According to Macnichol, he volunteered for the Canadian military to become part of the Great War.  This would have been before America entered, but after he had established the Eytinge Service, so in late 1916 or early 1917.  He filled out his American registration card in June 1917, giving his residence as Barnstable, Massachusetts.  He listed his occupation as author, his employer as self, suggesting he was no longer connected to the Eytinge Service (although the corporation did not disband until 1929).  According to the registration card, his mother and wife were both dependent on him “partly.”

Later, MacNichol would remember that he joined the American Expeditionary Forces in 1918; other documents suggest that he enlisted in 1917.  He was sent over as part of Harvard Unit 5, for which he was a sergeant assigned as a stretcher-bearer along the front lines.   The horror was too much for him, and MacNichol was re-assigned to headquarters press center and put on the staff of Stars and Stripes.  He was discharged in June 1919, and hoped to continue his service.  He was associated with the American Legion, hoped to start a magazine for that organization, which was organizing just as he discharged, based on others who had served in the AEF, agitated for better treatment of veterans (“Mr. Modell’s Army,” New York Times 22 February 1920), and hoped that the country would organize an army of peace, building on the organizational efforts of the Great War but focused on preventing more calamities (“Will to Serve,” National Service Nov 1919).

But his high hopes were overcome by the memories of his time in France.  He was diagnosed with shell shock.  Louise had to take a job as a secretary—before, one newspaper article noted, he had made enough that they had five maids—and he had a confession: a bit of beauty and guilt, encysted in the horror.

MacNichol admitted to Louise that in August 1918, while he was stationed in Mehun-sur-Yevre, he had met and fallen in love with Miss Leonie Winckel, a French woman in her mid to late twenties (she was estimated to have been born in 1891).  Amazingly, Louise accepted this information and agreed that the pregnant Leonie could come to their home at 15 East Park, Newark, New Jersey.  Leonie Winckel arrived in August.  She bore a daughter in December.

In March, Louise, MacNichol, and Leonie agreed to an adoption arrangement: the child would be supported by the MacNichols and bear the MacNichol name but be raised by Leonie until it was seven, or other arrangements could be made.   But Leonie soon left; according to news reports, she was homesick, but that seems a weak description.  The daughter was left with the MacNichols.

According to Louise, however, the child’s presence made Kenneth angry—again, one thinks the situation was more complex—and Leonie wrote to say how much she missed her baby.  In quick succession, the daughter was sent back to France and Kenneth was declared mentally ill—shell shocked—and sent to a sanitarium in Belle Meade, New Jersey.  Louise sued for and won guardianship over Kenneth—helped by the American Legion—so that she could receive his veteran’s pension while he was locked away.

During this time, Kenneth continued to write.   In addition to his war-related writing, he wrote two plays, Pan, which was performed in New York in 1917 and 1918 (no copy of the play exists) and The Faerie Fool, produced in 1918.  He published “Enough is Plenty” in The Argosy (26 January 1918), “Home for Breakfast” in the same magazine’s 20 September 1919 issue and “That Kind of Man” in the 8 May and 15 May 1920 issues as well as “The Twenty-Seventh Story” in the 20 June 1921 The Popular Magazine.   (He says that he wrote “The Night Shift” in 1919 but I cannot find any record of it.)

Apparently, however, the trauma of the situation overcame the couple—or so I imagine—and they left for greener pastures, sailing for England in the spring of 1921.  They settled at 68 Belsize Park, London, and Kenneth resumed his writing career, turning out the short stories “He Missed the Train” (Telling Tales September 1922), “The Nose of Papa Hilaire” (Blackwood’s February 1923), “The Devil’s Assistant” (Blackwood’s May 1923), “The Affair Mouchard,” Blackwood’s June 1923), and the books Freight (1923), Between the Days (1925), The Nose of Papa Hilaire (1925), and The Piper of Kerimor (1927).  He also may have had another job, since after they moved to 60 Gloucester Place, London, his place of employment was given as 43 Shoe Lane, London.

And then things got bad.

On 16 April 1923, Kenneth moved out.  Louise didn’t know where.  A month later, she sued for the restitution of her conjugal rights—which is to say, she tried to get the law to force him back home.   She withdrew that petition on 31 August and on the 11 September—ten years and ten days after their marriage—started divorce proceedings.  It turned out that Kenneth had been cheating on Louise, though she did not know who the other woman was.  It must have been a terrible blow to Louise, after all she had accepted from her husband, to be tossed aside in a foreign land.  Certainly, one can imagine that Kenneth was in pain, too, dealing with the after effects of the Great War, but that hardly excuses his behavior—in fact, barely explains it.

Louise seems to have taken some time in Europe, finally reaching America from Naples, Italy one day before her thirty-sixth birthday, having survived enormous heartache.  The divorce finally went through in 1927.

By that time, MacNichol was looking to change his life.  Again.