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.
The Americans were on the downstep of the hill with their prisoners on
the higher ground. The major's headquarters had been hidden away in a
thicket of young undergrowth, and the Americans could see but a short
distance ahead.
As the semicircle formed with Alvin York on the left end, he stepped
beyond the edge of the thicket--and what he saw up the hill surprized
him.
Just forty yards away was the crest, and along it was a row of machine
guns--a battalion of them!
The German gunners had heard the shots fired by the Americans in front
of the major's shack, or they had been warned by the fleeing
stretcher-bearers that the enemy was behind them. They were jerking at
their guns, rapidly turning them around, for the nests had been masked
and the muzzles of the guns pointed down into the valley at the foot of
Hill No. 223, to sweep it when the Eighty-Second Division came out into
the open.
Some of the Germans in the gun-pits, using rifles, shot at York. The
bullets "burned his face as they passed." He cried a warning to his
comrades which evidently was not heard, for when he began to shoot up
the hill they called to him to stop as the Germans had surrendered. They
saw--only the prisoners before them.
There was no time for parley. York's second cry, "Look out!" could carry
no explanation of the danger to those whose view was blinded by the
thicket. The Germans had their guns turned. Hell and death were being
belched down the hillside upon the Americans.
At the opening rattle of these guns the German prisoners as if through a
prearranged signal, fell flat to the ground, and the streams of lead
passed over them. Some of the Americans prevented by the thicket from
seeing that an attack was to be made upon them, hearing the guns,
instinctively followed the lead of the Germans. But the onslaught came
with such suddenness that those in the line of fire had no chance.
The first sweep of the guns killed six and wounded three of the
Americans. Death leaped through the bushes and claimed Corporal Murray
Savage, Privates Maryan Dymowski, Ralph Weiler, Fred Wareing, William
Wine and Carl Swanson. Crumpled to the ground, wounded, were Sergeant
Bernard Early, who had been in command; Corporal William B. Cutting and
Private Mario Muzzi.
York, to escape the guns he saw sweeping toward him, had dived to the
ground between two shrubs.
The fire of other machine guns was added to those already in action and
streams of lead continued to pour through the thicket. But the toll of
the dead and wounded of the Americans had been taken.
The Germans kept their line of fire about waist-high so they would not
kill their own men, some of whom they could see groveling on the ground.
York had seen the murder of his pals in the first onset. He had heard
some one say, "Let's get out of here; we are in the German line!" Then
all had been silence on the American side.
German prisoners lay on the ground before him, in view of the gunners on
the hilltop. York edged around until he had a clear view of the gun-pits
above him. The stalks of weeds and undergrowth were about him.
There came a lull in the machine gun fire. Several Germans arose as
though to come out of their pits and down the hill to see the battle's
result.
But on the American side the battle was just begun. York, from the
brushes at the end of the thicket, "let fly."
One of the Germans sprang upward, waved his arms above him as he began
his flight into eternity.
The others dropped back into their holes, and there was another clatter
of machine guns and again the bullets slashed across the thicket.
But there was silence on the American side. York waited.
More cautiously, German heads began to rise above their pits. York moved
his rifle deliberately along the line knocking back those heads that
were the more venturesome. The American rifle shoots five times, and a
clip was gone before the Germans realized that the fire upon them was
coming from one point.
They centered on that point.
Around York the ground was torn up. Mud from the plowing bullets
besmirched him. The brush was mowed away above and on either side of
him, and leaves and twigs were falling over him.
But they could only shoot at him. They were given no chance to take
deliberate aim. As they turned the clumsy barrel of a machine gun down
at the fire-sparking point on the hillside a German would raise his head
above his pit to sight it. Instantly backward along that German machine
gun barrel would come an American bullet--crashing into the head of the
Boche who manned the gun.
The prisoners on the ground squirmed under the fire that was passing
over them. Their bodies were in a tortuous motion. But York held them
there; it made the gunners keep their fire high.
Every shot York made was carefully placed. As a hunter stops in the
forest and gazes straight ahead, his mind, receptive to the slightest
movement of a squirrel or the rustle of leaves in any of the trees
before him, so this Tennessee mountaineer faced and fought that line of
blazing machine guns on the ridge of the hill before him. His mind was
sensitive to the point in the line that at that instant threatened a
real danger, and instinctively he turned to it.
Down the row of prisoners on the ground he saw the German major with a
pistol in his hand, and he made the officer throw the gun to him. Later
its magazine was found to have been emptied.
He noted that after he shot at a gun-pit, there was a break in the line
of flame at that point, and an interval would pass before that gun would
again be manned and become a source of danger to him. He also realized
that where there was a sudden break of ten or fifteen feet in the line
of flame, and the trunk of a tree rose within that space, that soon a
German gun and helmet would me peeking around the tree's trunk. A
rifleman would try for him where the machine guns failed.
In the mountains of Tennessee Alvin York had won fame as one of the best
shots with both rifle and revolver that those mountains had ever held,
and his imperturbability was as noted as the keenness of his sight.
In mountain shooting-matches at a range of forty yards--just the
distance the row of German guns were from him--he would put ten rifle
bullets into a space no larger than a man's thumb-nail. Since a small
boy he had been shooting with a rifle at the bobbing heads of turkeys
that had been tethered behind a log so that only their heads would show.
German heads and German helmets loomed large before him.
A battalion of machine guns is a military unit organized to give battle
to a regiment of infantry. Yet, one man, a representative of America on
that hillside on that October morning, broke the morale of a battalion
of machine gunners made up from members of Germany's famous Prussian
Guards. Down in the brush below the Prussians was a human machine gun
they could not hit, and the penalty was death to try to locate him.
As York fought, there was prayer upon his lips. He was an elder in a
little church back in the "Valley of the Three Forks o' the Wolf" in the
mountains of Tennessee. He prayed to God to spare him and to have mercy
on those he was compelled to kill. When York shot, and a German soldier
fell backward or pitched forward and remained motionless, York would
call to them:
"Well! Come on down!"
It was an earnest command in which there was no spirit of exultation or
braggadocio. He was praying for their surrender, so that he might stop
killing them.
His command, "Come down!" at times, above the firing, was heard in the
German pits. They realized they were fighting one man, and could not
understand the strange demand.
When the fight began York was lying on the ground. But as the entire
line of German guns came into the fight, he raised himself to a
sitting position so that his gun would have the sweep of all of them.
When the Germans found they could not "get him" with bullets, they tried
other tactics.
Off to his left, seven Germans, led by a lieutenant, crept through the
bushes. When about twenty yards away, they broke for him with lowered
bayonets.
The clip of York's rifle was nearly empty. He dropped it and took his
automatic pistol. So calmly was he master of himself and so complete his
vision of the situation that he selected as his first mark among the
oncoming Germans the one farthest away. He knew he would not miss the
form of a man at that distance. He wanted the rear men to fall first so
the others would keep coming at him and not stop in panic when they saw
their companions falling, and fire a volley at him. He felt that in such
a volley his only danger lay. They kept coming, and fell as he shot. The
foremost man, and the last to topple, did not get ten yards from where
he started. Their bodies formed a line down the hillside.
York resumed the battle with the machine guns. The German fire had
"eased up" while the bayonet charge was on. The gunners paused to watch
the grim struggle below them.
The major, from among the prisoners crawled to York with an offer to
order the surrender of the machine gunners.
"Do it!" was his laconic acceptance. But his vigilance did not lessen.
To the right a German had crawled nearby. He arose and hurled a
hand-grenade. It missed its objective and wounded one of the prisoners.
The American rifle swung quickly and the grenade-thrower pitched forward
with the grunt of a man struck heavily in the stomach pit.
The German major blew his whistle.
Out of their gun-pits the Germans came--around from behind trees--up
from the brush on either side. They were unbuckling cartridge belts and
throwing them and their side-arms away.
York did not move from his position in the brush. About halfway down the
hill as they came to him, he halted them, and he watched the gun-pits
for the movement of anyone left skulking there. His eye went cautiously
over the new prisoners to see that all side-arms had been thrown away.
The surrender was genuine.
There were about ninety Germans before him with their hands in air. This
gave him over a hundred prisoners.
He arose and called to his comrades, and several answered him. Some of
the responses came from wounded men.
All of the Americans had been on York's right throughout the fight. The
thicket had prevented them from taking any effective part. They were
forced to protect themselves from the whining bullets that came through
the brush from unseen guns. They had constantly guarded the prisoners
and shielded York from treachery.
Seven Americans--Percy Beardsley, Joe Konotski, Thomas G. Johnson,
Feodor Sak, Michael A. Sacina, Patrick Donahue and George W. Wills--came
to him. Sergeant Early, Corporal Cutting and Private Muzzi, tho wounded,
were still alive.