SAVED BY A CRUCIFIX.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXV, Issue 297, 14 December 1914, Page 6

SAVED BY A CRUCIFIX.

Saved from death on the battlefield by a crucifix! That, in a phrase, was the experience of a young lance-corporal of the King’s Royal Rifles, who was sent to London to recover from a wound re ceived almost at the. beginning of the war. But for the crucifix, which, hidden in his haversack, diverted a German bullet, he probably would not be alive to-day; and the shattered symbol, which he acquired, as it seemed at the time, by mere chance, is now one of his most cherished possessions. “I found the crucifix in a deserted and practically empty house in which

we were billeted for a night at the

beginning of the campaign,” he said, “Something made me pick up the crucifix just as a souvenir of the place. I put it in my haversack, and thought no more about it. “The next day was fearful. W« were outnumbered and retreating, and the Germans’, shrapnel fire was murderous. Heaps of our fellows were killed and wounded, but T was lucky. Later in the day some -nearly spent bullets knocked over a few of, our men. I thought I was lucky then not to ho hit. Just at the end of the day a shrapnel bullet caught me in the knee and crippled me. I was picked up and taken to the base, and after a pretty had time I found myself it> hospital near Paris. “It was there that I found that there were two bullet holes in my haversack; ono where a bullet had gone in, and the other where it had

come out; and inside was the crucifix * with one arm broken off. Then I realised that I must have been hit by one of those half-spent bullets, and the crucifix had deflected it from my side.”