Louis de Cazenave

Here's a story that's getting only the mildest of coverage locally.

World War I veteran Louis de Cazenave died Sunday at age 110, his son said, leaving just one known French survivor of the 1914-1918 conflict.

De Cazenave, who took part in the Battle of the Somme, died in his home in Brioude in central France, said his son, also named Louis de Cazenave.

. . .

De Cazenave took part in the Battle of the Somme in 1916, in which more than a million soldiers died, and in the liberation of France from German forces, the statement said.

"His death is an occasion for all of us to think of the 1.4 million French who sacrificed their lives during this conflict, for the 4.5 million wounded, for the 8.5 million mobilized," President Nicolas Sarkozy said in a statement.

That's the gist of the wire service coverage published in both the N&) and the HS (and probably most papers around the country. Foreign coverage gets a few more details out there. (MORE)
For instance, here's what the BBC adds:

In April 1917, assigned to the Fifth Senegalese Rifles, he fought in one of the most disastrous French actions of the war, at the Chemin des Dames, during the Second Battle of the Aisne.

The chemin was an 18th Century road straddling a ridge.

The Germans took it in late 1914, and after two years of attritional warfare, the French commander-in-chief, Gen Robert Nivelle, recommended a massive assault against them.

But squabbling between Allied leaders lead to delays and leaks.

Forewarned, the Germans dug in so well that the creeping artillery barrage ahead of the French advance did little to dislodge them.

Across the battlefront the French lost 40,000 men on the first day.

Some reports say the advancing French bleated in mocking acknowledgement that they were lambs to the slaughter.

Mr de Cazenave's family say the experience, which led to French mutinies, left him a pacifist.

During World War II he was briefly jailed by the pro-Nazi puppet regime under Marshal Petain, the general who relieved Nivelle after the debacle.

"War is something absurd, useless, that nothing can justify. Nothing," he told Le Monde newspaper in a 2005 interview.

In that interview, he described walking through fields of wounded soldiers calling for their mothers, begging to be finished off.

AFP adds an even more interesting tidbit:

At 110 years old, an Italian-born Foreign Legionnaire who wants nothing to do with the state funeral proposed by former president Jacques Chirac is the last man standing in France from World War I.

"The first men to fall in the trenches deserve to be honoured as much as the last," Lazare Ponticelli said, according to his daughter Janine Desbaucheron, upon learning of fellow veteran Louis de Cazenave's death on Sunday.

. . .


While Ponticelli and de Cazenave never met, as Desbaucheron pointed out, the two men instinctively reacted the same way when Chirac produced his suggestion for a ceremony filled with pomp and circumstance in 1995.

They were the last two of 8.5 million men who fought between 1914 and 1918 under French colours.

Imagine that. A veteran who saw tens of thousands of his fellows slaughtered for no other reason then the incompetence of his superior officers and politiicians, refusing offers of pomp and circumstance from their spiritual descendants, and dismissing war and patriotism as absurd.

Imagine that.