S1 William Mur- hys. Often there was no possible way discovering for which particular rown, Green or White a letter was in- nded.
 The r. E. s. tEied suggestion. coercion nd finally threat in an effort to per lade men to leave forwarding addresses henever they moved and to write to tho P. O. when they suspected their n,dIl as neing misdirected. Cards were di,- ihuted in many organizations to he fil- in by men who had recently been ansferred. At one large hospital l4.ua1 'rds were distributed and not one was
 M nod Do. nf.~h