Eric Margolis

SALUTE TO WWI's 'VIEUX SOLDAT'

France’s last living veteran of World War I, Lazare Ponticelli, died Wednesday, aged 110. His death marks the end of France’s final human link to the terrible 1914-1918 Great War that killed 20 million soldiers and civilians.

The passing of France’s last `poilu,’ as its infantrymen were called, reminds us of that nation’s epic heroism and unimaginable suffering during the Great War. Know-nothing American conservatives have been slandering France’s military record for years, accusing French of being cowardly `surrender monkeys’ because they were swiftly defeated by Germany in 1940. How quickly they forget America’s defeat in Vietnam three decades later.

Out of 8.6 million troops France mobilized during the Great War, 1.4 million were killed in action and 4.5 million seriously wounded. That is 68% of troops mobilized became casualties.

Every little French village bears a war memorial listing a horrifyingly long roll of names: fathers and sons, brothers, cousins. After the war, the French countryside was denuded of people. Fields lay fallow. Women found no husbands. So awful were France’s loses on the nightmare Western Front that its population barely grew from 1890 to 1945.

France’s `poilus’ fought in some of the most hideous conditions ever faced by soldiers: a nightmare landscape of mud, muck-filled shell craters, barbed wire, corpses and human parts. They lived under frequent bombardment of heavy shells up to 420mm, often went hungry and thirsty, and saw their friends blown to bloody pulp before their eyes. The Germans suffered too, but their trenches were better and their commanders less likely to throw their men into the meat grinder of suicidal frontal attacks.

Anyone who doubts the courage of French soldiers should go to the battlefield of Verdun, where some 600,00 died in a year of battle waged with poison gas, millions of heavy shells, machine guns, and flamethrowers. France’s rallying cry was, `they shall not pass,’ and they did not.

Until the 1980’s, Frances metros and buses had special reserved seats for mutilated war veterans. Hospitals were packed with veterans blinded or hideously burned by mustard, chlorine and phosgene gas. Most divisions of France’s Army were rotated into the hell of Verdun, ensuring its horror became a national Calvary.

Other nations also suffered deeply in World War I. Britain lost 885,000 men, Canada, 65,000, the US 116,000. Germany lost 2 million dead, but from a population almost twice France’s. Austro-Hungary lost 1.1 million and Turkey 800,000. Russia lost 18 million men. Even Italy lost 651,000 dead in a lunatic war in the high Alps and Dolomites against the Austrians and Hungarians. Ponticellil, who was born in Italy, ended up fighting there, too, after his French army service.

France, however, suffered more than any other combatant, save perhaps Serbia, which had provoked the war. France strained every national sinew to stop the German Army, the world’s best trained, most efficient military force. Had the US not intervened in 1917, the exhausted warring powers would have been forced to make peace, perhaps averting the Russian Revolution and Hitler.

In 1940, France faced the world’s most modern, high tech military, Germany’s Wehrmacht. France fought bravely, losing 600,000 casualties, but was overwhelmed by Germany’s new form of warfare. France fought, but without its usual `élan.’ France’s heart had been broken at Verdun. There is no dishonor being defeated by Germans. Had Americans faced Germans in 1940, they, too, would have been quickly whipped.

So we salute `vieux soldat’ Ponticelli and his gallant Great War comrades. The old warrior refused a state memorial ceremony, asking only his comrades in arms be honored. He told Reuters, `war is completely stupid.’

30 MARGOLIS