FRANCE:FRANCE'S LAST surviving veteran of the first World War, an Italian immigrant who fought in the trenches with the Foreign Legion, has died at the age of 110.
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, Mr Ponticelli was the last of the poilus, the nickname given to the unshaven troops who embodied French defiance in the most bloody war in the country's history.
Mr 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 Mr Cazenave's death, saying he would accept a simple ceremony "in homage to my comrades".
Mr 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 by France largely on its home soil, about 8.4 million 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.
Mr Ponticelli worked as a chimney sweep and newspaper boy before enlisting in the Foreign Legion in 1914, 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.
With Italy's entry into the war in 1915, he was conscripted into the Italian army and fought against the Austrians in the Tyrol, where he was wounded in the face. -