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.
“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.
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.
A handful of WWI vets 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 8.4 million who served.
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 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 a newsboy. 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.
“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 northeastern 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.
