Next Sunday Marks 100 years since the last "Great War" to end all wars

Armistice: two men separated by four years of war and a few yards of turf

The graves of the first and last British soldiers to die in the first world war face each other in a Belgian cemetery

The full four years of the first world war separate the deaths of 16-year-old John Parr from Finchley, north London, and 40-year-old George Edwin Ellison, a son of Leeds.

Between the firing of the bullet that killed Parr and the ringing out of the shot that struck Ellison down, about 750,000 British soldiers were killed. In a remarkable coincidence, just a few yards of lawn stand between the two men’s graves today.

The bodies of these men, the first and last British soldiers to die in the 1914-18 conflict, face each other in the cemetery of St Symphorien, a plot covered by pine trees, Japanese maples and red roses, on the outskirts of the Belgian city of Mons.

Parr, killed by rifle fire on 21 August as he scouted ahead on his bicycle in the first tentative British advance on the city, was buried by the Germans here on ground donated by a Belgian landowner after it was decided by Kaiser Wilhelm’s government in 1917 to honour all those, on both sides, who had died in the area.

The remains of Ellison, who was killed 90 minutes before the armistice in a last pointless advance when it was clear to all that they were on the cusp of peace, were brought here from a field grave by the British in the 1920s. There was no knowledge at the time of the significance of the plot opposite.

The circularity and symbolism of the two men’s deaths by German guns near the same fields in south-west Belgium will not be lost as the world marks the centenary of Armistice Day.

https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2018/nov/02/armistice-two-men-separated-by-four-years-of-war-and-a-few-yards-of-turf