For most Americans the belated entry of the United States into World War I was an exhilarating experience. The bloody reality of the Civil War had long since been embroidered by legend. After half a century of peace—the Spanish-American affair was, after all, little more than a maneuver—combat could again seem the grandest of human hazards. For Sacco and Vanzetti the complex tragedy of the war was simplified to the formula of predatory capitalism. Their attitude was summed up in the Anarchist-Communist Anti-Conscription Appeal, which demanded that the workers refuse to serve in the Army at any cost. A month after Congress declared war, President Wilson signed the Selective Military Conscription Bill, requiring every male between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one, whether or not a citizen of the United States, to register on June 5, 1917. The official notice explained that registration did not mean liability to military service except for citizens or those who had taken out first papers. Sacco and Vanzetti were not liable, but so remote were they from ordinary American life that neither of them understood this. The passage of the act filled them with panic. A week before the registration date they left for Mexico. It was only a week before this that Sacco and Vanzetti had first met. Some thirty New England anarchists formed a cooperative community in Monterrey. Those who could found jobs. Sacco worked in a bakery, sometimes taking his pay in bread and carrying a sack of it back to the others. But life in the adobe huts was difficult. From the United States letters came telling of high wages there and how easy it was to avoid the draft. Gradually the Monterrey anarchists slipped back across the border. Sacco, who had suffered much from the separation from his family, returned to Massachusetts late in August. Under his mother’s maiden name of Mosmacotelli he rejoined his wife in Cambridge and worked briefly for the New England Candy Company, going on to a succession of poorly paid jobs in East Boston and Haverhill, and a better one in Brockton. This he gave up rather than buy a Liberty Bond. For a short period in October 1917 he was employed by Rice & Hutchins in South Braintree, but quit when he found that he was making only thirteen dollars a week. A few days before the Armistice, when it was obvious that war was ending, Sacco reappeared under his own name at the Three-K Shoe Factory in South Stoughton. It was a small plant of about 125 workers, owned by the same Michael Kelley who had run the apprentice school in Milford. Sacco walked into his office and said, “I am Nick.” At first Kelley could not place him. Then he remembered the deft young Italian he had taught six years before. He called his elder son and told him, “George, if you need an edge-trimmer, here’s a good man.” And Sacco was a good man: steady, arriving early and staying late, “a great fellow to clean up everything.”