The Bridgeport times and evening farmer., 1918-08-22
''TIN HAT" OF
 AMERICANS AN
 EXCELLENT ONE
American Marine Passes Through Hail of shrapnel
 But is Saved by Helmet.

Paris, Aug. 22-(Correspondence of The Associated Press)-The case of one American Marine who went through a hail of shrapnel and ma chine gun fire at Cantigny and is now convalescing from a wound in the great American military hospital at Neuilly, in the Paris suburbs, seems to have demonstrated that the Amer ican field helmet, commonly called by soldiers, the ''tin hat" Is a thorough ly reliable article when put to the supreme test.
 This marine owed his life to his 'tin hat" and the peculiar qualities Of its 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 indentation about the size of half a baseball. It was this indenta- tion which had pressed down to the scalp, making a wound which re- quired trepaning. But there it stop ped, and the metal of the tin hat after giving to the missile until it's force was spent, had stopped it in it's dead Iy flight toward the brain. The tre- paning operation was only slight and the marine was well on the way to recovery.
 The indented helmet was preserved, not as a souvenir, but to be forwarded to the ordnance experts at Washing ton to show them the good qualities of their helmets. It is said that a 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 a stalwart young marine who had been in the same Cantigny fight stood at atten- tion with no apparent sign of wound. 1 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 observation, and prab- 1 ably the only case of the kind on record. A bullet had struck the sol dier in the left side of the neck and gone through to the gullet, where it stopped, 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 opera tion the surgeons decided to await the course of nature and see if the soldier would digest the rifle ball. :. And this he did One of the sur geons remarked that the chances of | h; !, one in a million, but colleague 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 o1 the Daughters of the American Con- federacy, with the beds marked with the names of the well-known south. ern figures, such as Stonewall Jack. son, Senator zebulon Vance, Genera, Joseph Wheeler of Alabama.
 When the big dietary kitchen was inspected later there was a savory smell of American dishes and dainties
 being prepared for the wounded men and one of the surgeons cheered 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 wan
 foreign foods long but for the simple
 old-fashioned dishes of home, likt
 boiled custard. matted milk, egg-noG and bread and milk. So that, even 1T
 the food American cooks are doing
 their share, and down to the last de
 tail the Americanism of the big mill
 tary hospital is proving a blessing tt the American matmed and wounded , who have come back from the front