Nevertheless, the war made its grand début on August first, and Mr. Kirkpatrick, who had started on one of the passenger ships leaving New York for the International Socialist Congress, climbed ignominiously over the side and returned to the great ironic city on a tug. III Two letters came from Olive to Alexina and one to each of her other old friends, imploring them to come over and help. They could nurse. They could run canteens. Oeuvres. She wanted to show France what her friends, her countrywomen, could do. But the war would be over in three months.... Only Judge Lawton believed it would be a long war. Others hardly comprehended there was a war at all.... Such things don't happen in these days. (Who in that wondrous smiling land could think upon war anywhere?) ... It would be too funny if it were not for those dreadful pictures of the Belgian refugees.... Poor things.... Maria and other good women immediately began knitting for them ... sat for hours on the verandahs, all in white, knitting, knitting ... but talking of anything of war.... It simply was a horrid dream and soon would be over.... Their husbands all said so ... three months.... German army irresistible ... modern implements of war must annihilate whole armies very quickly, and the Germans had the most and the best.... Rotten shame (said Burlingame) and the Germans not even good sportsmen. James Kirkpatrick, who avoided his former pupils, consoled himself with the thought that at least Britain would be licked ... she'd get what was coming to her, all right, and Ireland would be free.... Anyhow it would soon be over.... When April nineteen-seventeen came he damned the socialist party for its attitude and enlisted: "I was a man and an American first, wasn't I?" he wrote to Alexina. "I guess your flag ... oh, hell! (Excuse me.)" IV In December, nineteen-fourteen, Alexina and Alice Thorndyke (who grasped the entering wedge with both ruthless white little hands) went to France. Aileen was not strong enough to nurse so she bade a passionate good-by to her friends and engaged herself to Bob Cheever. Jimmie Thorne went to France as an ambulance driver, and Bascom Luning to join the Lafayette Escadrille. Gora sailed six months later to offer her services to England. In the case of a nurse there was much red tape to unravel. A fair proportion of the women left behind continued to knit. As time went on branches of certain French war-relief organizations were formed, and run by such capable women as Mrs. Thornton and Mrs. Hunter, who had many friends among the American women living in France; now toiling day and night at their oeuvres. Alexina and Olive de Morsigny, after a year of nursing, when what little flesh they had left could stand no more, founded an oeuvre of their own, and Sibyl Bascom and Aileen Cheever did fairly well with a branch in San Francisco, Alexina's relatives quite wonderfully in New York and Boston; although they were already interested in many others.