[Sidenote: The American Ambassador's visit.]
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.
[Sidenote: Heavy work and slender rations.]
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.