The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1917-12-14
BRITISH SAILOR ABOARD SHIP
 SUNK BY GERMAN RAIDER TELLS
 OFINHuMAN TREATMENT RECEIVED
Nearly Starved to Death Under Very Eyes of Captors Saw Other British Sailors Burned to Death-Is Caught
 Once But Afterward Makes Good Escape

iron ore, smelter, paper and saltpeter. They took away dyes, salt, iron manu- factures and cement. Here was the menu for hard work:
 Breakfast, 4 a. m.-Sman slice of black bread and cup of blackish cof- fee.
 'Noon-One bowl of turnip water. Nothing else.
 Eight o'clock at night-Another and weaker bowl of turnip water
 '@The poor blokes themselves don't get much, everything being ticketed. One German stevedore who was fed up with war told me that he had liv- ed for 10 years in England and that if the peace conference did not bring about results his country would have revolution. We got word of strikes in Berlin.
 T was fed up with Germany and says to myself, Bill, you must skip it.. tried it and they caught me on May 6, in the bilges of a Swedish ship just afore she sailed.
 Good Gawd, I can hardly bear to think of it now. They showed me in a dark cell about six feet by two and half. I thought that after had been there an hour it would seem lighter, but it was pitch dark. Next day it was still pitch dark, and when I walk ed. to stop myself pumping my head, had to count my steps, and I began to imagine that I had gone blind. I was mad.
 'They brought me bread and water once day and told me that was to stay there for three weeks, but that at the end of every fifth day I could come out for 10 minutes rest. This happened and again I was back doing nothing but thinking in the inky , blackness.
 ''It was enough to stop you from wanting to try and escape again. That three weeks seemed like a year and when I was brought out after 21 days of this imprisonment, still in my un- dershirt and no shoes and the old pair of overalls, felt like dying would be the best thing out.
 "But I knew it would do me no good to give any back talk to the of ficer, so when I was brought out in the daylight, unable to open my eyes, my hands, the officer says to me:
  "I said nothing. I was afraid I might hurt his feelings about his prisons. Then he says: German military laws very strict. I wonder you were not shot when they found you. But you have not finished yet. You have to go back to prison Saturday night to Monday morninhg'
 Next time you try to escape you'll be shot, said the officer.
 Tt was midnight, less than a week after the lecture from the German of- ficer, that I prepared a nice little place in one of the matches aboard the Ludwig Kollberg. What puzzled me was how to get from the shed where we slept to the berth where the ship was. The road was so well guarded that l could not have hoped to walk more than 10 yards without being caught.
 T had made an opening in the shed large enough to crawl through, and just before went away I wrote on a piece of paper to my pal: Coin to try again tonight. If caught you know what to tell those at home-if you ever get there.'
 When I got out of the sned l was glad because it was a late moon, but l saw laundering big man on guard, and lay flat on my belly waiting for him to move. I was afraid of my own breath. He stood there for 15 minutes and then must have thought he saw something up the road and off he goes.
 "I got tO the edge of tha wharf and then dropped down ladder gently into the water. To swim as noiseless- ly as possible I had to keep my hands under water all the time. 1 chung to the dark shadows and found I was forging along pretty we'll. It was the gentlest swimming guess anyone ever done.
 reached the old coal barge, made sure it was the one and climbed up the tfller. I got aboard the Ludwig