THORD’S TASTE for war is well illustrated by the lengths to which he went to enlist with the Allies in ‘the war to end all wars’ – one of the deadliest – the First World War. He secured command of the Eleventh Northumberland Fusiliers on the French front, quickly found his niche, and drew up a code of model regulations for battle conditions in the trenches. His regulations were later used in a United States training manual. He was mistakenly almost buried with victims of a heavy German artillery bombardment. At the last moment he was discovered to be still alive, although severely injured.
A dispute with his British chain of command, however, caused him to be sidelined from the conflict. It all had to do with the distribution of braziers in the trenches. Thord took on the hierarchy in an attempt to get back to the action, but British military bureaucracy proved obdurate. Thord retreated to the US, where he threw his considerable energies into countervailing German influence in Mexico through the offices of his 1913–1914 war comrades, reporting his findings to the adjutant-general of the US Army. He also did what he could to speed up the mobilsation of American forces from the US.
When the Russian Revolution spread to Finland during the winter of 1918, Thord sought to enlighten the Swedish people about the looming threat of German influence in Finland and impress on his compatriots the necessity of resistance.