Part 17

Our men dropped off one by one. The walls of our trench were battered to greasy sand heaps. The dead lay everywhere. Soon only Wedgewood, another chap, and myself were left.

"They've cleaned us out now. The whole battalion's gone," he said.

As far as we could see along the line there was nothing left, not even trenches--just churned-up earth and mutilated bodies. The gallant Fourth had stood its ground in the face of probably the worst hell that had yet visited the Canadian lines and had been wiped out!

It was not long before the other fellow was finished by a piece of shrapnel. I was wounded in the back with a splinter from a shell which broke overhead and then another got me in the knee. I bled freely, but luckily neither wound was serious. About 1.30 we saw a star shell go up over the German lines.

"They're coming!" cried Wedgewood, and we jumped to the gun.

The Germans were about seventy-five yards off when we got the gun trained on them. We gave them our 300 rounds and did great damage; the oncoming troops wavered and the front line crumpled up, but the rest came on.

What followed does not remain very clearly in my mind. We tried to retreat. Every move was agony for me. We did not go far, however. Some of the Germans had got around us and we ran right into four of them. We doubled back and found ourselves completely surrounded. A ring of steel and fierce, pitiless eyes! I expected they would butcher us there and then. The worst we got, however, was a series of kicks as we were marching through the lines in the German communication trenches.

We were given quick treatment at a dressing station and escorted with other prisoners back to Menin by Uhlans. The wounded were made to get along as best they could. We passed through several small towns where the Belgian people tried to give us food. The Uhlans rode along and thrust them back with their lances in the most cold-blooded way. We reached Menin about 10 o'clock that night and were given black bread and coffee--or something that passed by that name. The night was spent in a horse stable with guards all around us with fixed bayonets. The next day we were lined up before a group of German officers, who asked us questions about the numbers and disposition of the British forces, and we lied extravagantly. They knew we were lying, and finally gave it up.

During the next day and a half, traveling in cattle trucks, we had one meal, a bowl of soup. It was weak and nauseating. We took it gratefully, however, for we were nearly starved.

Finally we arrived at Dülmen camp, where I was kept two months. The food was bad, and very, very scanty. For breakfast we had black bread and coffee; for dinner, soup (I still shudder at the thought of turnip soup), and sometimes a bit of dog meat for supper, a gritty, tasteless porridge, which we called "sand storm." We used to sit around with our bowls of this concoction and extract a grim comfort from the hope that some day Kaiser Bill would be in captivity and we might be allowed to feed him on "sand storm."

While I was at Dülmen we had quite a number of visitors. One day Mr. Gerard, the American Ambassador, appeared. He looked us over with great concern and asked us a number of questions. "Is there anything I can do for you?" he asked as he was leaving.

"See if you can get them to give us more food," one of us begged.

"I shall speak to the camp commander about it," promised Mr. Gerard.

I do not doubt that he did so--but there was no change in the menu and no increase in the quantities served.

After two months at Dülmen prison camp we got word that we were to be sent to work on a farm. We conjured up visions of open fields and fresh air and clean straw to sleep in and perhaps even real food to eat. They loaded fifty of us into one car and sent us off, and when we reached our farm we found it was a coal mine!

As we tumbled off the train, stiff, weary, and disappointed, we were regarded curiously by a small group of people who worked in the mines. They were a heavy looking lot--oldish men with beards, and dull, stolid women. They regarded us with sullen hostility, but there was no fire in their antagonism. Some of the men spat and muttered "Schweinhunds!" That was all.

We were marched off to the "Black Hole." It was a large camp with large frame buildings, which had been erected especially for the purpose. There was one building for the French prisoners, one for the Russians, and one for the British and Canadian contingent. Barbed wire entanglements surrounded the camp and there were sentries with drawn bayonets everywhere.

We were greeted with considerable interest by the other prisoners. There were about two hundred of our men there and all of them seemed in bad shape. They had been subjected to the heaviest kind of work on the slenderest rations and were pretty well worn out.

Some of us were selected for the mine and some were told off for coke making, which, as we soon learned, was sheer unadulterated hell. I was selected for the coke mine and put in three days at it--three days of smarting eyes and burning lungs, of aching and weary muscles. Then my chum, Billy Flanagan, was buried under an avalanche of falling coal and killed. There were no safeguards in the mine and the same accident might occur again at any time. So we struck.

The officers took it as a matter of course. We were lined up and ordered to stand rigidly at "attention." No food was served, not even a glass of water was allowed us. We stood there for thirty-six hours. Man after man fainted from sheer exhaustion. When one of us dropped he was dragged out of the ranks to a corner, where a bucket of water was thrown over him, and, as soon as consciousness returned, he was yanked to his feet and forced to return to the line. All this time sentries marched up and down and if one of us moved he got a jab with the butt end of the gun. Every half hour an officer would come along and bark out at us:

"Are you for work ready now?"

Finally, when some of our fellows were on the verge of insanity, we gave in in a body.

After that things settled down into a steady and dull routine. We were routed out at 4 o'clock in the morning. The sentries would come in and beat the butts of their rifles on the wooden floor and roar "Raus!" at the top of their voices. If any sleep-sodden prisoners lingered a second, they were roughly hauled out and kicked into active obedience. Then a cup of black coffee was served out to us and at 5 o'clock we were marched to the mines. There was a dressing room at the mine where we stripped off our prisoners' garb and donned working clothes. We stayed in the mines until 3.30 in the afternoon and the "staggers"--our pet name for the foremen--saw to it that we had a busy time of it. Then we changed back into our prison clothes and marched to barracks, where a bowl of turnip soup was given us and a half pound of bread. We were supposed to save some of the bread to eat with our coffee in the morning. Our hunger was so great, however, that there was rarely any of the bread left in the morning. At 7 o'clock we received another bowl of turnip soup and were then supposed to go to bed.

If it had not been for the parcels of food that we received from friends at home and from the Red Cross we would certainly have starved. We were able to eke out our prison fare by carefully husbanding the food that came from the outside.

The citizens working in the mines when I first arrived were mostly middle-aged. Many were quite venerable in appearance and of little actual use. They were willing enough to work and work hard; but they complained continually about the lack of food.

That was the burden of their conversation, always, food--bread, butter, potatoes, schinken (ham)! They were living on meager rations and the situation grew steadily worse. The people that I worked with were in almost as bad a plight as we prisoners of war. In the course of a few months I could detect sad changes in them.

The German miners were quite as much at the mercy of the officers as we were. Discipline was rigid and they were "strafed" for any infraction of rules; that is, they were subjected to cuts in pay. Lateness, laziness, or insubordination were punished by the deduction of so many marks from their weekly earnings, and all on the say-so of the "stagger" in charge of the squad. At a certain hour each day an official would come around and hand each civilian a slip of paper. I asked one of my companions what it was all about.

"Bread tickets," he explained. "If they don't turn up for work, they don't get their bread tickets and have to go hungry."