out from the American line. All of them were expert rifle shots who came from the support platoon of the assault troops on the left.

Using the forest's undergrowth to shield them, they passed unharmed through the bullet-swept belt which the Germans were throwing around Hill No. 223, and reached the valley. Above them was a canopy of lead. To the north they heard the heavy cannonading of that part of the battle.

When they passed into the valley they found they were within the range of another battalion of German machine guns. The Germans on the hill at the far end of the valley were lashing the base of No. 223.

For their own protection against the bullets that came with the whip of a wasp through the tree-tops, the detachment went boldly up the enemy's hill before them. On the hillside they came to an old trench, which had been used in an earlier battle of the war. They dropped into it.

Moving cautiously, stopping to get their bearings from the sounds of the guns above them, they walked the trench in Indian file. It led to the left, around the shoulder of the hill, and into the deep dip of a valley in the rear.

Germans were on the hilltop across that valley. But the daring of the Americans protected them. The Germans were guarding the valleys and the passes and they were not looking for enemy in the shadow of the barrels of German guns.

As the trench 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. He had hunted in the mountains while forked lightning flashed around him. He had heard the thunder crash in mountain coves as loud as the burst of any German shell. He was of that type into whose brain and heart the qualm of fear never comes.

The Americans were on the downstep of the hill with their prisoners on the higher ground. The major's headquarters had been hidden away in a thicket of young undergrowth, and the Americans could see but a short distance ahead.

As the semicircle formed with Alvin York on the left end, he stepped beyond the edge of the thicket—and what he saw up the hill surprized him.

Just forty yards away was the crest, and along it was a row of machine guns—a battalion of them!

The German gunners had heard the shots fired by the Americans in front of the major's shack, or they had been warned by the fleeing stretcher-bearers that the enemy was behind them. They were jerking at their guns, rapidly turning them around, for the nests had been masked and the muzzles of the guns pointed down into the valley at the foot of Hill No. 223, to sweep it when the Eighty-Second Division came out into the open.

Some of the Germans in the gun-pits, using rifles, shot at York. The bullets "burned his face as they passed." He cried a warning to his comrades which evidently was not heard, for when he began to shoot up the hill they called to him to stop as the Germans had surrendered. They saw—only the prisoners before them.

There was no time for parley. York's second cry, "Look out!" could carry no explanation of the danger to those whose view was blinded by the thicket. The Germans had their guns turned. Hell and death were being belched down the hillside upon the Americans.

At the opening rattle of these guns the German prisoners as if through a prearranged signal, fell flat to the ground, and the streams of lead passed over them. Some of the Americans prevented by the thicket from seeing that an attack was to be made upon them, hearing the guns, instinctively followed the lead of the Germans. But the onslaught came with such suddenness that those in the line of fire had no chance.

The first sweep of the guns killed six and wounded three of the Americans. Death leaped through the bushes and claimed Corporal Murray Savage, Privates Maryan Dymowski, Ralph Weiler, Fred Wareing, William Wine and Carl Swanson. Crumpled to the ground, wounded, were Sergeant Bernard Early, who had been in command; Corporal William B. Cutting and Private Mario Muzzi.

York, to escape the guns he saw sweeping toward him, had dived to the ground between two shrubs.

The fire of other machine guns was added to those already in action and streams of lead continued to pour through the thicket. But the toll of the dead and wounded of the Americans had been taken.

The Germans kept their line of fire about waist-high so they would not kill their own men, some of whom they could see groveling on the ground.

York had seen the murder of his pals in the first onset. He had heard some one say, "Let's get out of here; we are in the German line!" Then all had been silence on the American side.

German prisoners lay on the ground before him, in view of the gunners on the hilltop. York edged around until he had a clear view of the gun-pits above him. The stalks of weeds and undergrowth were about him.

There came a lull in the machine gun fire. Several Germans arose as though to come out of their pits and down the hill to see the battle's result.

But on the American side the battle was just begun. York, from the brushes at the end of the thicket, "let fly."

One of the Germans sprang upward, waved his arms above him as he began his flight into eternity.

The others dropped back into their holes, and there was another clatter of machine guns and again the bullets slashed across the thicket.

But there was silence on the American side. York waited.

More cautiously, German heads began to rise above their pits. York moved his rifle deliberately along the line knocking back those heads that were the more venturesome. The American rifle shoots five times, and a clip was gone before the Germans realized