French WWI vet dies
PARIS — France's last veteran of World War I died Wednesday at age 110 after outliving 8.4 million Frenchmen who fought in what they called "la Grande Guerre."
Lazare Ponticelli, who was born in Italy but chose to fight for France and was a French citizen for most of the past century, died at his home in the Paris suburb of Kremlin-Bicetre, the national veterans' office said.
"It is to him and his generation that we owe in large part the peaceful and pacified Europe of today. It is up to us to be worthy of that," President Nicolas Sarkozy said in a statement.
France planned a national funeral ceremony Monday honoring Ponticelli and all the "poilus," an affectionate term meaning hairy or tough that the French use for their soldiers who fought in World War I.
Monuments to battles and war dead cover swathes of France where trenches once divided the landscape during the war, which left 1.4 million French fighters dead of the 8.4 million who served. The last survivor was an unlikely one.
Ponticelli was born Dec. 7, 1897, in Bettola, a town in northern Italy.
To escape a tough childhood, Ponticelli trooped off alone at age 9 to the nearest railway station, 21 miles away in Piacenza, where he took a train to join his brothers in France, eventually becoming a French citizen.
When the war broke out, he was just 16, so he lied about his age to enlist.
Ponticelli decided to fight for France, because it had taken him in. Ponticelli joined the Foreign Legion during the war and served in the Argonne region of forest, rivers and lakes in northeast France, digging burial pits and trenches.
"At the beginning, we barely knew how to fight and had hardly any ammunition. Every time that one of us died, we fell silent and waited for our turn," he said in an 2005 interview.
He also recalled running into no man's land to save a wounded comrade stuck in barbed wire.
"He was shouting, 'Come and get me, I've severed a leg.' The stretcher-bearers didn't dare go out. I couldn't bear it any longer," he said.
When Italy entered the war in 1915, Ponticelli was called up to fight with an Italian Alpine regiment. He tried to hide, but was found and sent to fight the Austrian army.
Ponticelli returned to France in 1921.
