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.