Canadian shot dead two minutes before war ended
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. Pte. 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 25year-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 Ville-Sur-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, Pte. 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.
“My mom was his second youngest sister and from the time I was a little girl that’s all I heard was about Uncle George,” McLean said following the recent première in Halifax of a short documentary film about Price.
“My mom just worshipped him and she named her son George after Uncle George.”
Price, a native of Falmouth, now Port Williams, N.S., was working as a labourer in Moose Jaw, Sask., when he was conscripted on Oct. 15, 1917.
He fought in the Battle of Amiens, the Battle of Cambrai and the Pursuit to Mons, and was gassed in the Canal-du-Nord area on Sept. 8, 1918.
Upon his discharge from hospital, he returned to his unit on Sept. 26 and was on the line in Canal-du-Centre when he took part in the final action that led to his death.
According to unit records, Price and his comrades crossed the canal to check on houses that appeared to be the site of a German machine gun post. They rushed one house and found only the owner and his family after the Germans ran out the back door.
A second house was checked, and as Price stepped back into the street he suddenly slumped into the arms of Pte. Art Goodmurphy. He was dragged back into the house where attempts to save him proved futile.
According to an eyewitness account by Goodmurphy in an interview conducted after the war, he said that he went back to his company’s position and told a major that Price had been killed.
“Oh Jees did he blow a fuse,” Goodmurphy recalled. “The war is over, the war is over, he (the major) said. I said, well I can’t help that.”
Goodmurphy also reported the major as saying “What the hell did you go across there for? We had no orders to go across there.”
But Goodmurphy’s account noted the reconnaissance party “never even thought about the war being over then,” adding that “we didn’t always get orders to do everything that we did.”
Canadian War Museum historian Tim Cook said the Canadian Corps had in fact received orders at 6 a.m. on Nov. 11 that the war would end at 11 a.m. that day.
Most battalions got word no later than 9:30 a.m. “and they went to ground” Cook said. “Still, there were patrols along the front including George Price’s.”