Word War I Is Over
With the funeral of Lazare Ponticelli, France has said farewell to the country’s last veteran of World War I.
Today’s mass in the Invalides was a homage to the 1.4 million French soldiers who died during that war, at the rate of nearly one thousand a day. Most of them were ill-prepared, badly armed, and no match for the machine guns of the enemy. They were simply cannon fodder.
Ironically, Ponticelli wasn’t a French soldier, and fought most of his war years for Italy. He didn’t take up French citizenship until twenty years after the war, when he was already in his forties.
Ponticelli’s life would have been completely different if he had been born a century later. As an illegal 9-year old immigrant he would have been picked up by French immigration authorities, and put back on a plane to his home country (in his case Italy). Serving in the French army at the age of sixteen would have made him a child soldier, and would have triggered international outrage.
Those are the things nobody wants to consider on a day like today. Together with Ponticelli, France has buried WW1, also known as the War To End All Wars. Unfortunately, that turned out to be the misnomer of the century.
Mon 17-Mar-08 | Posted in: People, History
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Comments
Comment from romke
Time: March 17, 2008, 8:51 pm
Arnaud: thanks for those clarfifications. The fact remains that Ponticelli wouldn’t have been allowed to do what he did in today’s France.
Comment from Arnaud
Time: March 17, 2008, 8:28 pm
“Ironically, Ponticelli wasn’t a French soldier, and fought most of his war years for Italy. He didn’t take up French citizenship until twenty years after the war, when he was already in his forties.”
Yeah, it’s a bit more complex than that; he actually fought for France for nearly a year in the Foreign Legion (he was sent to France by his family, aged nine, eight years before the war) until Italy switched sides and joined the allies in 1915. Then, and only then, was he, against his wishes, sent back to fight with the Italians. He even managed to escaped to rejoin his French unit but was re-captured! As he said often, he only wanted to fight for the people who gave him bread.
So no, it’s not “ironic”, what is ironic is this great man, who was shamefully treated, being given state funerals now, something he steadfastly refused until a few months ago.
To his credit.