Wednesday 12 March 2008
By ReutersPARIS, March 12 (Reuters) - France's last surviving veteran
of World War One, an Italian immigrant who fought in the
trenches with the Foreign Legion, has died at the age of 110,
the president's office said on Wednesday.
Lazare Ponticelli, who joined his adopted country's army as
a 16-year-old at the outbreak of the war with Germany in 1914,
had attended a memorial ceremony as recently as November 2007.
Following the death of 110-year-old Louis de Cazenave in
January, Ponticelli was the last of the "poilus" ("hairy ones"),
the nickname given to the unshaven troops who embodied French
defiance in one of the bloodiest wars in the country's history.
Ponticelli, who described war as "idiotic", had initially
refused an offer of a state funeral made by former President
Jacques Chirac, considering it would be an insult to the men who
had died without commemoration.
He relented after Cazenave's death, saying he would accept a
simple ceremony "in homage to my comrades".
President Nicolas Sarkozy paid tribute to Ponticelli and
said a national commemoration of all of France's participants in
the war would be held in the coming days.
"I express today the profound emotion and infinite sadness
of the whole of the nation at the death of Lazare Ponticelli,
last survivor of the French combatants of the first world war,"
he said in a statement.
LAST LINK
Ponticelli's death severs the last living link with a
conflict whose traces can still be seen in war memorials in
nearly every town and village in France.
In a war fought largely on their home soil, about 8.4
million French soldiers served and about 1.3 million were killed
in battles that transformed familiar place names such as Verdun
and the Chemin des Dames into bywords for horror and suffering.
Ninety years later, the Great War "poilu" in his sky-blue
uniform still occupies a special place in the French imagination
and Ponticelli's death topped news bulletins on Wednesday.
Ponticelli was born into a poor family on Dec. 7, 1897, in
the northern Italian town of Bettola and came to France as a
9-year-old, walking part of the way to save money.
He worked as a chimney sweep and newspaper boy before
enlisting in the Foreign Legion when war broke out, saying later
it was "a way of thanking" the country that had fed him.
He served at Soissons in Picardy, the Argonne region of
northeast France and at Douaumont, near Verdun, on one occasion
rescuing a wounded German and a wounded French soldier caught
between the front lines.
"I was in all sorts of danger, during the war and at other
times as well. We were all going to die," he told reporters at
an Armistice Day ceremony in 2007.
With Italy's entry into the war in 1915, Ponticelli was
conscripted into the Italian Army and fought against the
Austrians in the Tyrol, where he was wounded in the face.
He made his way back to France after the war and, with two
brothers, founded Ponticelli Freres, a successful engineering
firm that still employs 2,000 people.
Ponticelli took French citizenship in 1939, settling in the
working class Paris suburb of Kremlin Bicetre, where he attended
Nov. 11 Armistice Day ceremonies regularly.
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