officer. "But what will we all do when the
Germans really are licked?"

"Go home and start a veterans' association for the good of the
country, sir," the sergeant answered.

Lieutenant Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, then major, was the officer,
and Sergeant William Patterson, later killed in action, was the
enlisted man, and the institution was Base Hospital No. 2.

Colonel Roosevelt, who was in the hospital convalescing from a wound
in his knee caused by a machine gun bullet, told me the story and said
it was the first time that he had heard the subject of a veterans'
association mentioned, although he had thought of it frequently
himself as an organization with boundless possibilities for good. He
found later that it was being very generally discussed by men in Base
Hospital No. 2, particularly those who were so badly wounded that they
could not be sent to the front again and who knew they must further
serve their country along peaceful lines at home.

This was during war time, remember!

Then came the armistice!

When our victorious armies were wending their way towards the Rhine,
when men of the navy and the marine corps realized that peace had come
and that home was again within reach, this thought of a veterans'
band, which had slumbered far back in the subconscious thoughts of all
of them, burst into objectivity. An association of some sort was
widely discussed not only by the men but by the officers as well. But
how could even the start of it be begun? Those who considered the
project most seriously were confronted with a difficulty which seemed
at first to be almost insurmountable: that was the difficulty of
assembling at one time and in one place a gathering which might at
least approximately represent the whole army, navy, marine corps, or
even the A.E.F.

This difficulty tended to narrow what is believed to have been the
wish of everyone when he first thought of the matter, that is the hope
that it would be another Grand Army of the Republic, another United
Confederate Veterans, but greater than either because representative
of a United Country. Talk started then about all sorts of imagined and
fancied veteran organizations. Some advocated an officers'
association. This was believed to be possible because officers had
more freedom and more financial ability to attend a convention. Others
thought the enlisted men should perfect organizations by regiments
first, then divisions, and finally form one great