the trench.
In battalion contest formation, where the soldiers run and fall and
fire, "shooting at moving targets," it was not difficult for him to
score eight hits out of ten shots, and, with a rifle that was new to
him. This, too, over a range that began at 600 yards and went down to
100 yards, with the targets in the shape of the head and shoulders of a
man. In these maneuvers he attracted the attention of his officers.

The impressive figure of the man with its ever present evidence of
reserve force, the strength of his personality, uneducated as he was,
made him a natural leader of the men around him. Officers of the
regiment have said that he would have received a promotion while in the
training-camp but for the policy of not placing in command a man who
might be a conscientious objector.

The "All America" Division passed through England on its way to France
and the first real fighting they had was in the St. Mihiel Salient. From
there they went to the Argonne Forest, where the division was on the
front line of the battle for twenty-six days and nights without relief.

It was in the St. Mihiel Salient that York was made a Corporal, and when
he came out of the Argonne Forest he was a Sergeant. The armistice was
signed a fortnight later.

The war made York more deeply religious. The diary he kept passed from
simple notations about "places he had been" to a record of his thoughts
and feelings. In it are many quotations from the Bible; many texts of
sermons he heard while on the battlefields of France. With the texts
were brief notes that would recall the sermons to his memory. The book
is really "a history" of his religious development.

When he would kneel by a dying soldier he would record in his diary the
talk he had with his comrade and would write the passages of Scripture
that he or the dying man had spoken. It was upon this his interests
centered. To others he left the task of telling of the battle's result.

He wrote in his diary this simple story of his fight with the battalion
of German machine guns:

"On the 7th day of October we lay in some little holes on the roadside
all day. That night we went out and stayed a little while and came back
to our holes, the shells bursting all around us. I saw men just blown up
by the big German shells which were bursting all around us.

"So the order came for us to take Hill 223 and 240 the 8th.

"So the morning of the 8th just before daylight, we started fo