IN A WRETCHED PLIGHT

Dominion, Volume 9, Issue 2639, 9 December 1915, Page 5

IN A WRETCHED PLIGHT

BRITISH PRISONERS IN' GERMAN PRISON CAMPS ■ '! By Telegraph-Pruss Association—Oopyritht (llec. December 8, 10.40 p.m.) London, December 8. The "Daily Chronicle" states that 160 civilians who had been released froin . the German prison camp at Ruhleben ' have arrived at Flushing (Holland) They tell pitiable stories, of their ill treatment. They are exhausted in body and mind. said that tho Germans are revenging themselves on 4500 Britishers with a meanness only possible to the German character., Thero is no heating of the camps bo fore two o'clock in tho. afternoon, and then it is moagre. Tho soldiers in the early part of the war attempted to persuade the prisoners to work by belabouring them wjt'h rifles. Another act;of cruelty, which was even forced upon invalids of sixty years Of age, was to walk for an hour at a fast pace around the racecourse 1 The interned men are tied to posts for tlie, smallost infractions of the rules. The clothes of, all the\ prisoners have been painted with broad yellow stripes. The food is bad, and there is! a high rate of sickness and mortality. The returned prisoners include a ; number of maimed soldiers, the major- i ity with pinched faces and sunken eyes, < ,garbed in the shabbiest clothes, con- I trasting strangely with tho warm suits i and overcoats in which the well-fed . Germans who were returned to Ger- ] many that same night were fitted out. Tlie returned men | shocking happenings at Wittenburg, whore there are fifteen thousand prisoners. Typhus broke out, and sixteen hundred , prisoners died. • The German guards immediately fled, and six British Army . medical officers from the other camps . volunteered to go to Wittenburg. Five of them immediately caught typhus, and three died. s