A 1919 newspaper reported a story about my great-grandfather, believed to have been shared with them by his mother. It explained how he’d been saved from being shot while serving during World War One.
Trooper Jack Hodge (6th A. L. H.), of Surry Hills, recently returned to Sydney. He served all through the Palestine campaign. In the Sinai desert a bullet passed through three cartridges in his bandolier and entered his stomach. Had its force not been broken by the three brass cases he would probably have been killed. As it was, he was wounded sufficiently to be kept in hospital for many weeks. He has suffered no ill-effects from the injury, and is now employed in Sydney by the Water and Sewerage Board. Trooper Hodge is an old member of the Boys’ Brigade.
~ ‘A Pictorial Medley of Topical Events’, Sydney Mail, 12 November 1919, p. 9.
The story was accompanied by a which shows the cases with holes through them. Jack later used them as the ‘feet’ of a homemade metal container, a piece of trench art. One of the cases has fallen off, but the metal container remains in the family, a reminder of how three bullet cases saved the soldier who became my great-grandfather.
Select references
‘A Pictorial Medley of Topical Events’, Sydney Mail, 12 November 1919, p. 9, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article159654529, accessed 17 October 2026.
He was a lucky man! My great grandfather, Arthur Foster, was in the Boer War and, on the first day was shot in his shoulder. He lived to have 3 more children after that.
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