elmet after me? He
glared at me for a moment. Yes, he said, he would.

At The Hague I immediately visited the German Legation and told them of
the customs officer's promise.

From bitter experience I realized that in war-time out of sight is lost,
so far as baggage is concerned. Consequently I had given up all hope of
my trophy. A week later, when I happened to be in Dr. van Dyke's study,
I noticed a conical-shaped object resting on one of the secretary's
desks. There, on top of a pile of letters, with "Herr Horace Green"
scribbled in German script on a piece of paper pinned to the green-gray
service covering, lay my dented, battered, and long-lost German
private's helmet!

Simply because the fiery customs officer had given his word, the German
Legation at The Hague had telegraphed to Bentheim and also, I take it,
to Excellency von Mumm at Berlin; and the customs officials had shipped
the helmet to the Dutch capital, where the German Legation, obedient to
promise, had turned it over to the American Legation for delivery to me.
The whole proceeding seemed typical of the overbearing gruffness, the
systematic attention to detail, and at the same time the thoroughgoing
honesty of the German character.

So I tucked the helmet under my arm, and, saying good-bye to Dr. van
Dyke and Mr. Langhome, who had made my stay at The Hague so pleasant, I
crossed the mine-strewn English Channel for Piccadilly Circus.

Two weeks later I was aboard the Red Star liner Lapland, driven one
hundred miles out of her course through fear of German war craft, yet
pounding along through a thick fog and hopefully headed in the general
direction of the good old Statue of Liberty.

Appendix: Atrocities

I gained the impressions given below and compiled many of the instances
on the now threadbare subject of atrocities during the time that I was
in the war zone. The opinions will not meet with favor in this country,
particularly at present, when we seem on the point of breaking
diplomatic relations with Germany.

Nevertheless, I think these notes present a point of view which ought to
be known, if only for the purpose of showing the other side of the
shield--and of checking, to some extent, the nursery tales in regard to
personal atrocities, which become more fanciful the farther they are
told from the scene of reported occurrence. After the horrible
Lusitania crime and other evidences of German Schrecklichkeit for which
there c