The Yanks Are Coming! (28 page)

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

FRANCIS P. DUFFY (1871–1932) AND ALVIN C. YORK (1887–1964)

F
ather Francis Duffy, the most decorated United States Army chaplain, was actually born and raised, and earned his undergraduate degree, in Canada. Both his maternal and paternal grandparents were Irish immigrants, and his Irish bloodlines would guide his future. He accepted a teaching position at a Catholic school in New York City, decided to become a priest—eventually earning a doctorate at the Catholic University of America—and became a professor at St. Joseph's Seminary in New York. He got a brief taste of stateside chaplain's duty during the Spanish-American War when he ministered to soldiers returning from Cuba. Many of the soldiers
suffered from tropical fevers; Duffy himself came down with typhoid and had to be hospitalized.

As a professor Duffy was popular with his students. But as an intellectual in the most intellectual of religious denominations and a relative liberal in the most conservative institution in the world—one dedicated to preaching eternal verities—he got into a slight bit of bother with the Church authorities who thought his views were tinged with unwelcome modernism. As a consequence, the magazine he edited was shuttered, and he was eventually removed from his professorship and assigned as a parish priest in the Bronx, starting up the Church of Our Savior, a converted store consecrated into a church.

THE FIGHTING 69TH

Tall, lean, and tough looking, in 1914 Duffy became chaplain of the 69th Infantry Regiment—the “Fighting 69th,” a proudly and jealously “Irish” regiment—of the New York National Guard. In 1916 he wrote a frank letter to Cardinal John Farley asking for a transfer from his parish duties, saying that he wanted “a man's job—one big enough to tax my energies to the full.”
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He got that job, but not from Cardinal Farley. The Fighting 69th was mobilized (and Father Duffy with it) to join General John J. Pershing's expedition against Pancho Villa. In the event, the 69th never saw action against the banditos, but Father Duffy did have to defend the 69th's reputation against false allegations of drunken, brawling (Irish) behavior, and keep down the dander of his men who were suspicious at the arrival of non-Irish officers to the regiment. The 69th returned home in March 1917 to a parade, a hero's welcome, and a blessing from Cardinal Farley.

The Fighting 69th was proud of its fame in the War Between the States—whence came its moniker—but many of its Irish American volunteers were truculent and suspicious about the prospect, which became a reality in April 1917, of going to war alongside the dreaded English. Both Cardinal Farley and Father Duffy, however, were diligent in asserting that it was time for Irish Americans to once again prove their loyalty, their patriotism, and their willingness to fight for their adopted American home. Sure enough, new recruits came pouring in, many of them Irish Americans, others willing to fake it to join an esteemed regiment. When the 69th (now officially the 165th Infantry Regiment) was made part of the Rainbow Division, it was reinforced by other New York regiments—an unpopular move, but Father Duffy promised an Irish welcome to all who came into the regiment. He even helped arrange the transfer of poet and Catholic convert Joyce Kilmer, though only after he was convinced Kilmer wasn't a pantywaist poetaster
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and Kilmer's enthusiasm overcame Father Duffy's doubts that the poet's place was at home with his wife and children (of whom he had five, one of whom died shortly before he officially joined the 69th).
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Sent to Camp Mills, Long Island, Father Duffy was a peacemaker among New Yorkers from rival boroughs and regiments, as well as between his own New Yorkers and the rough-hewn men of the 167th Regiment from Alabama, which had last met the 69th in the War Between the States. After the Rainbow Division shipped overseas, Father Duffy once again tamped down Irish tempers when the troops were sent British uniforms to replace their own tattered togs. (By compromise, they wore the uniforms but only after clipping off the British buttons and replacing them with American ones.)

On 1 March 1918 Duffy wrote down a sentiment that few European soldiers would have echoed at that stage of the war: “The
trenches at last!” The men, he noted, “are happy at being on the front . . . and look on the discomforts as part of the game. . . . Their main sport is going out on patrols . . . to cut wires, and stir things up generally. With our artillery throwing over shells from the rear and our impatient infantry prodding the enemy, this sector will not be long a quiet one.”
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German shelling took its toll on the regiment, picking off two sentries and collapsing a dugout that claimed the lives of twenty-one men of E Company.

Father Duffy reminded the men at a St. Patrick's Day Mass, “We can pay tribute to our dead, but we must not lament them overmuch.” There was still fighting to do, and a just cause to be served. At least one soldier thought Father Duffy resembled St. Patrick himself, preaching to the converted heathen as the chaplain stood “erect on the hill-top beside his little improvised altar . . . [overlooking] the columns of men as they approached.”
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The eventual colonel of the Fighting 69th, Frank McCoy—a West Pointer, veteran of the Spanish-American War, and former aide to President Theodore Roosevelt—noted how Father Duffy knew all the men of the regiment by name, cajoled the sick and wounded with jokes instead of mothering them with sympathy, and was good company at the dining table and a “very learned” man.
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He was also a tireless, calm, and courageous one, insisting on serving at the front, under fire, slapping nervous soldiers on the back, offering words of martial encouragement, handing out cigarettes, helping to treat and retrieve the wounded, hearing confessions before battle, and helping bury the dead after. Once, in a tight spot, he disdained an offer of grenades, saying, “Every man to his trade. I stick to mine.”
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By war's end the Fighting 69th (or the 165th as it was known during the war) had taken casualties of more than 50 percent of its force. So Father Duffy was kept busy, but not too busy to conspire to
make his great friend the outstanding combat officer William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan colonel of the 69th, a position Donovan, commander of the regiment's 1st Battalion, had disdained during the war,
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but now gratefully accepted to lead the regiment home. Father Duffy ended the war a lieutenant colonel and had earned the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal, the Conspicuous Service Cross, the Légion d'Honneur, and the Croix de Guerre.

After the war he returned to life as a parish priest, as rector and then pastor of Holy Cross Church in the area of New York City known as “Hell's Kitchen.” Alexander Woollcott recollected of him, “This city is too large for most of us. But not for Father Duffy. Not too large, I mean, for him to invest it with the homeliness of a neighborhood. When he walked down the street—any street—he was like a curé striding through his own village. Everyone knew him.”
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Father Duffy died in 1932, after an intestinal infection. An estimated twenty-five thousand people turned out for his funeral at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City, the streets lined with mourners. His best epitaph came perhaps from a New York police officer trying to move a woman who had positioned herself in a reserved spot outside the cathedral. The woman asserted her right to be there, saying she had been a personal friend of Father Duffy. The policeman replied, “That is true, Ma'am, of everyone here today.”
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Father Duffy was the Catholic intellectual who made his true mark not in learned journals but in the mud of the bloody trenches of France and in the counsel, sacraments, and sermons he delivered as a parish priest.

THE MARKSMAN

Alvin C. York made no pretense of being an intellectual, a philosopher, or a theologian—he was nevertheless one of the great
Christian heroes of the war, a man of conscience who spoke to America's conscience. He was an authentically log-cabin-born American from the hills of Tennessee, the son of a farmer who doubled as a blacksmith. York was the third of eleven children, and like his siblings he worked around the house or in the fields as soon as he was able. He also learned to hunt and to make every shot count—because ammunition cost money.

Schooling and church-going were often ignored in the mountains. While the mountain folk were religious and centered their social life on going to church, the pastors were too few and their churches too scattered to make it a regular affair; and education had to play second fiddle to the need for farm labor. Alvin's formal education ended after the third grade.

When his father was killed by a mule kicking him in the head, Alvin, nearly fourteen, took a variety of jobs to support the family. That was admirable, but to burn off steam from his labors he became a roughhouser—a card player, a drinker, a brawler. Handy with his fists, he was equally adept with knives and also strove to emulate the gunfighters of mountain legend, practicing with a revolver until he could “crack a lizard's head”
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with a bullet fired from either hand. Drunk or sober, he was an impressive marksman who earned money (and meat) in shooting competitions.

By his mid-twenties, York had begun sobering up and attending church more regularly. He still enjoyed his prowess with guns but came to realize that trouble was something to be avoided, not dallied with in raucous drinking sessions. He had a conversion experience in January 1915, after which he put drinking and smoking, dancing and gambling—and their consequent dangers—behind him. In 1917 he got engaged to a girl thirteen years his junior (he had recognized her as his future wife from the moment he first saw her; they married
immediately after his return from the war) and was so active in the life of his church that he even preached when the preacher was away (York's other special interest was establishing Sunday schools).

When conscripted for the war, York tried four times to get an exemption on religious grounds and was stunned that the authorities would not take his pacifistic reading of the Bible as . . . well, gospel. York made a good soldier, nevertheless, in that he was dutiful and an expert marksman before he was even handed his Army rifle. At the rifle range, he thought the targets were awfully large—much bigger than a turkey's or a lizard's head—and was amazed that “Them-there Greeks and Italians and Poles and New York Jews and some of the boys from the big cities . . . not only missed the targets, they missed the background on which the targets were fixed. They missed everything except the sky.”
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Two kindly officers talked to York about his objections to fighting, gave him a different interpretation of Scripture than he had previously considered, guaranteed him a noncombat role if he requested it, and granted him leave to think it over. York went home and spent a night alone on the mountain praying. When he returned, he was convinced that God had no objections to his fighting in his nation's cause and that as long as he kept faith he would be preserved from all harm. York had always considered patriotism a virtue. His officers convinced him that America's cause in the First World War was just, and he knew in his gut, “If some feller was to come along and bust into your house and mistreat your wife and murder your children,”
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a Christian man didn't have to just stand for it—he should defend himself and his family. He returned to his officers a calm, confident soldier, though he “couldn't help a-wonderin' why there wasn't some other way to get peace except by fightin' for it.”
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In May 1918, York shipped to France with the 82nd “All American” Division (a division with soldiers from every state in the Union). In action, he learned that “The only thing to do was to pray and trust God”
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—and to get the enemy before he got you. York did that well enough that on 8 October 1918 he managed to knock out 35 enemy machine guns, kill 25 German soldiers, and round up and capture another 132. That extraordinary feat made him an American hero—the mountain sharpshooter whose facility with rifle and pistol, and cool-handed courage, seemed to make him a throwback to the days of the long-rifle men, a Davy Crockett of the Great War. Marshal Foch thought it the most outstanding individual action of the entire conflict. Woodrow Wilson felt obliged to meet York in Paris in December 1918. He shook the soldier's hand, talked to him briefly, but did not invite him to stay for dinner—indeed, he had the bemused York escorted away, as he was expecting other guests.

Though the events of October 1918 had made him famous, York was never entirely at ease with what he had done. He prayed not only for his fallen American comrades but for the souls of the Germans he had killed; he once said that the fighting in the Meuse-Argonne was “one of those things I want to forget”;
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and at the end of his life he asked his minister son how God would judge his actions of that day. For his own part, he believed that God had protected him and that the American Expeditionary Force had indeed served the role of peacemaker in the terrible war in Europe. When York returned stateside, he refused to capitalize on his fame—that didn't seem right to him—except in one respect. Having seen the big old world, he thought that some of it deserved to come to the mountains, and that perhaps he was the one ordained to help bring it there.

In his words,

           
Before the war I had never been out of the mountains. I had never wanted to be. I had sorter of figured out that them-there mountains were our shield against the outside world. They sorter of isolated us and kept us together so that we might grow up pureblooded and resourceful and God-loving and God-fearing. They done that, too, but they done more'n that. They done kept out many good and worthwhile things like good roads, schools, libraries, up-to-date homes, and modern farming methods. But I never thought of these things before going to war. Only when I got back home again and got to kinder thinking and dreaming.
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