In 1914 Ms Little's father-in-law Stuart Little left his home town of Dunedin for the desert, where he was a stretcher bearer at Gallipoli and accompanied the many wounded to hospital.
"One day, Stuart saw this tortoise walking around [where] they took the wounded from Gallipoli and then immediately this terrible thing happened," says Ms Little.
As it turns out, Torty was run over by a French gun carriage and when Mr Little picked her up, there was the large dent in the shell - her own war wound - and the dent is still there.
A chuck of her shell was broken off and she also lost a few toes. Mr Little asked some of the locals in Salonica how old they thought Torty was, to which they replied, give or take around 100 years old.
That would make Torty around 200 years old.
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