On a fog-covered field north of the city of Verdun, in the dying embers of the war on the

Western Front, the last Allied soldier to be killed in action fell. By the autumn of

1918, American, British and Commonwealth and French armies were pushing the Germans to

breaking point.

What happened on the day the guns fell silent?

This weekend with Remembrance Sunday approaching,

our minds turned to the fallen of both world wars and those who served and came home. Today the commemorations take place

on Remembrance Sunday but once it was Armistice Day and many now commemorate that too. There's been

a resurgence of interest in the commemoration particularly of the First World War on the 11th

November in recent years. But that day Armistice Day commemorates an event on the 11th of November

1918 that brought the Great War on the Western Front to an end.

What happened on that day? Where did the story begin?

And who were the last men to fall?

If we were to start somewhere on the Old Front Line itself, possibly we'd begin

this story outside the Poziere's Memorial on the Somme battlefields, a memorial that we

featured in the very first episode of the Old Front Line. This memorial commemorates

thousands of British and Commonwealth soldiers who fell on the Somme battlefields in March and April of 1918 and have no known grave.

These were men killed in the German Kaiser schlact, the German Spring Offensive,

one of several that broke the Allied lines and pushed through,

first here on the Somme in March, then in Flanders in April, on the Schmen-de-Darmes in May,

and in the final battles around Paris, in the Second Battle of the Marne in the summer of 1918.

The war swung like a pendulum in 1918, and for the British and Commonwealth forces,

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