Lieut. Alfred P. Reck. Out of the great World war there have come numerous stories of heroism, of thrilling adventure, miraculous escapes, brutal treatment and great fortitude. In the comparatively brief career of Lieut. Alfred P. Reck as a soldier of the American Expeditionary Forces, all of these are combined into one seemingly interminable, nightmarish experience in which he ran the whole gamut of suffering, danger and abuse, and from which he happily emerged to take up again the duties of peace. Lieutenant Reck was born at Piqua, June 25, 1898, a son of Charles and Nina (Pierce) Reck, his father being a druggist of this city. He comes of good fighting stock as his paternal grandfather, F. W. Reck, was a soldier of the Union during the Civil war and his maternal grandfather, W. F. Pierce, was colonel of the Forty-seventh Regiment, Ohio Volunteer infantry, during that struggle. After his graduation from the Piqua High School, Alfred P. Reck went to Pittsburgh, where he secured a position in the accounting department of the Westinghouse Electric Company. He was so employed at the time of his enlistment in the One Hundred and Ninth Infantry, Twenty-eighth division, a Pennsylvania command, and was sent overseas in April, 1918, in the British steamship "Anchises." After some training in England, his command was sent to France, and while still unseasoned was thrown into the engagement with the French at the second battle of the Marne. On the midnight of July 15, 1918, the Germans attacked on their drive to Paris. Lieutenant Reck, then a sergeant (he later being promoted lieutenant for distinguished service), had charge of a platoon of fifty men in a force of 250. The attacking Germans numbered thousands and when the French retreated the Americans were left to fight it out. The enemy crossed the Marne by boat-loads and the men under Lieutenant Reck rolled hand grenades down upon them, but they were too greatly outnumbered and the command was almost annihilated. Lieutenant Reck was incapacitated by liquid fire, his neck being burned seriously and his whole body seeming afire, and fell unconscious. At this time the American artillery behind began to shell this sector, but the lieutenant, who had regained consciousness, crawled on his hands and knees away from the shrapnel, and when it rained managed to catch a few drops in his mouth and partly soothe his tortured throat. In vain he tried to attract the allied planes, he being mistaken for a German soldier, and bombs were dropped toward him which he avoided with difficulty. Indeed a splinter from one bomb pinned his coat to the ground. Eventually he made his way to a tree, which he climbed with much difficulty, but in his exhausted state he soon went to sleep and fell ten feet to the ground. For four days, with nothing to eat or drink, without sense of direction, and with the maggots swarming in his sore body, he wandered aimlessly and finally collapsed from sheer exhaustion. He was awakened by a brutal kick on his sore shoulder from the boot of a German soldier and was put on a stretcher and carried to the rear of the German lines. With two other captives he was thrown into an abandoned wine cellar, with the cheerful information that in the morning, as a reprisal, all three were to have their throats cut. Instead they were taken to the prison camp at Fremlin, where Lieutenant Reck witnessed German surgeons driving nails in fractured limbs to hold the limbs together. Later he was transferred to the prison camp at Hirson and then entrained for another camp still farther away from the lines. Here a French soldier bribed one of the German guards for a map, an enroute the French poilu, Lieutenant Reck and five others escaped by jumping from the train. With the aid of the map and a compass they pressed on into Belgium, dodging innumerable German patrols and begging food from the Belgian peasants, who ran the risk of death in giving them aid. At Rheinsdale, Belgium, they learned that the frontier at Holland was guarded by a highly charged system of electric wires and charged pools and decided to try another avenue of escape less dangerous. Catching a freight train, they found it filled with German soldiers, but managed to evade them and at Aix-la-Chappelle started again for the Holland border, steering their course by the North star. They finally came to the electric wires across the Dutch frontier, and for days waited in the underbrush for a good opportunity for escape to present itself. A French aviator eventually succeeded in winning his way through to freedom and Lieutenant Reck made the next attempt. He had nearly gotten through when discovered and captured by German soldiers, who took him to a prison camp at Giessen. In the refined cruelty which distinguished their treatment of their prisoners, the Germans here informed Lieutenant Reck that Mexico had joined forces with Germany and in the absence of American troops had captured the states of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Eventually he was released, following the signing of the Armistice, crossed the Rhine, and rejoined the American forces January 1, 1919. Returning to Piqua he took up newspaper work, and became city editor of the Piqua Call. His next position was on the staff of the Dayton journal, where he remained until he went to Washington as private secretary to Senator John S. Cable.