Part 21

"I was placed in the 21st training battalion. Then I was called the first morning of my army life to police up in the yard all the old cigarette butts and I thought that was pretty hard as I didn't smoke. But I did it just the same."

His history tells in one sentence, of months of his experience in training with the "awkward squad" and of his regimental assignment:

"I stayed there and done squads right and squads left until the first of February, 1918, and then I was sent to Company G, 328 Inf. 82nd Div."

This was the "All America" Division, made up of selected men from every state in the Union and in its ranks were the descendants of men who came from every nation that composed the Allies that were fighting Germany.

In his notes Alvin records temptations that came to him while at Camp Gordon:

"Well they gave me a gun and, oh my! that old gun was just full of grease, and I had to clean that old gun for inspection. So I had a hard time to get that old gun clean, and oh, those were trying hours for a boy like me trying to live for God and do his blessed will. ... Then the Lord would help me to bear my hard tasks.

"So there I was. I was the homesickest boy you ever seen."

When he entered the army Alvin York stood six feet in the clear. There were but few in camp physically his equal. In any crowd of men he drew attention. The huge muscles of his body glided lithely over each other. He had been swinging with long, firm strides up the mountainsides. His arms and shoulders had developed by lifting hay-ladened pitchforks in the fields and in the swing of the sledge in his father's blacksmith's shop. The military training coordinated these muscles and he moved among the men a commanding figure, whose quiet reserve power seemed never fully called into action by the arduous duties of the soldier.

The strength of his mind, the brain force he possessed were yet to be recognized and tested. And even to-day, with all the experiences he has had and the advancement he has made, that force is not yet measured. It is in the years of the future that the real mission of Sergeant York will be told.

He came out of the mountains of Tennessee with an education equal to that of a child of eight or nine years of age, with no experience in the world beyond the primitive, wholesome life of his mountain community, with but little knowledge of the lives and customs, the ambitions and struggles of men who lived over the summit of the Blue Ridge and beyond the foot-hills of the Cumberlands.

But he was wise enough to know there were many things he did not know. He was brave enough to frankly admit them. When placed in a situation that was new to him, he would try quietly to think his way out of it; and through inheritance and training he thought calmly. He had the mental power to stand at ease under any condition and await sufficient developments to justify him to speak or act. Even German bullets could not hurry nor disconcert him.

He was keenly observant of all that went on around him in the training-camp. Few sounds or motions escaped him, though it was in a seemingly stoic mien that he contemplated the things that were new to him. In the presence of those whose knowledge or training he recognized as superior to his own he calmly waited for them to act, and so accurate were his observations that the officers of his regiment looked upon him as one by nature a soldier, and they said of him that he "always seemed instinctively to know the right thing to do."

Placed at his first banquet board--the guest of honor--with a row of silver by his plate so different from the table service in his humble home, he did not misuse a piece from among them or select one in error. But throughout the courses he was not the first to pick up a needed piece.

His ability to think clearly and quickly, under conditions that tried both heart and brain, was shown in the fight in the Argonne. With eight men, not twenty yards away, charging him with bayonets, he calmly decided to shoot the last man first, and to continue this policy in selecting his mark, so that those remaining would "not see their comrades falling and in panic stop and fire a volley at him."

Military critics analyzing the tactics York used in this fight have been able to find no superior way for removing the menace of the German machine guns that were over the crest of the hill and between him and his regiment, than to form the prisoners he had captured in a column, put the officers in front and march directly to each machine gun-nest, compelling the German officers to order the gunners to surrender and to take their place in line.

Calm and self-controlled, with hair of copper-red and face and neck browned and furrowed by the sun and mountain winds, enured to hardships and ready for them, this young mountaineer moved among his new-found companions at Camp Gordon. Reticent he seemed, but his answer to an inquiry was direct, and his quiet blue-eyes never shifted from the eyes of the man who addressed him. As friendships were formed, his moods were noted by his comrades. At times he was playful as a boy, using cautiously, even gently, the strength he possessed. Then again he would remain, in the midst of the sports, thoughtful, and as tho he were troubled.

Back in the mountains he had but little opportunity to attend school, and his sentences were framed in the quaint construction of his people, and nearly all of them were ungrammatical. There were many who would have regarded him as ignorant. By the standards that hold that education is enlightenment that comes from acquaintance with books and that wisdom is a knowledge of the ways of the world, he was. But he had a training that is rare; advantages that come to too few.

From his father he inherited physical courage; from his mother, moral courage. And both of them spent their lives developing these qualities of manhood in their boy. His father hiked him through the mountains on hunts that would have stoutened the heart of any man to have kept the pace. And he never tolerated the least evidence of fear of man or beast. He taught his boy to so live that he owed apology or explanation to no man.

While I was at Pall Mall, one of his neighbors, speaking of Alvin, said:

"Even as a boy he had his say and did his do, and never stopped to explain a statement or tell what prompted an act. Left those to stand for themselves."

And the little mother, whose frail body was worn from hard work and wracked by the birth of eleven children, was before him the embodiment of gentleness, spirit and faith. When he came from the hunt into the door of that cabin home and hung his gun above the mantel, or came in from the fields where the work was physical, he put from him all feeling of the possession of strength. When he was with her, he was as gentle as the mother herself.

She, too, wanted her son to live in such a way that he would not fear any man. But she wanted his course through life to be over the path her Bible pointed out, so that he would not have the impulse to do those deeds that called for explanation or demanded apology.

From her he inherited those qualities of mind that gave him at all times the full possession of himself. Her simple, home-made philosophy was ever urging her boy to "think clear through" whatever proposition was before him, and when in a situation where those around him were excited "to slow down on what he was doing, and think fast." I have heard her say:

"There hain't no good in gitting excited you can't do what you ought to do."

She had not seen a railroad-train until she went to the capital of Tennessee to the presentation of the medal of honor given her son by the people of the state. She came upon the platform of the Tabernacle at Nashville wearing the sunbonnet of stays she wore to church in the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf." The Governor in greeting her, lifted off the sunbonnet. His possession was momentary, for Mrs. York recaptured it in true York style. Her smiling face and nodding head told that the Governor had capitulated. It was pantomime, for the thousands were on their feet waving to her and cheering her. Calm and still smiling, she looked over the demonstration in the vast auditorium more as a spectator than as the cause of the outburst of applause. Later, at the reception at the Governor's mansion, guests gathered around her and she held a levee that crowded one of the big drawing-rooms. Those who sought to measure wit with her found her never at a loss for a reply, and woven through her responses were many similes drawn from her mountain life.

Under her proctorship the moral courage of her son had developed. In her code of manhood there was no tolerance for infirmity of purpose, and mental fear was as degrading and as disintegrating as physical cowardice. He had been a man of the world in the miniature world that the miles of mountains had enclosed around him. He had lived every phase of the life of his people, and lived them openly. When he renounced drinking and gambling he was through with them for all time. When he joined the church, his religion was made the large part of the new plan of his life.

It was while at Camp Gordon that he reconciled his religious convictions with his patriotic duty to his country.

The rugged manhood within him had made him refuse to ask exemption from service and danger on the ground that the doctrine of his church opposed war. But his conscience was troubled that he was deliberately on the mission to kill his fellow man. It was these thoughts that caused his companions to note his moody silences.