Seconds before an armistice formally ended World War I on November 11, 1918, Pvt Henry Nicholas Gunther, an American soldier from Baltimore, mounted a final, one-man charge against a German machine-gun nest in northeastern France.
The German gunners, The Baltimore Sun reported many years later, had tried to wave him away, but he ran on, only to perish in a burst of heavy automatic fire — the last soldier of any nationality to die in the conflict — at 10.59 am local time. One minute later, under the terms of an armistice signed about six hours earlier, the so-called Great