united body.

The present leaders in the movement have since said that they realized
that all of these schemes must come to naught because no organization
except one on the broadest possible lines could be effective. They
believed that all officers and men of the three branches of the
service and all enlisted women, whether they served at home or abroad,
should be eligible and urged to join one thoroughly democratic and
comprehensive organization. They knew that any organization leaving
out one or more elements composing the military service of the United
States would be forced to compete constantly with the organization or
association so discarded. In short, they knew that in union there is
strength. And they believed, and still believe, that the problems of
peace after a catastrophe such as was never before witnessed in
history are so grave that they can be met with safety only by a
national bulwark composed of the men who won the war, so closely knit,
so tightly welded together in a common organization for the common
good of all that no power of external or internal evil or aggression,
no matter how allied or augmented, could hope even so much as to
threaten our national existence, ambitions, aspirations, and pursuit
of happiness, much less aim to destroy them.

Don't forget that the leaders of the movement realized all this, and
also remember that they include among their number the enlisted man of
the A.E.F. and home army and the sailor in a shore station and on
board a destroyer. The realization may not have been in so many words,
but each knew he wanted to "make the world safe for democracy"--he had
fought to do that and had thought out carefully what it meant, that
is, that it didn't mean anything selfish--and each knew enough of the
principle of union and strength to embrace the idea when "organize"
first began to be mentioned.

But how to do it, that was the problem.

Then kind Fate in the shape of G.H.Q. came to the rescue with what
proved to be the solution.

G.H.Q. didn't mean to find the solution. There had been a deal of
dissatisfaction with the way certain things were going in the A.E.F.
and on February 15, 1919, twenty National Guard and Reserve officers
serving in the A.E.F., representing the S.O.S., ten infantry
divisions, and several other organizations, were ordered to report in
Paris. The purpose of this gathering was to have these officers confer
with certain others of the Regular Army, inc