the chief article of diet.]

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.

[Sidenote: Citizen miners also complain about food.]

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.

[Sidenote: German miners also severely disciplined.]

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