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Outside of the world's shooting ranges and galleries, finding an empty bullet casing without a story to tell is a rare thing.
When that same casing is corroded, speckled with dirt and rust from lying nearly 90 years in the mud of the French countryside-its deadly contents expelled during one of World War I's greatest acts of heroism-the story is bound to be worth retelling.
Until recently, a nearly nine-decade discrepancy had endured surrounding the exact location where Cpl. Alvin York-who was later immortalized by Gary Cooper as Sgt. York in a film of the same name-and seven survivors of his 17-man patrol captured a German company of more than 130 men during October 1918.
Thomas Nolan, a professor of geosciences and the director of the R.O. Fullerton Laboratory for Spatial Technology, led a five-man interdisciplinary research team to Châtel-Chéréry in the Argonne Forest of Northeastern France over spring break to uncover truth behind the mystery. There he employed a combination of various geographic technologies bridging archaeology and history to zero in on the site.
"One of the things I was interested in was using geography, specifically geographic information systems, to integrate the historical and archaeological records in a holistic way," Nolan said, while working to build a 3-D digital model of the site on his computer. He expressed a long-standing interest in this combination of fields, having worked on several previous projects mapping out Civil War-era locations in Tennessee in the past, including the Battle of Stones River and the Civil War Engagement at Liberty Gap.
"We had the written accounts and historic maps [of the area], and we used those to relate to the modern terrain," he explained. His references included World War I-era German and French regional contour maps, the latter of which he described as 'grossly inaccurate.' "We then used global positioning systems to navigate to where we thought the event took place and were able to verify that with our metal detectors."
Their search proved successful-despite the inaccurate reference materials. They found many empty casings, and many untold stories. York, who began the war proclaiming pacifism as grounds for conscientious objection, utilized his shooting prowess-a byproduct of frequently hunting near his home in Pall Mall, Tenn.-to deadly effect. In addition to 162 spent rounds from the Model 08 German water-cooled machine guns that fired down on his party, killing six and wounding two, Nolan's team uncovered 12 of the 15 casings from the Enfield 1917 rifle the 31-year-old corporal used to silence the men manning those same guns.
Those shells will be donated to the Sgt. Alvin C. York State Historic Site in Pall Mall, Tenn., and the team is working to have them matched to York's rifle, which is currently displayed at the Tennessee State Museum in Nashville. Nolan expressed surprise at finding as many cartridges as his team did, citing a common practice of local towns to scavenge for metal at battlesites.
"We found out that, in the 1950s, the French citizens in that village were in need of employment and income to the point that they were willing to go through the woods and look for spent cartridges," Nolan said.
Rounds from the .45-caliber Colt Model 1911 pistol York used to kill six German soldiers bearing down on him have eluded the team thus far, Nolan said. Although the team's findings are highly conclusive, he suggested that finding those cartridges would make their discovery definitive.
"[Our conclusion] is highly probable, but nothing is 100 percent certain," Nolan explained. "We were only in the field for four days the first time. We're fairly confident, but it would take more field work to make it definite."
Nolan, who funded the majority of the expedition out of his own pocket, said he hopes publicity generated by his finding will help defray the cost of future field work at the site.
"We paid for our own way over there," he said. "We felt like it was something important to do, and if we had to wait on somebody else to fund it, it might not ever have happened."
Nolan said he hopes to fund future work at the site through donations and an as-yet-untitled documentary currently being worked on by the team's videographer, David Curry, the executive director of Traveller's Rest Plantation and Museum in Nashville. Curry said he sees value in telling the story of contemporary Americans tracing the paths and deeds of older generations during the Great War.
"I think [York's story] is extremely significant," he said. "I think the real story of York in World War I has never been completely told. There are a lot of different perspectives, and there's never been a documentary form within the context in which things happened. I think there's something to the story of Tennesseans going back to World War I Europe to tell the story of another Tennessean."
The results of the team's work weren't limited to decaying ammunition and film interviews with locals. Nolan's office in Kirksey Old Main has several plastic bags filled with assorted artifacts of World War I the team recovered, including a heavily rusted muzzle cover for a German Mauser infantry rifle and a piece of a leather carrying harness that was standard on German uniforms of the period.
In addition to solving the long-standing mystery surrounding York's act, the team had a separate objective: helping to improve the lackluster local economy.
"There's not much infrastructure for tourism in that part of France," Nolan said. "We wanted to encourage the development of tourism by developing some of the World War I historic sites that relate to the American presence there. [The French] are actually interested in building a monument and establishing a park there."
An aluminum mess kit riddled with small holes due to exposure to the elements was recovered by the French and given to Nolan's team-one of many examples of the coordination and support the locals provided the researchers during their four days of field work.
"[The soldier's] name and where he was from were etched in the back," Curry said. "A Frenchman found it and gave it to us to see if we could locate the man's family. I think the French feel a lot of gratitude [toward Americans]-York is seen as much as a French hero as an American hero over there."
York's commendations for his act included the French Croix de Guerre and Legion of Honor, the Italian Croce di Guerra and the American Medal of Honor. He is considered by many to be the greatest hero of World War I and this is why his story continues to hold public interest, Nolan and Curry said.
"I think, in some ways, he already is a timeless hero," Curry said. "He was an ordinary individual thrown into extraordinary circumstances, and he overcame."
If an empty shell lying in the dirt of the Argonne Forest had been better aimed, however, the tale of the hero from Fentress County might have had a tragically different ending.
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