The story in question is that of Private Harry Robertson (21), who was fighting with the Otago Regiment of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force at Passchendaele in 1917 when he was shot in the chest by enemy fire.
In a quirk of fate, instead of hitting him the German bullet struck one of his own .303 bullets in a bandolier (a pocketed belt for holding ammunition) strung across his chest.
The impact knocked Pte Robertson out cold and sent shrapnel and gunpowder flying into his chest, injuring him badly enough to require an operation.
"That bullet saved his life," his son, Brian Robertson (70), of Dunedin, said.
A few months later, Pte Robertson was back in action in northern France, only to be gassed.
He was considered too ill to continue fighting and sent home with chronic bronchitis.
It was not a story Brian Robertson often told publicly, but one he did yesterday morning, almost accidently, at a Probus meeting at the Mornington Bowling Club.
The fact it was Armistice Day was coincidental, he said.
That afternoon he had planned to drop off to be framed a re-touched picture of his father in uniform, the torn bullet that saved his life and his medals.
But following the group's observation of two minutes' silence and a discussion about Armistice Day, he brought in the items from his car.
The war was something his father, a carpenter, never spoke much of before his death at 69 in 1964, he said"One day I asked him about the mud [the battle of Passchendaele has become synonymous with the misery of fighting in thick mud].
I said: 'How did you get through the mud?' He sort of went pale and said `By jumping from body to body'."
He recalled other stories, told by his mother, of his father dragging an injured soldier to safety under fire from no-man's land; and of his reaction to the radio announcement that World War 2 had started: "Those poor boys," was all he said.
He believed his father did not like to talk of his war experience because of the carnage he had witnessed during World War 1.
He knew hundreds of other New Zealand families would have stories similar to his, Brian Robertson said, but as he grew older his interest in his family's history had grown and he wanted to preserve the stories for future generations, to which end he was having the bullet framed so the next generation would remember too.
