You know we were in the Argonne Forest twenty-eight days, and had some mighty hard fighting in there. A lot of our boys were killed off. Every company has to have so many sergeants. They needed a sergeant; and they jes' took me.

On how he came to be known as "Sergeant York" when he was still technically only a corporal, as quoted in Sergeant York And His People (1922) by Sam K. Cowan, Ch. I : A Fight In The Forest Of The Argonne.