I missed my train and was kept in Bentheim overnight.  In the morning I again tried persuasion, but without success.  As it was now a question of myself or the helmet, I decided to get myself home.  I went back once more, and as a final chance put up this proposition to my officer.  I showed my credentials and explained that I was going to The Hague.  Would he in the mean time put my name on the helmet, and if within forty-eight hours he received a wire both from the Foreign Office in Berlin and The Hague Legation, would he send the helmet 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.