The Nenana daily news., 1918-09-11
TN HAT SAVES
 AMER GAN FROM
 GERMAN BULLET

PARIS.-The case of one Ameri- can Marine who went through hail of shrapnel and machin gun fire at Cantigny and is now con- 7alescing from the wound in the great American military hospital at Neuilly, in the Paris suburbs, seems to have demonstrated that the American field helmet, commonly called by soldiers the "tin hat" IS thoroughly reliable article when put to the supreme test.
 This marine owed his life to his ''tin hat, and the peculiar qualities of it's steel in giving slightly without shattering. In the midst of the action he went down with a ball striking the top of the helmet and pressing down to the skull He was brought back, along with the helmet which showed deep indent- ation about the size of half base bal It was this indentation which had pressed down to the scalp. mak- ing a wound which required tre- paning. But there it stopped. and the metal of the tin hat after giving to the missel until its force was spent, had stopped it in its deadly flight straight toward the brain The trepaning operation was on;y slight and the marine was we'll on the way to recovery.
 The indented helmet was pre- served, not as souvenir, but to be forwarded to the ordnance experts at Washington to show them the good qualities of their helmets. It is said that hard and brittle steel. which would have resisted without giving would have been shattered to bits by the impact and the ball would have gone straight through the brain.
 In an adjoining ward stalwart young marine who had been in the same Cantigny fight stood at at tention with no apparent sign of wound. But the surgeon, feeling the boys throat, nodded approvingly and then remarked that this was one of the most remarkable cases that had ever come under his ob- servation, and probably the only case of the kind on record. A bulletl had struck the soldier in the left side of the neck and had gone through to the gullet, where it stop ped. and had then descended or been swallowed into the stomach.
 An X-ray examination clearly showed the ball in the intestines. But instead of removing it by an operation the surgeon decided to await the course of nature and see if the soldier would digest the rifle ball, And this he did. One of the surgeons remarked that the chances of such thing happening were less than one in million, but a col 1. league added that the chances were far less than that as he could not recall any like case in the whole range of military surgery.
 Many of the French poilus under American care were in the wards of the Daughters of the American Con- federacy, with the beds marked with the names of the well-known i Southern figures, such as Stonewall i Jackson, Senator Zebulon Vance, i General Joseph Wheeler of Alabama. l
 When the big dietary kitchen was inspected later there was a savory 1 smell of American dishes and daint- ies being prepared for the wounded | men, and one of the surgeons cheer ed the cooks with the remark "Your dishes do more good than all our medicines" And this is literally true, for these American wounded do not want foreign foods | but long for the simple old-fash- toned dishes of home, like boiled custard, matted milk, egg-nog and nd