Bullet shrine

"This was my Mother's. It is a WWI bullet shrine, with a miniature figure of St Anthony of Padua inside. The bullet has been carved to house the figure and can rotate to ensure the saint remains safely inside. Such bullet shrines were carried in pockets of soldiers in WWI and also into WWII. We suspect a soldier, probably a patient, gave it to my Mother when she worked in St Guy's Hospital in London in the 1940s, one of the Military and War hospitals in the UK. She always kept it safe and 'minded it' through the years. It not only reminds me of her, but particular when she was young and how life must have seemed to her then as a young nurse in London in her very early 20s. It also strikes me as a contradictory object - an object of war/killing being used for devotion, a juxtaposition of sorts between two objects (the bullet and the saintly figurine), between war and peace. The object therefore is redolent of the times that were in it, in Ireland, in the 1940s and certainly Europe. To my Mother perhaps it reminded her too of the patient who fought in WWII and she met in her youth."