JF Ptak Science Books Quick Post
"To the victor, the (pointy) spoils" was found in Illustrated World in their June 1919 issue. (As it runs out, the word "pointy" is a lot older than I thought, the OED finding it in K. Digby Two Treat. i. xv. 130, from 1644: I haue seen some very high, and pointy spire steeples do the like.) It seems as though the captured "Hun" helmets with spikes were collected and pyramided for a war relief benefit/fund-raiser. I guesstimate that it took around 2,000 helmets to complete this display--it also reminds me quite a bit of a famous photo of buffalo skulls piled 20 feet high, waiting to be loaded onto a train car in about 1870 to be hauled away for processing into fertilizer. There's nothing in common between the two besides the composition and the pointy parts, as the buffalo were slaughtered for many reasons all of which are terrible and none of which had to do with war, where the German helmets came from.
[Source: Wiki Commons]
Here's another view of perhaps the same bit, evidently located just beyond Grand Central:
[Source:: http://rarehistoricalphotos.com/pyramid-german-helmets-1918/]
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