ESCAPED PRISONERS FROM GERMANY

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 3152, 2 August 1917, Page 7

ESCAPED PRISONERS FROM GERMANY

FORCED LABOUR AND FLOGGING OF BRITISH SOLDIERS.

After exciting adventures, a batch' of English soldiers, who had escaped from Germany, arrived recently in London. They confirmed all the recent reports of the 'inhuman treatment prisoners of war are receiving at tho hands of the Germans. ' They were, they said, fed mainly on bread and water. Without any previous experience of mining, some of them were ordered to work in coal mines. They were employed at the pifs mouth for a fortnight and down below for tiro months. ' They were guarded by 70 sentries and two vicious dogs. At one camp in Rhineland the dogs were maliciously set on to bite them. ..-.■,...- ]">■;. Altogether, the men stated, 400 British were employed in one particular mining district. One of them, who was captnred at Mons. averred that ho had not seen a pi'ece of meat for two' and a half years. The men generally agreed that tho treatment was bad and the provisions, were poor. When they were first taken to the mines to work they protested that, as prisoners of war, they were not compelled to work. Then the Germans split them into sections, and flogged them with a length of indiarubber tubing. Thoy also beat them with the buttend of rifles. The -prisoners subsequently agreed to work, but more men were flogged for refusing to dou tho pit clothes. For a time thev were paid three marks weekly, but later even this small remuneration was stopped. • Some of the men had to swim four or five waterways before they reached the frontier, and on more than ouo occasion they were almost detected. A Canadian sergeant, a Middlesex corporal .and a Scotsman escaped together from Herzlake, a small camp for 86 men, 27 of whom were British. On May IS they tunnelled under the barrack Wall and the commandant's office while the commandant was sleeping there, and had got clear of the barbed wire fence when the camp dog gave the alarm. Two others wero recaptured, but the three got away. Hiding in woods day by dav. thev subsisted on one ration and malted milk tablets. They had a narrow escape of being shot by a sentry. Two others, one a Northumberland Fusilier, escaped from Obercassel, where they had been working on tram lines.