ench now led down the hill, carrying the Americans away from
the gunners they sought, the detachment came out of it and took skirmish
formation in the dense and tangled bushes.

They had gone but a short distance when they stepped upon a forest path.
Just below them were two Germans, with Red Cross bands upon their arms.
At the sight of the Americans, the Germans dropped their stretcher,
turned and fled around a curve.

The sound of the shots fired after them was lost in the clatter of the
machine guns above. One of the Germans fell, but regained his feet, and
both disappeared in the shrubs to the right.

It was kill or capture those Germans to prevent exposure of the position
of the invaders, and the Americans went after them.

They turned off the path where they saw the stretcher-bearers leave it,
darted through the underbrush, dodged trees and stumps and brushes.
Jumping through the shrubs and reeds on the bank of a small stream, the
Americans in the lead landed in a group of about twenty of the enemy.

The Germans sprang to their feet in surprize. They were behind their own
line of battle. Officers were holding a conference with a major. Private
soldiers, in groups, were chatting and eating. They were before a little
shack that was the German major's headquarters, and from it stretched
telephone wires. The Germans were not set for a fight.

Out from the brushwood and off the bank across the stream, one after
another, came the Americans.

It bewildered the Germans. They did not know the number of the enemy
that had come upon them. As each of the "Buddies" landed, he sensed the
situation, and prepared for an attack from any angle. Some of them fired
at German soldiers whom they saw reaching for their guns.

All threw up their hands, with the cry "Kamerad!" when the Americans
opened fire.

About their prisoners the Americans formed in a semicircle as they
forced them to disarm. At the left end of this crescent was Alvin
York--a young six-foot mountaineer, who had come to the war from "The
Knobs of Tennessee." He knew nothing of military tactics beyond the
simple evolutions of the drill. Only a few days before had he first seen
the flash of a hostile gun. But a rifle was as familiar to his hands as
one of the fingers upon them. His body was ridged and laced with muscles
that had grown to seasoned sinews from swinging a sledge in a
blacksmith-shop. He had never seen the man or crowd of men of whom he
was afraid