A great helmet indeed, Andy. I particularly love those with newspaper still inside (I had one in this case, sold it to a friend of mine years ago). The corrugated aluminium spacers were there to create intermediate sizes (they existed in different thicknesses), but they made the helmet quite uncomfortable to wear ; that's the reason why newspaper was sometimes used.
"No idea where or how this one managed to escape being messed with over the last 107 years, however it certainly conjures up images of a dark corner in an old barn somewhere in France."
I'll add some precisions here : as it was said, the goverment decided to offer a helmet to each and every WWI vet (soldier or officer), or to the family who asked for it if the soldier did not return. The one and only criteria was that the man had to be part of the french military at one point between 1914 and 1918 ; no condition of duration was required and having seen "active combat" was not mandatory.
I any case, these "souvenir helmets" (they were called this way) were most of the time respected artifacts, witnesses of the somewhat courageous and glorious past of a family member and / or the tangible memory of a terrible and violent unprecedented ordeal. That's why most - if not all - of them were not messed with and did not end "in a corner of an old barn".
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