ctly what had happened. Sergeant
Speranza, wounded by machine gun fire and again by the explosion of the
grenade, was found in the ruins of the cottage when the detachment of
the enemy captured it. He was conscious and able to speak, so instead
of being bayonetted was carried to the rear where he might be questioned
concerning the American forces. The questioning was most unsatisfactory
to the Prussian officers who conducted it. Albert fainted, recovered
consciousness and fainted again. So at last the Yankee swine was left
to die or get well and his Prussian interrogators went about other
business, the business of escaping capture themselves. But when they
retreated the few prisoners, mostly wounded men, were taken with them.

Albert's recollections of the next few days were hazy and very doubtful.
Pain, pain and more pain. Hours and hours--they seemed like years--of
jolting over rough roads. Pawing-over by a fat, bearded surgeon, who
may not have been intentionally brutal, but quite as likely may. A great
desire to die, punctuated by occasional feeble spurts of wishing to
live. Then more surgical man-handling, more jolting--in freight cars
this time--a slow, miserable recovery, nurses who hated their patients
and treated them as if they did, then, a prison camp, a German prison
camp. Then horrors and starvation and brutality lasting many months.
Then fever.

He was wandering in that misty land between this world and the
next when, the armistice having been signed, an American Red Cross
representative found him. In the interval between fits of delirium
he told this man his name and regiment and, later, the name of his
grandparents. When it seemed sure that he was to recover the Red Cross
representative cabled the facts to this country. And, still later, those
facts, or the all-important fact that Sergeant Albert M. C. Speranza was
not dead but alive, came by telegraph to Captain Zelotes Snow of South
Harniss. And, two months after that, Captain Zelotes himself, standing
on the wharf in Boston and peering up at a crowded deck above him, saw
the face of his grandson, that face which he had never expected to see
again, looking eagerly down upon him.

A few more weeks and it was over. The brief interval of camp life and
the mustering out were things of the past. Captain Lote and Albert,
seated in the train, were on their way down the Cape, bound home. Home!
The word had a significance now which it never had before. Home!