Extracts from Evidence The committee extract from the great mass of evidence now in their possession statements as to the impression produced upon those who actually saw our men upon their escape to the British lines or after their transfer to camps in Germany. These statements, they believe, must convince every impartial mind that it is impossible in terms of exaggeration to describe the sufferings these prisoners had undergone. In April, 1917, three of them escaped over "No Man's Land." They were received by a British General Staff officer, a Major in the 1st Anzac Corps. This is what he says of them, under date April 18, 1917: Three men escaped from behind the German lines to us the other day. They had been prisoners three months, and were literally nearly dead with ill-treatment and starvation. One of them could hardly walk, and was just a skeleton. He had gone down from 182 pounds to less than 112 pounds in three months. I fetched him back from the line, and it almost made me cry. All that awful January and February out all day in the wet and cold; no overcoat, and at night no blanket, in a shelter where the clothes froze stiff on him; no change of underclothing in three months, and he was one mass of vermin, no chance of washing. The bodies of all of them were covered with sores. "Beaten and starved," one of them said, "sooner than go through it again I'd just put my head under the first railway." The following is the substance of statements by two witnesses from a German camp: About June, 1917, a party of about twenty English soldiers came in who had been working behind the German lines on the western front. I became friends with one of them. He was so weak that I have several times seen him faint on parade. Another of them told me that he was one of a party of 100 working behind the lines on the western front digging trenches and carrying up supplies. He said they were all very badly treated and starved. They were knocked about by the Germans if they did not march as fast as they wanted them to, although they were all so weak. He was only sent to Germany when he became so weak as to be useless for work. When I left he did not look as if he could lift a shovelful of sand. There was another whom I knew. He had also been working behind the lines. They had to work in clogs and no socks. He said they used to tie rags round their feet. He was employed on road making. I never could have believed the things I was told but for the terrible state the men were in, which caused me to feel that no horror I was told was impossible.