Kitchener's Last Volunteer

This is the touching story of an ordinary man's extraordinary life - one who outlived six monarchs and twenty-one prime ministers, and who represents a last link to a vital point in our nation's history. Henry Allingham was the last British serviceman to have volunteered for active duty in the First World War. Kitchener's Last Volunteer vividly recaptures how life was lived in the Edwardian era and how it was altered irrevocably by the slaughter of millions of men in the Great War, and by the subsequent coming of the modern age. Henry is unique in that he saw action on land, sea and in the air with the British Naval Air Service. He was present at the Battle of Jutland in 1916 with the British Grand Fleet and went on to serve on the Western Front. He befriended several of the young pilots who would lose their lives, and he himself suffered the privations of the front line under fire.