"So you can see here in this case of mine where God helped me out. I had been living for God and working in church work sometime before I came to the army. I am a witness to the fact that God did help me out of that hard battle for the bushes were shot off all around me and I never got a scrach.
"So you can see that God will be with you if you will only trust Him, and I say He did save me."
"By this time," he wrote; "the Germans from on the hill was shooting at me. 'Well, I was giving them the best I had."
That best was the courage to stand his ground and fight it out with them, regardless of their number, for they were the defilers of civilization, murderers of men, the enemies of fair play who had shown no quarter to his pals who were slain unwarned while in the act of granting mercy to men in their power.
That best was the morale of the soldier who believes that justice is on his side and that the justness of God will shield him from harm.
And in physical qualities, it included a heart that was stout and a brain that was clear—a mind that did not weaken when all the hilltop above flashed in a hostile blaze, when the hillside rattled with the death drum-beat of machine gun-fire and while the very air around him was filled with darting lead. As he fought, his mind visualized the tactics of the enemy in the moves they made, and whether the attack upon him was with rifle or machine gun, hand-grenade or bayonet, he met it with an unfailing marksmanship that equalized the disparity in numbers.
Another passage in his direct and simple story shows the character of this man who came from a distant recess of the mountains with no code of ethics except a confidence in his fellow man.
Those of the Americans who were not killed or wounded in the first machine gun-fire had saved themselves as York had done. They had dived into the brush and lay flat upon the ground, behind trees, among the prisoners, protected by any obstruction they could find, and the stream of bullets passed over them.
York was at the left, beyond the edge of the thicket. The others were shut off by the underbrush from a view of the German machine guns that were firing on them. York had the open of the slope of the hill, and it fell to him to fight the fight. He wrote in his diary when he could find time, and the story was written in "fox-holes" in the Forest of Argonne, in the evenings after the American soldiers had dug in. Tho his records were for no one but himself, he had no thought that raised his performance of duty above that of his comrades:
"They killed 6 and wounded 3. That just left 8 and we got into it right. So we had a hard battle for a little while."