A report issued by an official British Investigating Committee, known as the Justice Younger Committee, appointed to investigate the treatment of British soldiers by their German captors, made public in April, 1918, presents a shocking record of barbarities. The commission reported as follows: There is now no doubt in the minds of the committee that as early, at the latest, as the month of August, 1916, the German Command were systematically employing their British as well as other prisoners in forced labor close behind the western firing line, thereby deliberately exposing them to the fire of the guns of their own and allied armies. This fact has never been acknowledged by the German Government. On the contrary, it has always been studiously concealed. But that the Germans are chargeable, even from that early date, with inflicting the physical cruelty and the mental torture inherent in such a practice can no longer be doubted. Characteristically the excuse put forward was that this treatment, not apparently suggested to be otherwise defensible, was forced upon the German Command as a reprisal for what was asserted to be the fact, namely, that German prisoners in British hands had at some time or other been kept less than thirty kilometers (how much less does not appear) behind the British firing line in France. This statement was quite unfounded. Furthermore, at the end of April, 1917, an agreement was definitely concluded between the British and German Governments that prisoners of war should not on either side be employed within thirty kilometers of the firing line. Nevertheless, the German Command continued without intermission so to employ their British prisoners, under the inhuman conditions stated in the report. And that certainly until the end of 1917--it may be even until now--although it has never even been suggested by the German authorities, so far as the committee are aware, that the thirty kilometers limit agreed upon has not been scrupulously observed by the British Command in the letter as well as in the spirit. "Prisoners of Respite"