Hello Carol and welcome to the forum, I‘m glad you took Tim‘s advice and have come to join us.
Your thread on the GWF
https://www.greatwarforum.org/topic/278334-herbert-butcher-manchester-regiment/ is a bit confusing as it seems to be based a lot on family lore. Please do not take offence as family lore can be very misleading and I‘m sure most of us on here have been mislead by it at one time or another.
All that is documented about his time as a PoW is that he was captured at Manchester Hill while serving with A Company of the 16th Battalion, after which he was sent to Cassel, now Kassel, and thereafter transferred to the PoW camp at Hameln. It was normal for PoWs to be collected at holding camps just behind the front before being sent to Germany. It is more than likely he was first held near St Quentin before being sent to Germany.
There is no reason to dispute that he was sent to work in a salt mine. This was very unlikely to have been near Metz as the area round Metz is or was a very important coal mining area. On the other hand Hameln is in the middle of a salt rich area (see the attached map). I think it is impossible to say which mine he was at, the map only shows towns where salt mining was carried out not how many mines there were.
Just to clear up a couple of points from your GWF thread.
In 1918 Metz and Strassbourg were German, the provinces of Alsace/ Elsass and Lorraine/Lothringen had been taken from the French in the war of 1870-71, they reverted back to France after the end of the Great War.
The PoW camps in Metz and Strassbourg, which are two separate towns about 150 miles apart, were administered by the German XVI Army Corps. That the Battalion and Army Corps are both numbered 16 is purely coincidental.
I hope this has cleared things up a bit.
Charlie
