The three divisions of the Army, namely, the Regular Army, the National Guard, and the National Army, were very different organizations as we contemplated them at the time of the passage of the act for the temporary increase of the Military Establishment. The Regular Army was a veteran establishment of professional soldiers; the National Guard a volunteer organization of local origin maintained primarily for the preservation of domestic order in the several States, with an emergency duty toward the national defense; the National Army an unknown quantity, made up of men to be selected arbitrarily by tests and rules as yet to be formulated, unorganized, untrained, existing only in theory and, therefore, problematical as to its spirit and the length of time necessary to fit it for use. Congress, however, most wisely provided as far as possible for an elimination of these differences. Enlistments in the Regular Army and National Guard were authorized to be made for the period of the war rather than for fixed terms; the maximum and minimum ages of enlistment in the Regular Army and National Guard were assimilated; the rights and privileges of members of the three forces were made largely identical. Indeed, the act created but one army, selected by three processes. The wisdom of Congress in this course became instantly apparent. Spirited young men throughout the country began at once to enlist in the Regular Army and National Guard who might have been deterred from such enlistment had their obligation been for a fixed period rather than for the duration of the war. Many men asked themselves but one question: "By which avenue of service will I earliest get to France?" The men in the National Army soon caught this spirit and, while the department is endeavoring to preserve as far as possible in the National Guard and the National Army those intimacies which belong to men who come from the same city or town, and to preserve the honorable traditions of military organizations which have histories of service to the country in other wars, the fact still remains that the army is rapidly becoming the army of the United States, with the sense of origin from a particular State, or association with a particular neighborhood, more and more submerged by the rising sense of national service and national identity. [Sidenote: Sites selected for cantonments.] [Sidenote: Sixteen divisional cantonments.] [Sidenote: Emergency construction division established.]