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.
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