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.