pansypoo's personal rant page.

RANDOM WWI POST

last french soldier.


PARIS, France (AP) -- Lazare Ponticelli, France's last veteran of World War I, has died. He was 110.

Lazare Ponticelli was born in Italy but fought for France in World War I.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy expressed "deep emotion and sadness" at Ponticelli's death, which Sarkozy's office announced in a statement Wednesday.

No cause or details of his death were given.

France planned a national funeral ceremony honoring its last "poilu" -- the term meaning hairy or tough and given to those who fought in the Great War, as World War I is called here. The 1914-1918 conflict tore Europe apart.

Only a handful of World War I veterans are still living, scattered from Australia to the United States and Europe. Germany's last veteran from the conflict died on New Year's Day.

Ponticelli was born December 7, 1897, in Bettola, a town in the foothills of the Apennines in the Emilia Romagna region of northern Italy.

To escape a tough childhood, Ponticelli trooped off alone at age 9 to the nearest railway station, 34 kilometers (21 miles) away in Piacenza, where he took a train to rejoin his brothers in France, eventually becoming a French citizen, according to the veterans' office in the Yvelines region west of Paris.

In the French capital, where he was when the war broke out, he worked as a chimney sweep and then as a newspaper boy.

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 daily Le Monde and officials from France's veterans' office. E-mail to a friend