s 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 G