[Sidenote: Men do construction work in Ardennes.]
The men were taken to the French Ardennes and compelled to mend roads, man sawmills and forges, build masonry, and toil at other manual tasks. Rough hutments formed their barracks. They were under constant guard both there and at their work, and they were marched under escort from the huts to work and from work to the huts. For food each man was given a two-pound loaf of German bread every five days, a little boiled rice, and a pint of coffee a day. At 8 o'clock in the morning, after a breakfast consisting of a slice of bread and a cup of coffee, they went to work. At 4 o'clock in the afternoon they returned for the night and took their second meal--dinner, tea, and supper all in one. Often they were buffeted and generally ill-used by their taskmasters. If they fell ill, cold water, internally or externally, was the invariable remedy. Once a commission came to see them at work, but they had been warned beforehand that any man who complained of his treatment would suffer for it. One of them was bold enough to protest to the visitors against a particularly flagrant case of ill-usage. That man disappeared a few days later.
[Sidenote: The Belgian frontier is closed.]
Long before this the food problem had become acute in Roubaix. Simultaneously with the establishment of the system of personal control over the inhabitants the Germans closed the frontier between France and Belgium and forbade us to approach within half a mile of the border line. The immediate effect of this isolation was to reduce to an insignificant trickle the copious stream of foodstuffs which until then poured in from Belgium--not the starving Belgium of fiction, but the well supplied Belgium of fact.
Butchers and bakers and provision dealers had to shut their shops, and the town became almost wholly dependent on supplies brought in by the American Relief Commission. Fresh meat was soon unobtainable, except by those few people who could afford to pay fabulous prices for joints smuggled across the frontier. Months ago meat cost 32 francs a kilogram (about 13 shillings a pound) and an egg cost 1 franc 25 (a shilling). Obviously such things were beyond the reach of the bulk of the people, and had it not been for the efforts of the Relief Commission we should all have starved.