American Rifle - Alexander Rose [151]
Shooting the heads off turkeys was a long-established pastime in Fentress County. Regularly a turkey would be tethered behind a log so that only its bobbing head was exposed. Each contestant would take a shot until someone hit it. The winner wound up with the bird. York excelled at the sport but found himself drifting into mammoth moonshine-drinking binges, brawling, and gambling. By the time he was twenty-seven, however, “I knowd deep down in my heart that it was’nt [sic] worthwhile,” and in December 1914 he began attending the Church of Christ in Christian Union, a fundamentalist sect that had split from the Methodists in the aftermath of the Civil War and discouraged any kind of political engagement.
Rigorously following his pastor’s teachings, York paid no heed to the politics of wartime. (He was not alone in this respect: reflecting its readers’ tastes the weekly Fentress County Gazette ran brief paragraphs on the European conflict while devoting multiple pages to livestock prices.) In any case, he had marriage on his mind (to Gracie Williams), Sunday school to teach, and sermons to give. Yet while he may not have been interested in the government, the government was interested in him and sent York a draft notice in June 1917.
Its arrival left York’s mind writhing with indecision. “I loved and trusted old Uncle Sam and I have always believed he did the right thing. But I was worried clean through. I did’nt [sic] want to go and kill. I believed in my bible. And hit distinctly said ‘THOU SHALT NOT KILL.’ And yet Uncle Sam wanted me. And he said he wanted me most awfull bad. And I jest didn’t known what to do. I worried and worried. I couldn’t think of anything else.”
York claimed conscientious objector status (“Don’t Want to Fight,” he scrawled on the form) and filed no fewer than four appeals. All were rejected, and Private York showed up for service at Camp Gordon, Georgia, and was assigned to Company G, 328th Infantry, 82nd Division. He soon made “good friends” with his Model 1917 Enfield, declaring it just as accurate as his old Tennessee muzzle-loader, at least to a hundred yards.
He proved it on October 8, 1918, when, during an American raid into the German lines, York’s Enfield shot at least a score of Germans in the head, with nary a miss. In a replay of those Tennessee turkey matches, every time an enemy head appeared, York fired. After a time the German officer in charge, Lieutenant Vollmer, stood up and cried, “English?” “No, not English,” York replied. “What?” persisted the German. “American,” answered York. Whereupon a stunned Vollmer said, “Good Lord,” and offered to surrender his unit.
York, promoted to sergeant, received the Medal of Honor for his feat (and was cited for killing 25 Germans, putting 35 machine guns out of action, and capturing no fewer than 132 prisoners while armed only with an Enfield rifle and a spare pistol). So remarkable was his heroism that even tiny Montenegro in the Balkans awarded him a medal. What was never mentioned was what York did the next day: he returned to the battlefield, knelt down, and prayed to the Lord to save the souls of those men he had killed. Over the decades that followed, whenever he was asked why he did it, York modestly refrained from saying anything more than, “Blessed is the peacemaker.”19
York’s miracle emblazoned the image of the clean-limbed, clean-living soldier in the American mind. While in France, he never smoked a cigarette, downed a shot, visited a brothel,