The hands stopped at 6:30.
And they never moved again.
All the same, that broken watch has remained in the same family for generations.
Two hands perfectly frozen in place. One pointing to the six. The other to the half hour.
That’s how they knew when the bullet hit Private Jack Oborne.
It was 1917, at Passchendaele. A bullet struck him in the chest. But it didn’t go in. It hit the pocket watch his father had given him. The glass shattered. The casing bent. The watch stopped.
Jack didn’t.
He lived. And he kept the watch for the rest of his life.
He didn’t polish it or put it in a case. It lived in a drawer. It came out when he felt like telling the story. Usually to someone younger, who wasn’t sure whether to believe it. He’d hand them the watch, wait for them to see the dent, then say, “That’s when I didn’t die.”
When Jack died, the watch passed to his son. Then his grandson. The story went with it.
It wasn’t valuable. Or beautiful. Or rare. But everyone who held it understood what it meant.
That at 6:30, on a battlefield in Belgium, time stopped. And because it did, life went on.
Make some memories,
The Ironclad Co.
