Sergeant York and His People

Part 1

Produced by Don Kostuch

A photograph from the national archives accompanies this file.

www.archives.gov/southeast/exhibit/popups.php?p=4.1.11

photo-4-1-11.jpg

Here are some unfamiliar (to me) words.

badinage Light, playful banter.

Chapultepec Hill south of Mexico City, Mexico; site of an American victory on September 13, 1847 in the Mexican War.

condoling Express sympathy or sorrow.

currycomb Square comb with rows of small teeth used to groom (curry) horses.

enured Made tough by habitual exposure.

fastness Strongly fortified defensive structure; stronghold.

kamerad Comrade [German].

lagnappe Trifling present given to customers; a gratuity.

levee Formal reception, as at a royal court.

predial Relating to, containing, or possessing land; attached to, bound to, or arising from the land.

puncheon Short wooden upright used in structural framing; Piece of broad, heavy, roughly dressed timber with one face finished flat.

scantlings Small timber used in construction.

tho Though

SERGEANT YORK AND HIS PEOPLE

BY SAM K. COWAN

GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS NEW YORK By Arrangement with Funk & Wagnalls Company

Copyright, 1922, By FUNK & WAGNALLS COMPANY [Printed in the United States of America] Copyright Under the Articles of the Copyright Convention of the Pan-American Republics and the United States August 11, 1910.

To FLOY PASCAL COWAN THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED, WITH A LOVE THAT WANES NOT, BUT GROWS AS THE YEARS ROLL ON

CONTENTS I. A FIGHT IN THE FOREST OF THE ARGONNE II. A "LONG HUNTER" COMES TO THE VALLEY III. THE PEOPLE OF THE MOUNTAINS IV. THE MOLDING OF A MAN V. THE PEOPLE OF PALL MALL VI. SERGEANT YORK'S OWN STORY VII. TWO MORE DEEDS OF DISTINCTION

SERGEANT ALVIN C. YORK

From a cabin back in the mountains of Tennessee, forty-eight miles from the railroad, a young man went to the World War. He was untutored in the ways of the world.

Caught by the enemy in the cove of a hill in the Forest of Argonne, he did not run; but sank into the bushes and single-handed fought a battalion of German machine gunners until he made them come down that hill to him with their hands in air. There were one hundred and thirty-two of them left, and he marched them, prisoners, into the American line.

Marshal Foch, in decorating him, said, "What you did was the greatest thing accomplished by any private soldier of all of the armies of Europe."

Part 2

His ancestors were cane-cutters and Indian fighters. Their lives were rich in the romance of adventure. They were men of strong hate and gentle love. His people have lived in the simplicity of the pioneer.

This is not a war-story, but the tale of the making of a man. His ancestors were able to leave him but one legacy--an idea of American manhood.

In the period that has elapsed since he came down from the mountains he has done three things--and any one of them would have marked him for distinction.

SAM K. COWAN.

I A FIGHT IN THE FOREST OF THE ARGONNE

Just to the north of Chatel Chehery, in the Argonne Forest in France, is a hill which was known to the American soldiers as "Hill No. 223." Fronting its high wooded knoll, on the way to Germany, are three more hills. The one in the center is rugged. Those to the right and left are more sloping, and the one to the left--which the people of France have named "York's Hill"--turns a shoulder toward Hill No. 223. The valley which they form is only from two to three hundred yards wide.

Early in the morning of the eighth of October, 1918, as a floating gray mist relaxed its last hold on the tops of the trees on the sides of those hills, the "All America" Division--the Eighty-Second--poured over the crest of No. 223. Prussian Guards were on the ridge-tops across the valley, and behind the Germans ran the Decauville Railroad--the artery for supplies to a salient still further to the north which the Germans were striving desperately to hold. The second phase of the Battle of the Meuse-Argonne was on.

As the fog rose the American "jumped off" down the wooded slope and the Germans opened fire from three directions. With artillery they pounded the hillside. Machine guns savagely sprayed the trees under which the Americans were moving. At one point, where the hill makes a steep descent, the American line seemed to fade away as it attempted to pass.

This slope, it was found, was being swept by machine guns on the crest of the hill to the left which faced down the valley. The Germans were hastily "planting" other machine guns there.

The Americans showered that hill top with bullets, but the Germans were entrenched.

The sun had now melted the mist and the sky was cloudless. From the pits the Germans could see the Americans working their way through the timber.

To find a place from which the Boche could be knocked away from those death-dealing machine guns and to stop the digging of "fox holes" for new nests, a non-commissioned officer and sixteen men went out from the American line. All of them were expert rifle shots who came from the support platoon of the assault troops on the left.

Using the forest's undergrowth to shield them, they passed unharmed through the bullet-swept belt which the Germans were throwing around Hill No. 223, and reached the valley. Above them was a canopy of lead. To the north they heard the heavy cannonading of that part of the battle.

When they passed into the valley they found they were within the range of another battalion of German machine guns. The Germans on the hill at the far end of the valley were lashing the base of No. 223.

For their own protection against the bullets that came with the whip of a wasp through the tree-tops, the detachment went boldly up the enemy's hill before them. On the hillside they came to an old trench, which had been used in an earlier battle of the war. They dropped into it.

Moving cautiously, stopping to get their bearings from the sounds of the guns above them, they walked the trench in Indian file. It led to the left, around the shoulder of the hill, and into the deep dip of a valley in the rear.

Germans were on the hilltop across that valley. But the daring of the Americans protected them. The Germans were guarding the valleys and the passes and they were not looking for enemy in the shadow of the barrels of German guns.

As the trench now led down the hill, carrying the Americans away from the gunners they sought, the detachment came out of it and took skirmish formation in the dense and tangled bushes.

They had gone but a short distance when they stepped upon a forest path. Just below them were two Germans, with Red Cross bands upon their arms. At the sight of the Americans, the Germans dropped their stretcher, turned and fled around a curve.

The sound of the shots fired after them was lost in the clatter of the machine guns above. One of the Germans fell, but regained his feet, and both disappeared in the shrubs to the right.

It was kill or capture those Germans to prevent exposure of the position of the invaders, and the Americans went after them.

They turned off the path where they saw the stretcher-bearers leave it, darted through the underbrush, dodged trees and stumps and brushes. Jumping through the shrubs and reeds on the bank of a small stream, the Americans in the lead landed in a group of about twenty of the enemy.

The Germans sprang to their feet in surprize. They were behind their own line of battle. Officers were holding a conference with a major. Private soldiers, in groups, were chatting and eating. They were before a little shack that was the German major's headquarters, and from it stretched telephone wires. The Germans were not set for a fight.

Out from the brushwood and off the bank across the stream, one after another, came the Americans.

It bewildered the Germans. They did not know the number of the enemy that had come upon them. As each of the "Buddies" landed, he sensed the situation, and prepared for an attack from any angle. Some of them fired at German soldiers whom they saw reaching for their guns.

All threw up their hands, with the cry "Kamerad!" when the Americans opened fire.

About their prisoners the Americans formed in a semicircle as they forced them to disarm. At the left end of this crescent was Alvin York--a young six-foot mountaineer, who had come to the war from "The Knobs of Tennessee." He knew nothing of military tactics beyond the simple evolutions of the drill. Only a few days before had he first seen the flash of a hostile gun. But a rifle was as familiar to his hands as one of the fingers upon them. His body was ridged and laced with muscles that had grown to seasoned sinews from swinging a sledge in a blacksmith-shop. He had never seen the man or crowd of men of whom he was afraid. He had hunted in the mountains while forked lightning flashed around him. He had heard the thunder crash in mountain coves as loud as the burst of any German shell. He was of that type into whose brain and heart the qualm of fear never comes.

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