A story of ‘really bad timing:’ the Canadian who was war’s last casualty

HALIFAX — Moments before the armistice ending the First World War took effect on Nov. 11, 1918, a sniper’s bullet sliced the morning air.

It struck a Canadian soldier in the chest as he emerged from the doorway of a house in a small Belgian village. Pvt. George Lawrence Price died minutes later at 10:58 a.m. — a mere two minutes before hostilities ceased.

He became the last British Empire soldier to die in a war that claimed millions of lives, including nearly 67,000 Canadians and Newfoundlanders.

It’s unclear whether the 25-year-old was aware the war was so close to being over when he and five other members of ‘A’ Company, the 28th Battalion of the Saskatchewan North West Regiment, decided on their own to search a series of houses for Germans in VilleSur-Haine, east of Mons.

“They had heard rumours for months that maybe the war was going to come to an end, but if you are a soldier on the front lines you tend to take that stuff with a grain of salt,” said Ken Hynes, curator of the Army Museum Halifax Citadel. “So George was doing his job as he saw it.” Price was posthumously awarded the British War Medal and the Victory Medal.

He is interred in a cemetery in Belgium not far from the war’s first British Empire casualty, Pvt. John Parr of the 4th Battalion Middlesex Regiment.

Price’s story has remained ingrained in the lore of succeeding generations of his surviving family, according to his niece, Beverly McLean, of Kentville, N.S.