As the crisis grew Buchman was particularly concerned about his colleagues in Britain. On 1 September he cabled them: 'You are all in our constant, loving, prayerful thoughts. Guard against unnecessary danger. Ensure Tod Liz Sloan maximum care in home outside London. Remember that in times of difficulty and danger the temptation always is to take the lesser course and do the lesser thing. Regard your work as essential service.'

When the news finally broke that war had been declared, Buchman and others were sitting with a Los Angeles hotel proprietor in his private apartments. At first Buchman was stunned. One Briton broke down in tears. Their years of effort to avert the conflict were over, and they could see nothing ahead in their minds' eye but the cities of Europe lying in ruins.

Then after a time, Buchman looked up and said, 'Someone, some day, is going to have to win the peace.'

Now that war had come Buchman had no doubt that it had to be fought and won. There was no comparison between the 'demoniac force', which he had tried to exorcise, and the democracies, however lacking in God's grace they might be. He had always considered patriotism and nationalism as being as different as health and fever. But he believed there should be an extra dimension to patriotism. 'A true patriot', in his view, 'gives his life to bring his nation under God's control.'5 He believed that a force of such people had just as particular a part to play in war as in peace - and would also be needed to bring reconciliation after the fighting ended.

Hundreds of MRA men and women enlisted; some were soon to die. But for the moment there followed the 'phoney war' when no bombs fell on Western Europe, and Americans inferred that the war scare was being overplayed. Those months strengthened America's traditional isolationism - Jefferson's policy of 'Friendship with all nations, but entangling alliance with none'. Roosevelt took this tradition into account, for he knew that he could only be re-elected in 1940 as 'the President who kept us out of the war'. Neither the invasion of France, the Low Countries and Scandinavia, nor Dunkirk, nor the Battle of Britain, altered the basic fact that America as a whole was strongly against becoming involved in Europe's war.

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