The process of having an officer discharged from the army by authority of Paragraph 9, War Department Bulletin No. 32 (“The President is hereby authorized to discharge any officer from the office held by him under such appointment for any cause which, in the judgment of the President, would promote the public service”), was the easiest and most satisfactory manner of dealing with cases of individuals against whom it was impossible to obtain sufficient evidence for conviction by court martial but whose presence in the army was regarded as constituting a menace to the national safety. This will explain in some measure, perhaps, the curt announcements which appeared from time to time during the course of the war in Army Orders: “Lieutenant (or Captain, or Colonel) So-and-So has been discharged for the good of the Service.” The great drawback, however, to this method of ridding the army of undesirables was that it could not be applied to officers of the regular establishment, as the terms of the Act restricted its application to Reserve officers and those holding commissions for the term of the emergency. The policy pursued by Military Intelligence in the cases of regular officers suspected of disloyalty—for all suspected officers were not confined to the National Army or the Reserve Corps—was to have them assigned to posts where their opportunities for mischief would be reduced to a minimum. An officer ordered to duty in the heart of Alaska, say, was considered about as safe, from the point of view of Military Intelligence, as though he were in a cell at Leavenworth. Among the nearly 700,000 men swept by the first draft into the cantonments to be fused into a national army were thousands upon thousands of men of alien birth, many of them but recently arrived in this country and all but ignorant of its tongue. It speedily became apparent that the fusing process was failing to produce in many of these men, perhaps in the majority of them, the change necessary to make them into soldiers. Instead of melting and flowing like the rest of the metal from which was forged the weapon which halted the Huns at Château-Thierry and beat them back in the Argonne, these men of alien birth remained a hard, unyielding mass, not only obdurate in itself, but threatening to leave in the finished weapon flaws that would be fatal when it was subjected to the test of battle. By the fall of 1917, therefore, the military authorities had awakened to a realization of the fact that they were confronted by a serious and difficult problem—what to do with the foreign-speaking element of our new armies.