On August 21, 1914, 17-year-old Private John Parr of the Middlesex Regiment was killed while scouting German positions near Mons, Belgium, making him the first British soldier to die in World War I. Over four horrific years later, at 9:30 AM on November 11, 1918—just ninety minutes before the armistice took effect—40-year-old Private George Edwin Ellison of the 5th Royal Irish Lancers was shot and killed while patrolling the woods near the same city. Following the war, the Imperial War Graves Commission established the St.
Symphorien Military Cemetery in the woods southeast of Mons. By extraordinary coincidence, when the war graves were laid out, the burial positions resulted in Parr and Ellison facing each other, separated by merely seven meters of grass. Their graves serve as tragic, poetic bookends to a conflict that claimed millions of lives, ending in the exact geographic location where Britain's involvement began.