CBC - First and Last Casualties of the Great War (2003)

The tragic story of the Great War is told through the accounts of the British and Canadian soldiers who were the first and last to die in battle. In Mons, Belgium during World War I, Private John Parr, aged 17, from Middlesex, England, was the first Allied soldier to die. Four years later, Private George Price, aged 25, from Nova Scotia, would be the last. Although the two men never met, the circumstances of their deaths linked their lives. FIRST AND LAST attempts to reveal the details of their lives while helping us better understand World War I. Sitting opposite each other in the St Symphorien military cemetery, just south-east of Mons in Belgium, are the gravestones of the first and last British soldiers to be killed in the First World War. Their graves are separated by seven yards of lawn and, chronologically and metaphorically, by 700,000 fellow British servicemen who died in the conflict. The proximity of the graves of Private John Parr, killed 17 days after Britain declared war, and Private George Ellison, who died 90 minutes before the armistice, is said to be a coincidence – when they were buried, their “first” and “last” status was unknown - making it somewhat all the more poignant. The First World War was particularly bloody, causing millions of casualties. Mons did not escape the destructive wave of events and, against its will, played host to major and tragic events. Mons has a special resonance for the British and Canadians, as it was on its territory that their first and last involvement in the First World War took place. On 23 August 1914, the British met the Germans at Mons, and on 11 November 1918, with substantial involvement of the Canadians, they liberated the city after 50 months of occupation. Thus Mons became the resting place for soldiers Parr and Ellison, the first and last British men to fall during the conflict, and it was also here that Canadian soldier Georges Lawrence Price collapsed on 11 November 1918, two minutes before the Armistice took effect, forever becoming the last soldier killed in the Great War… The authorities knew that the war was over, but the British wanted to save Mons whatever the cost, no doubt for its symbolism. After four years of occupation, the city of Mons was liberated by the Commonwealth troops on 11 November 1918, going down in history as the place where the war began and ended for the British.

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