In the light of all this, the historian wonders if the influence of Gracie Williams might not have carried considerable weight, along with his mother's, in bringing to an end Alvin's wild oats days. A further change in his life came soon after and here, almost certainly, Gracie was very influential. On New Year's day, 1915, Alvin York professed religion and cast his lot with the church instead of the "shack." From that day until his death forty-nine years later, his faith never wavered.
The Valley of the Three Forks of the Wolf in 1917 was a dimple in the Cumberlands where "exceeding peace" abounded. But there was one small cloud on the horizon. There had been a trickle of news filtering into the valley about a big war that was going on way across the sea somewhere. The menfolk would gather at R. C. Pile's store on Saturday afternoons and "Pastor" Pile would read to them about the fighting in Europe. They gathered that a country called Germany ruled by a fellow called the Kaiser was the trouble-maker, but until early 1917 it had never occurred to any of them that this far-away conflict could ever affect them in any way. Even after the papers began to express alarm and fear that America was going to be drawn into the blood-letting, the people of the valley could not conceive of a foreign war reaching down into their peaceful valley and disturbing their way of life. If the war were here, they could understand it. Many still remembered the horrors of the Civil War. Even Alvin York knew something of war for both of his grandfathers had died horrible deaths because of it. But a war 4000 miles across a wide ocean, there was no way it could affect them. But even then it was to be only a matter of a few months before Alvin York would be writing this:
"Life's tol'ably queer. You think you've got a grip on it, then you open your hands and find out there's nothing in them. It doesn't go in straight lines like bees to their hives or quail from the covey. It sort of circles like foxes and goes back again to where it began."
So spoke Alvin York in 1917 when Uncle Sam pointed a finger at him and said, "I want you." The big red-headed, raw-boned son of the forest thought he had a grip on life. Before the arrival of a certain card on June 5, 1917, the future never looked brighter for Alvin York. For him life had always been good, even if hard at times. Now it looked better than ever. Hadn't Gracie agreed to marry him when last they met on the limestone ledge under the giant beeches? And hadn't he just been named an elder in their little Church of Christ in Christian Union? With his wild oats days behind him for good, he had learned that leading the singing in church was far better than fighting and brawling and drinking and gambling at the "shack" on the Tennessee-Kentucky line. And finally, his terribly pinched financial circumstances were beginning to show unmistakable signs of improvement. Up until now he had never been able to earn more than one dollar a day. Now he was driving steel on the new highway being built through the valley, and he was making the unbelievable sum of one dollar and sixty cents a day. Alvin York still labored under the delusion that he had a firm grip on all the good things. Even at this late date, he could not imagine opening his hands and finding them empty, all his good things taken away by a war 4000 miles from his valley across mountains and plains and an ocean.
The card that arrived on June 5, 1917 was his notice to register for the draft. Not until then would he acknowledge, even to himself, that fate had caught up with him. Describing this day when his world began to disintegrate around him, he wrote: "I kind of lived in a dream the next few days (after Gracie had promised to marry him) and then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, so it seemed to me, life sort of took me by the back of the neck and tried to lift me out of our little valley and throw me into the war over there in France. I received from the post office a little red card telling me to register for the draft."
He did.
The small cloud on the horizon of just a few months before had now spread all the way around the world, casting its shadow over the Valley of the Three Forks of the Wolf. Alvin York "opened his hands" to find there was "nothing in them."
He started keeping a diary on that fateful June 5th, the day he got his notice to register for the draft. From that day on until May 29, 1919 when he arrived back in his Valley of the Three Forks, Alvin recorded every activity he took part in. The tempo of the military machine shifted into high gear for Alvin York after June 5th. On that date he registered. On October 28th he reported for his physical examination. After that he had no doubt about going to the army. He says: "They looked at me and weighed me and I weighed 170 pounds and was 72 inches tall. So, they said I passed all right. Well, when they said that I almost knowed that I would have to go to the army." On November 14, he reported for induction, on the 15th he left Oneida for Camp Gordon, Georgia, and on the 16th he arrived in Camp Gordon.
The world has been under the impression that Alvin York was a conscientious objector who tried unsuccessfully to avoid serving in the army. Technically, this was not so, although at one point he admitted it and at another denied it categorically. Let the reader make up his own mind after reading the next few pages.
Alvin York did not want to go to war. He freely admits that and tells why. He says, "There were two reasons why I didn't want to go to war. My own experience told me it wasn't right, and the Bible was against it too.....but Uncle Sam said he wanted me, and I had been brought up to believe in my country."
If there is anything one can say about Alvin York without fear of contradiction, it is that he was patriotic. He loved his country, and what is more, he came from a long line of patriots who had fought for their country all the way from King's Mountain to New Orleans, Chapultepec and Shiloh. In addition to York's direct family ancestors who had fought for their country since the Revolution, he also felt a close kinship with such frontier greats as Andrew Jackson, Davy Crockett and Sam Houston. The influence of all these patriotic ancestors, both by blood and by culture, weighed heavily on the mind of Alvin York as the day of his induction into the army moved closer and even after he got to Camp Gordon. He describes his dilemma in these words:
"So you see my religion and my experience...told me not to go to war, and the memory of my ancestors...told me to get my gun and go fight. I didn't know what to do. I'm telling you there was a war going on inside me, and I didn't know which side to lean to. I was a heap bothered. It is a most awful thing when the wishes of your God and your country...get mixed up and go against each other. One moment I would make up my mind to follow God, and the next I would hesitate and almost make up my mind to follow Uncle Sam. Then I wouldn't know which to follow or what to do. I wanted to follow both but I couldn't. They were opposite. I wanted to be a good Christian and a good American too."
Up to this point in the sheltered life of the isolated valley in which Alvin York had lived, he had never come face to face with and had to choose between two great principles or courses of action. He had always just assumed that being a good Christian and being a good, patriotic American were one and the same thing. At least they were so closely connected that a man dedicated to one would automatically be dedicated to the other. Now he was learning it was not so in the light of what he had always been taught about Christianity and about patriotism. The complexities of theology and its application to living in a world far more complex than he had imagined, drove him to cry out, "I am a soul in doubt."
The records in the War Department in Washington will always make it appear that Alvin York was a conscientious objector. He was not. He was a "soul in doubt" as he said. He was torn between what he thought was his duty to his country and his God. When this conflict was resolved in his mind, he never again voiced objection to fighting, killing if necessary, for his country. The petitions filed asking exemption from military duty were initiated by Pastor Pile and his mother. "My little old mother and Pastor Pile wanted me to get out," he wrote in his diary.
"Pastor Pile put in a plea to the government that it was against the religion of our church to fight, and that he wanted to get me out on these grounds. And he sent his papers to the War Department, and they filled them out and sent them to me at the camp and asked me to sign them.
"They told me all I had to do was to sign them. And I refused to sign them, as I couldn't see it the way Pastor Pile did. My mother, too, put in a plea to get me out as her sole support. My father was dead and I was keeping my mother and brothers and sisters. And the papers were fixed up and sent to Camp Gordon and I was asked to sign them. I knew I had plenty of brothers back there who could look after my mother, that I was not the sole support, and I didn't feel I ought to do it. And so I never asked for exemption on any grounds at all. I never was a conscientious objector. I am not today. I didn't want to go and fight and kill. But I had to answer the call of my country and I did. I believed it was right. I have got no hatred toward the Germans and I never had."
Here we have a direct statement from Alvin York denying categorically that he ever was a conscientious objector. But we have another direct quotation from another book stating that "....so long as the records remain I will be officially known as a conscientious objector. I was. I joined the church. I had taken its creed, and I had taken it without what you might call reservations. I was not a Sunday Christian. I believed in the Bible, and I tried in my own way to live up to it."
Here we have two direct statements which appear to be flatly contradictory: "I never was a conscientious objector," and "So long as the records remain I will be officially known as a conscientious objector. I was."
How do we reconcile these statements? Or can we reconcile them? I think we can.
Those who knew Alvin York personally knew how confused he was at that time. In that confused state of mind he interpreted the term "conscientious objector" in two different ways, as it was used by the War Department and as he saw it in the light of his church creed and the Bible. By the former interpretation he was not a conscientious objector; by the latter he was. His lack of education made it impossible for him to comprehend entirely the two horns of the dilemma upon which he was impaled. In his own writing he gives us a basis for this explanation: "Only the boy who is uneducated can understand what an awful thing ignorance is . . . . I know what I want to say, but I don't always know just how to put it down on paper. I just don't know how to get it out of me and put it in words."
The conflict raged on in his mind. He was still the "soul in doubt knowing that he really wanted to follow in the footsteps of his ancestors and fight for his country, but finding no way to reconcile war and killing with his own conscience and the creed of his church.
