Albert Coss was born in the first month of the century and will be 99 at the end of this month. He lives with his wife, Millie (91) in the Jewish Home of Ireland in Rathmines. On Tuesday he will receive the Legion d'honneur from the French ambassador, Henri de Coignac. Originally from Leeds, Albert has lived in Ireland since he left England almost 66 years ago and married in Belfast in 1933. He survives, by almost two years, the last of the men from this State who served in the first World War. There are at least five survivors in Northern Ireland, the youngest of them 99.
Coss, who has been blind for almost seven years, admits that until the last few months when he and Millie were approached about receiving the Legion d'honneur, he had thought little and spoken less about his experiences at the front from 1915 to 1918: "I am very pleased with it and I consider it a great honour. What I like about it is it brings a great honour to the Home and the community here. I have waited long enough for it - 84 years. It took them that time to make their minds up." Asked how he feels about his time in the trenches, he says: "I never thought about it, never gave it a thought until they all started asking me questions. The family, my daughter and grand-daughter never heard anything about it until I started spouting here, and now they know everything."
Seated beside him is Millie who says in a clear Belfast accent of her husband of 66 years: "He's as good as gold. You wouldn't get many like him in a lucky bag."
Although he has spoken so little of it, at the age of 15 - when our teenagers are enjoying their school's Transition Year - Coss served in one of the most horrific periods of the war. Arras, where Coss served from May 1915 until his true age was discovered a year later, was near the centre of the spring offensives of 1915. During his first months at the front, poisonous chlorine gas was used widely for the first time.
He recalls joining up at a recruiting office in the centre of Leeds on an impulse one day when he was sent on a message from the upholstery factory where he worked. "I went across town for this message and on the way back I saw them going in and Kitchener pointing and I thought: `have a go, Joe.' I didn't give a damn about anything.
"I went to Winchester (the Headquarters of the King's Royal Rifles), and was rigged up with my uniform. I went from there to a camp, I don't know where, for three months and then went to France in May.
"We went to Etaples. That is where everybody went and you were drafted out of there. I was drafted with the 13th Battalion to Arras. I was there for a year." The trenches were "terrible" but, he adds: "You got used to them. You never knew when you were going to slip into a shell hole full of water. I was there for part of the summer and part of the winter. The winter was terrible. But there were dug-outs where you could get a cup of tea or go in for a rest but otherwise you were out on the firing step all the time."
Over the years he has lost track of where exactly he served and what went on around him on the front. "I don't know anything about it except I was still there all the time. I moved about a couple of places later on but I don't know where they were." He remained in the army for three years after the war ended, leaving in 1921. After a variety of jobs he settled into tailoring and opened his own shop outside Leeds. He met Millie through his brother who had moved to Belfast during the war, and through mutual friends in the Jewish community when Albert went to Belfast for a holiday in 1926.
At the time, a considerable, vibrant Jewish community was settled largely in the north of the city. The community's synagogue in Annesley Street, off Carlisle Circus, where Albert and Millie married, is now an annexe of the nearby hospital. The "new" synagogue, serving a greatly reduced community, is further up the Antrim Road.
Millie is the last of a family of seven daughters and one son of the Leopold family who owned a garment factory in Donegall Street. There were strong connections at the time between the Jewish communities in Belfast and in the northern English cities.
Their engagement lasted seven years during which he travelled to Belfast for weekends on the Heysham ferry. When she refused to leave home he came to Belfast to work in her father's clothing factory. They eventually moved into a nice home in the modest middle-class suburbs beneath the Cave Hill.
During the second World War, Coss, then too old to enlist, served as a sergeant major with the Home Guard unit on the Cliftonville Road in Belfast.
In 1955 during a slump in the garment trade, the couple left Belfast and moved into a flat in Kenilworth Road, Rathmines where they lived up to 1997. They were never happier, they say, and were dismayed when they had to leave Kenilworth Road. They were forced to leave their home after three burglaries in the space of two months. Millie's jewellery was stolen, and the flat was ransacked. "The police told us to leave money out. So we left money out so they took the money and smashed the place up. We were robbed three times in two months."
Fear that they themselves would be attacked in their beds led them to move into the Jewish Home at the end of 1997.
Their daughter, Rose, who still lives in Belfast, and grand-daughter Amanda are travelling to Dublin to attend the bestowal of the Legion d'honneur. The couple regard Dublin as their home. "All our friends are here," says Millie.
The bestowal of the Legion d'honneur arises from a decision taken almost two years ago by the French government to honour those remaining soldiers who had seen action with the Allies in France in the first World War. The French Embassy was alerted to Coss's service through the Royal British Legion office in Dublin.
Four of the first World War survivors in Northern Ireland have already received their awards. They are William Calvert (101), from Lisburn; Thomas McDowell (100) from Belfast; James Burns (99) from Belfast; and James Taylor (99), from Portaferry, Co Down. Taylor served with the Royal Field Artillery, the others with the Royal Irish Rifles.
Coss's joining the army at the age of 15 was not unusual. The general manager of the Somme Association in Belfast, Billy Ervine, points out that there is a grave of a 14-year-old Waterford boy, John Condon, at the Somme. Ervine says Condon must have been 13 when he enlisted.