Final fallen

Although ELEVEN is a work of fiction it is, however, based on real and reliable events.

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So who were the last to die?

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BRITISH

The final British soldier to be killed in action was Private George Edwin Ellison.

 

At 9.30am Pte Ellison of the 5th Royal Irish Lancers was scouting on the outskirts of the Belgian town of Mons where German soldiers had been reported in a wood.

Aged 40, Pte Ellison was not the typical conscript, says military historian Paul Reed.

"He was a pre-war regular soldier; we can tell this by his number (L /12643) which is consistent with a man who enlisted in the early years of the 20th Century. He may even have been a Boer war veteran, considering his age."

It must have been odd for Pte Ellison to be back in Mons again. This is where his war started four years earlier when he was part of the British Expeditionary Force retreating from Mons in August 1914, just weeks after the outbreak of the war.

"During his four years at the front, George saw every type of warfare," says Mr Reed.

"He went into the first trenches as the war became deadlocked. He fought in the first gas attack, and on the Somme in 1916, watched the first ever tanks go up to the front."

Almost a million British soldiers had been killed in those intervening years, yet almost miraculously Pte Ellison had so far escaped uninjured. In just over an hour the ceasefire would come into force, the war would be over and Pte Ellison, a former coal miner, would return to the terraced street in Leeds to see his wife Hannah and their four-year-old son James.

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And then the shot rang out. George was dead - the last British soldier to be killed in action in WWI.

Although the last British soldier to die, Pte Ellison would not be the last to be killed that morning.

 

As the minutes ticked towards the 11 o'clock ceasefire, more soldiers would fall.

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FRENCH

At 10.45 another 40-year-old soldier, Frenchman Augustin Trebuchon, was taking a message to troops by the River Meuse saying that soup would be served at 11.30 after the peace, when he too was killed.

Augustin Trebuchon's grave - along with all those French soldiers killed on 11 November 1918 - is marked 10/11/18. It is said that after the war France was so ashamed that men would die on the final day that they had all the graves backdated.

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CANADIAN

Just minutes before 11am, to the north around Mons, the 25-year-old Canadian Private George Lawrence Price was on the trail of retreating German soldiers.

It was street fighting. Pte Price had just entered a cottage as the Germans left through the back. On emerging into the street he was struck by the bullet which killed him.

But Pte Price's death at 10.58 was not the last.

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AMERICAN

Further south in the Argonne region of France, US soldier Henry Gunther was involved in a final charge against astonished German troops who knew the Armistice was about to occur. What could they do? He too was shot.

The Baltimore Private - ironically of German descent - was dead.

 

It was 10.59 and Henry Gunther is now recognised as the last soldier to be killed in action in WWI.

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