If Atomes are as small, as small can bee,
They must in quantity of Matter all agree:
And if consisting Matter of the same (be right,)
Then every Atome must weigh just alike.
Thus Quantity, Quality and Weight, all
Together meets in every Atome small.
Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle 1623-1673 - aka Mad Madge (predating Ms Ciccone's similar title by 350 years...)
In a beautiful, wooded cemetery at the end of a suburban lane in Belgium, the body of John Parr, from Finchley, North London, rests a few paces from the body of George Edwin Ellison from Leeds. Between their graves there lies seven yards of lawn and, chronologically and metaphorically, the bodies of all the other British soldiers who died in the Great War.
Private Parr, 16, a bicycle scout, and Pte George Ellison, 40, of the Royal Irish Lancers, were, respectively, the first and the last British soldiers to die in combat in the First World War. Pte Parr was killed on 21 August, 1914, the day before the first rearguard action fought by the British Expeditionary Force near Mons on the Belgian-French border. Pte Ellison was killed on the morning of 11 November, 1918, 90 minutes before the armistice which brought the industrial-strength slaughter of the first modern war to a close, 90 years ago next Tuesday. Both died within a couple of miles of the spot where they are buried. Their memorial stones face each other across a narrow strip of grass in a cemetery which contains more than 500 British, Irish, Canadian and German graves.
When you visit the Saint Symphorien cemetery (check out teh photos. It is such a beautiful cemetery), just east of it seems obvious that the placing of the two graves was deliberate. It is a wry and moving tribute to the fact that, for the British Army, the Great War, "the war to end all wars", began and ended in the same place. The fact that John Parr and George Ellison lie facing one other, overlooked by pine trees and surrounded by rose bushes and cotoneasters, is a poignant and macabre accident of fate.
"It is a pure coincidence," said Peter Francis, spokesman for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. "John Parr's body was placed where it is now by the Germans in 1914. George Ellison's body was brought to the Saint Symphorien cemetery from a temporary burial place after the war. Our records suggest that Pte Ellison was simply buried in the next available space. It was not then realised that he was the last British soldier to die in combat. Nor was the fact that Pte Parr was the first British soldier to die established until later."
Both men were regular soldiers and part of the original British Expeditionary Force (BEF) of 120,000 men – a "contemptible little army," according to Kaiser Wilhelm II – which was shipped to France in August 1914. John Parr is listed in the cemetery register as 20 years old. Recently unearthed evidence suggests that he was just 16. He had lied about his age when he gave up his job as a golf caddy at the North Middlesex Golf Course in Friern Barnet Lane and joined the Middlesex Regiment a year earlier. The caddy's war lasted less than a day. Pte Parr never fought in the Great War. He never knew the First World War of trenches, of barbed wire, of mud, of poison gas or aircraft and of tanks. He never knew the kind of fighting in which 29,000 British soldiers could be killed in one day (the first day of the Somme). He never even wore a tin helmet (first issued to British troops in September 1915). He was shot by advancing German troops as he scouted, on his bicycle, ahead of the deploying British Army on 21 August 1914. No picture of him has ever been found.
George Ellison, a former miner, married with a small son, was old enough to have been Parr's father. He was already 36, and had probably been a regular soldier for more than a decade, when he was posted to France with the BEF in 1914. He survived the retreat to the Marne, where the French and British finally blocked the German advance. He was among the first British troops to fight in trenches in late 1914. He may have witnessed the first use of poisoned gas by the Germans near Ypres in April 1915 and fought in the battle of the Somme, in which the first tanks were used, in July to November 1916. He is believed to have been wounded at least once but survived to take part in the collapse of trench fighting and the Allied advance to the Belgian border in the summer and autumn of 1918. Very few of the original foot-soldiers of the BEF were still alive and fit to fight by the time the Armistice was signed at 5am on 11 November 1918. Pte Ellison was one of them.
Pte Ellison, who had survived so much, was one of them. He was shot by sniper while part of a patrol scouting on the edge of Mons – about two miles from where he is now buried – at about 9.30am on 11 November. Did he know that the war was just about to end? Did the sniper know? Almost certainly, both did. Word of the approaching armistice had gone around the fighting troops like wildfire. They, nonetheless, carried on fighting, in some places ferociously, to the end.
In Mons, the shooting and shelling had almost finished by the time that Pte Ellison died. There were, however, further casualties among the Canadians who were fighting a little to the west. Pte George Lawrence Price, 25, of the 6th Canadian Infantry Brigade, was shot through the head at 10.57am, the last British Empire soldier to die. He is also buried at the Saint Symphorien cemetery, only 20 yards from privates Parr and Ellison.
The cemetery is deeply moving for other reasons. It was begun by the Germans after the fighting of August 1914. They buried German and British soldiers in groups, side by side, in a maze-like spiral, with a stone memorial to both the armies on top. (Nothing so magnanimous would have been possible later in the war.) Saint Symphorien is rare in having almost equal numbers of German and British Empire troops buried there (284 German and 229 "British", including many Irish and Canadian soldiers.) They include one of the first British VCs of the war and the first German soldier to win an Iron Cross. Pte Parr, according to the commission records, was buried by the Germans where he now lies, close to the cemetery boundary, in August 1914.
For many months, the British Army failed to report that he was dead or even missing. His mother, Alice Parr finally wrote a letter complaining that she had not heard from her son for months. The War Office replied gruffly saying that it could not help. It was not until after the war that a soldier who had been on the same bicycle scouting mission confirmed the time and place of John Parr's death.
Pte Ellison was originally buried in a small battlefield cemetery near the spot where he died. During the 1920s, many of these small cemeteries were converted to permanent memorials and their wooden crosses were replaced by the now-familiar, engraved tablets of white Portland stone. Other bodies were, however, moved to larger cemeteries nearby.Thus, Pte Ellison, "the last casualty", was placed, opposite Pte Parr, "the first casualty", some time in the early 1920s.
And so it is that John Parr and George Ellison, the first and last of so many, have lain together ever since. Purely by coincidence.
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Photo Hunt follows this postOn this dreadful day, then, when three hundred thousand men in arms with all their artillery swelled like a flood against the little English company, there was one point above all other points in our battle line that was for a time in awful danger, not merely of defeat, but of utter annihilation. With the permission of the Censorship and of the military expert, this corner may, perhaps, be described as a salient, and if this angle were crushed and broken, then the English force as a whole would be shattered, the Allied left would be turned, and Sedan would inevitably follow.
All the morning the German guns had thundered and shrieked against this corner, and against the thousand or so of men who held it. The men joked at the shells, and found funny names for them, and had bets about them, and greeted them with scraps of music-hall songs. But the shells came on and burst, and tore good Englishmen limb from limb, and tore brother from brother, and as the heat of the day increased so did the fury of that terrific cannonade. There was no help, it seemed. The English artillery was good, but there was not nearly enough of it; it was being steadily battered into scrap iron.
There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another, "It is at its worst; it can blow no harder," and then there is a blast ten times more fierce than any before it. So it was in these British trenches.
There were no stouter hearts in the whole world than the hearts of these men; but even they were appalled as this seven-times-heated hell of the German cannonade fell upon them and overwhelmed them and destroyed them. And at this very moment they saw from their trenches that a tremendous host was moving against their lines. Five hundred of the thousand remained, and as far as they could see the German infantry was pressing on against them, column upon column, a grey world of men, ten thousand of them, as it appeared afterwards.
There was no hope at all. They shook hands, some of them. One man improvised a new version of the battlesong, "Good-bye, good-bye to Tipperary," ending with "And we shan't get there". And they all went on firing steadily. The officers pointed out that such an opportunity for high-class, fancy shooting might never occur again; the Germans dropped line after line; the Tipperary humorist asked, "What price Sidney Street?" And the few machine guns did their best. But everybody knew it was of no use. The dead grey bodies lay in companies and battalions, as others came on and on and on, and they swarmed and stirred and advanced from beyond and beyond.
"World without end. Amen," said one of the British soldiers with some irrelevance as he took aim and fired. And then he remembered-he says he cannot think why or wherefore - a queer vegetarian restaurant in London where he had once or twice eaten eccentric dishes of cutlets made of lentils and nuts that pretended to be steak. On all the plates in this restaurant there was printed a figure of St. George in blue, with the motto, Adsit Anglis Sanctus Geogius - May St. George be a present help to the English. This soldier happened to know Latin and other useless things, and now, as he fired at his man in the grey advancing mass - 300 yards away - he uttered the pious vegetarian motto. He went on firing to the end, and at last Bill on his right had to clout him cheerfully over the head to make him stop, pointing out as he did so that the King's ammunition cost money and was not lightly to be wasted in drilling funny patterns into dead Germans.
For as the Latin scholar uttered his invocation he felt something between a shudder and an electric shock pass through his body. The roar of the battle died down in his ears to a gentle murmur; instead of it, he says, he heard a great voice and a shout louder than a thunder-peal crying, "Array, array, array!"
His heart grew hot as a burning coal, it grew cold as ice within him, as it seemed to him that a tumult of voices answered to his summons. He heard, or seemed to hear, thousands shouting: "St. George! St. George!"
"Ha! messire; ha! sweet Saint, grant us good deliverance!"
"St. George for merry England!"
"Harow! Harow! Monseigneur St. George, succour us."
"Ha! St. George! Ha! St. George! a long bow and a strong bow."
"Heaven's Knight, aid us!"
And as the soldier heard these voices he saw before him, beyond the trench, a long line of shapes, with a shining about them. They were like men who drew the bow, and with another shout their cloud of arrows flew singing and tingling through the air towards the German hosts.
The other men in the trench were firing all the while.They had no hope; but they aimed just as if they had been shooting at Bisley. Suddenly one of them lifted up his voice in the plainest English, "Gawd help us!" he bellowed to the man next to him, "but we're blooming marvels! Look at those grey ... gentlemen, look at them! D'ye see them? They're not going down in dozens, nor in 'undreds; it's thousands, it is. Look! look! there's a regiment gone while I'm talking to ye."
"Shut it!" the other soldier bellowed, taking aim, "what are ye gassing about!"
But he gulped with astonishment even as he spoke, for, indeed, the grey men were falling by the thousands. The English could hear the guttural scream of the German officers, the crackle of their revolvers as they shot the reluctant; and still line after line crashed to the earth.
All the while the Latin-bred soldier heard the cry: "Harow! Harow! Monseigneur, dear saint, quick to our aid! St. George help us!"
"High Chevalier, defend us!"
The singing arrows fled so swift and thick that they darkened the air; the heathen horde melted from before them.
"More machine guns!" Bill yelled to Tom.
"Don't hear them," Tom yelled back. "But, thank God, anyway; they've got it in the neck."
In fact, there were ten thousand dead German soldiers left before that salient of the English army, and consequently there was no Sedan. In Germany, a country ruled by scientific principles, the Great General Staff decided that the contemptible English must have employed shells containing an unknown gas of a poisonous nature, as no wounds were discernible on the bodies of the dead German soldiers. But the man who knew what nuts tasted like when they called themselves steak knew also that St. George had brought his Agincourt Bowmen to help the English.
The theme for this week's Photo Hunt is together. This Sunday the the people of UK come together to commemorate our war dead. These photos were taken at the Field of Remembrance at Westminster Abbey today
