CARRIED SINCE WAR

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 77, 28 September 1938, Page 6

CARRIED SINCE WAR

BULLET IN BODY

GALLIPOLI MAN'S SURPRISE

(From "The Post's" Representative.!

SYDNEY, September 20,

Ever since the morning of the landing at Gallipoli—April 25, 1915— Arthur Coombs, of Toombul, Brisbane; has carried in his body close to the spine a bullet, fired from a Mauser rifle. Yet until last week he knew nothing about it. Coombs is now in a private hospital in Brisbane, recovering from an operation for an internal complaint, which he does not associate with war lajury. . "On the morning of the landing when I was falling to take cover, something struck me," he said. "I thought I had been hit in the stomach, but later I felt blood near my left shoulder-blade and thought I must only have been grazed by a bullet. Later viii the morning I was hit on thfe foot and put out of action. Doctors paid little attention to the scratch on my back, and the only ill effect I felt was a paralysed left arm for a few days." • After a month in hospital Coombs went back into action and fought through the rest' of the war. He was not wounded again. The bullet in his back has never inconvenienced him, and he was surprised when he saw the X-ray" photographs. "If the doctor had not taken the X-ray a little too high up, the bullet might never have been discovered," he said.