ESCAPED FROM GERMANY

New Zealand Times, Volume XLII, Issue 9720, 24 July 1917, Page 3

ESCAPED FROM GERMANY

FORCED LABOUR AND FLOGGING OF BRITISH SOLDIERS. 'After exciting adyenturcs,’ a batch of English soldiers, who had esoajt.-d from Germany, arrived in London ut the beginning of. June. They confirmed all the recent reports of the inhuman treatment prisoners of war are receiving at the 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 pit’s mouth for a fortnight and down below for two 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 captured at Alons, averred that he had not seen a piece of moat for 21 years. The men generally agreed that the treatment was bad and the provL sions 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 theny-into sections, and flogged them with-% length "of in-diarubher-tubing. They also beat them with the butt-end of rifles.

The -prisoners subsequently agreed to work, but more men were flogged for refusing to don the, pit clothes. For a time they were paid three marks weekly, but later even .'tins small remuneration was stopped. Some of the men hard to swim four or five waterways before they reached the frontier, and on more .than, one occasion they were* also detected. . A Canadian sergeant, a Middlesex corporal, and a escaped together from Herzlake'.T a small camp for 86 men. 27 of whom'were British. On May IStlr 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 were recaptured, but the three got away. Hiding in woods day by day, they subsisted on one ration and malted milk’ tablets. They had a\,narrow escape of shot by a sentry. Two others, one a Northumberland Fusilier, escaped from Obereassel, where they had been working on tram hues. A Leeds eoldier, ;a prisoner or war in Germany., lias written to his mother as follows: til have just been through six weeks of torture with hunger anil cold in the German firing line. This is not war. It is murder with' prison, ere of war. There were 000 of us there, and wo left a lot who will never return. Nearly every man, will be a consumptive -before long. There* arc over 200 of us in hospital from the treatment.”

This letter wag taken by the mother to the Lord Mayor, who communicated with Lord Derby, and he has replied that “knowledge of what is occurring with regard to prisoners has only recently come to hand, and steps have been taken which will result in the removal of British prisoners from the proximity of the Gorman firing line.”