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

"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.

He described moments of fraternity with enemy Austrian soldiers.

"They gave us tobacco, and we gave them loaves of bread. No one was shooting any more. The headquarters found out, and moved us to a tougher zone," he told Le Monde.

He described the joy in receiving letters from a milkmaid who "adopted" him when he was serving in Italy. He couldn't read at the time, so comrades read them to him, according to a biography by the Versailles veterans' office.

The Italian President Giorgio Napolitano expressed condolences "in the name of all Italians" to the veteran's daughter, Jeannine Desbaucheron.

By fighting first for France and then for Italy, Ponticelli "offered an admirable example of an elevated sense of duty and dedication to both his adoptive country and his country of birth," Napolitano wrote in a message to her.

Ponticelli returned to France in 1921, and he and his brothers started a company that made factory smokestacks. The company, Ponticelli Freres, grew into a manufacturer of specialized industrial equipment and is still in business.

Ponticelli became a French citizen in 1939, his nephew said.

His family was uncomfortable with the elaborate national funeral ceremony planned. Ponticelli agreed to one before his death, as long as it honored all the poilus and not just himself.

"We are trying to keep this a bit personal. We didn't want all this ceremony," said his grandnephew, Daniel Ponticelli.

He will be interred in a family burial plot in Paris.

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