Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have sat us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!
But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
-- Thomas Hardy
Last week’s issue of the Economist carried the obituary of one Lazare Ponticelli, a French citizen who died on March 11 at the age of 110.
Mr. Ponticelli’s death might have gone unnoticed but for the fact that he was France’s last surviving veteran of World War I, or what the French still refer to as La Grande Guerre.
The French government had offered Mr. Ponticelli a state funeral and other honors, which he declined. He knew that he was being singled out merely because he was the last of the 8.4 million poilus, or foot-soldiers, who had fought for France in the terrible years between 1914 and 1918. Of these, 1,397,800 died and 4,266,000 were wounded.
Mr. Ponticelli, as his surname suggests, was not born in France. He was a native of Italy, whose family had moved to France to find work. In gratitude, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion as an under-age volunteer at 16. When Italy entered the war in 1915, he was forcibly repatriated and served in an Italian Alpine regiment for the duration. Afterwards, he was able to return to his adopted country.
To the end of his long life, he vividly recalled an occasion when his Italian regiment stopped firing on the enemy Austrians for three weeks. During this brief unofficial armistice, the soldiers on both sides swapped loaves of bread for tobacco, took pictures of each other and otherwise fraternized. In his later years, Mr. Ponticelli would share this story with anyone interested in his experiences –- but especially with children. For him, it illustrated the utter insanity of warfare. C’est completment idiot la guerre, he would say, sadly.
He would have agreed with the English poet, Thomas Hardy, who held similar views on war. I began this post with the opening stanzas of Hardy’s poem, “The Man He Killed.” I’m going to end with the last. It goes like this:
Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat, if met where any bar is,
Or help to half a crown.
