Final fallen

[Iain]

If you have any way to watch BBC programmes then I can recommend the edition of Timewatch that was on tonight. Michael Palin covered the final hours of the Great War, after the armistice was signed but before it came into effect at 11am.

A good portion of the content appeared in an article on the BBC's website earlier this week click here. Some snippets:

Joseph E Persico has calculated a shocking figure that the final day of WWI would produce nearly 11,000 casualties, more than those killed, wounded or missing on D-Day, when Allied forces landed en masse on the shores of occupied France almost 27 years later.

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... 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.

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.

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. 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.

[Stand_watie]

     On my watch list Ian. FWIW, BBC "scholarly" shows hit our better free cable channels a couple of years after you see them. Our "better cable channels" are a cut above our network programing, IMHO. I'm talking about channels like "The History network", "The discovery channel", "National Geographic channel", "The learning place" and channels like that,