(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-03-13 10:58

PARIS -- France's last remaining 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.

Italian-born Lazare Ponticelli, the only remaining French veteran of World War I, celebrates his 110th birthday at the National History of Immigration Museum in Paris , in this Dec. 16, 2007 file photo. France's last World War I veteran, Ponticelli, has died at the age of 110, the French presidency announced Wednesday March 11, 2008. [Agencies]

"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.

The 1914-1918 conflict, known at the time as the Great War or the "war to end all wars," tore Europe apart and killed millions. Only a handful of World War I veterans are still living, scattered from Australia to the United States and Europe. Germany's last WWI veteran died on New Year's Day.

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, according to the veterans' office in Versailles.

In the French capital, he worked as a chimney sweep and then as a newspaper boy. When the war broke out, he was just 16, so he lied about his age to enlist, the president's statement said.

Ponticelli decided to fight for France, because it had taken him in.

"It was my way of saying 'Thank you," he said in a 2005 interview with the newspaper Le Monde.

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 the 2005 interview.

He also recalled running into no man's land to save a wounded comrade stuck in barbed wire.

   1 2   

   1 2