Part 20

He had given up his work on the farm and was making more money than he had ever made before. The shortcut of the Dixie Highway--that part that runs from Louisville to Chattanooga--had been surveyed and was being graded through Fentress county. It runs through the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf," He was "driving steel on the pike," for his days in the blacksmith shop had taught him to wield a sledgehammer and many rocks were to be blasted to make a roadway. For this he was receiving $1.65 a day, for ten hours' work, while on the farm he had not been able to earn more than $25 a month, working from "can't see to can't see."

When he joined the church he had given himself to it unreservedly. They were holding many meetings and the church was growing. He had become the Second Elder. At the time, too, he was planning for the day when he could marry.

In June following the country's entry into the war Alvin registered for the draft and in October at Jamestown took his examination.

"They looked at me, they weighed me," he told on his return, "and I weighed 170 pounds and was 72 inches tall. So they said I passed all right!"

He was with Pastor Pile, and he turned to him:

"This means good-bye for me. But I'll go."

After his registration his mother had never ceased to worry over his going to a war so far away from her.

The situation troubled him. At times he would see his mother looking steadily at him, and there was always a sadness in her face. He knew that she needed him, for the next oldest of the brothers of those who were at home was only seventeen. But his country had asked him to stand by and would call him if it needed him.

The struggle within him lasted for weeks. Then he asked that they seek no exemption for him.

In his presence his mother never again referred to his going, but he would see her troubled face watching him.

But she talked with the influential men in the valley hoping there would be some suggestion that would honorably relieve Alvin from the duty of going. Pastor Pile had gone ahead to see what he could do, and he learned that those who were "conscientious objectors" would not have to go. The tenets of his church, he held, were against all wars. Alvin was an elder; he had subscribed to and was living the principles of his religion. He hurried home to Mrs. York.

But the soldier, himself, had to make the plea for exemption, no one could make it for him.

Alvin never made it.

In the middle of November his summons reached him. He had but twenty-four hours to respond.

He sent a note to Gracie, telling her his "little blue card" had come and he asked her to meet him at the church--which always stands open by the roadside. As they walked toward her home they arranged to meet the next morning at the rock under the beech trees, when she would leave to carry the cows to the pasture. And it was there she promised to marry him--when he returned from the war.

Men at the store saw Alvin come down from the mountain and he could not escape some banterings over the success or failure of his early morning tryst.

"Jes left it to her," he is said to have frankly confessed, "she can have me for the takin' when I git back."

He and his mother were alone in their home for several hours. When he left he stopped at the Brooks' porch where relatives and neighbors had assembled. As he walked away he turned, unexpectedly, up the path toward the rock on the mountainside. It is now known he went there to kneel alone in prayer.

When he came down to the store, to the men waiting for him, he spoke with an assured faith he had not shown before. "I know, now, that I'll be back," he told them.

His mother, weeping, tho hiding it from him, had slowly followed as far as the Brooks' porch.

Alvin, looking back toward the old Coonrod Pile home, saw her and waved to her, then hurried to the buggy that was to take him to Jamestown.

As the grating of the moving buggy wheels on the road reached the Brooks porch, Mrs. York gave a cry that went to responsive hearts in every home in that part of the valley. And she secluded herself, and sobbed for days.

VI Sergeant York's Own Story

When Alvin went to war he carried with him a small, red, cloth-covered memorandum book, which was to be his diary. He knew that beyond the mountains that encircled his home there was a world that would be new to him. He kept the little volume--now with broken-back and worn--constantly with him, and he wrote in it while in camp, on shipboard and in the trenches in France. It was in his pocket while he fought the German machine gun battalion in the Forest of Argonne.

The book with its records was intended for no eyes but his own. Yet painstaking, using ink, he had headed the volume: "A History of places where I have been."

As a whole, the volume would be unintelligible to a reader, for while it records the things he wished to remember of his camp-life, the trip through England, his stay in France, and tells in order the "places he had been," it is made up of swift-moving notes that enter into no explanatory details. But to him the notations could--even in the evening of his life--revive the chain of incidents in memory. His handling of his diary is typical of his mind and his methods.

To him details are essential, but when they are done carefully and thoroughly their functions are performed and thereafter they are uninteresting. They are but the steps that must be taken to walk a given distance. His mind instead dwells upon the object of the walk.

When he left his home at Pall Mall he reported to the local recruiting station at Jamestown, the county seat. He was sent to Camp Gordon near Atlanta, Ga., and reached there the night of November 16, 1917. His diary runs: