 In 1939 he moved to Toulon, starting an art workshop for the untrained and basing its rules on Moreau's theories.When France fell in 1940 he took a fishing boat to Algiers in the hope that war would not reach the French colonies.McEwen quickly grew disillusioned with the war, but through contacts with the French Resistance and France's government in exile was able, as a fluent speaker of French, to find work at the headquarters of the Allied Forces.