Last French WWI Veteran Dies

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Swedishguy said:
Oh? I'm supposed to see these old men as anything more than old, primitive, old men? There is nothing further to learn from WWI. Don't expect me to worship these people just because you think they're cool.
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These people were your fellow human beings. Why not honor them at the time of their passing?
 
I don't like some of the opinion pieces published by The Economist, but this week they had an obituary obituary that I believe is worth reading:

THE business of memory is a solid and solemn thing. Plaques are unveiled on the wall; stone memorials are built in the square; the domed mausoleum rises brick by brick over the city. But the business of memory is also as elusive as water or mist. The yellowing photographs slide to the back of the drawer; the voices fade; and the last rememberers of the dead die in their turn, leaving only what Thomas Hardy called “oblivion's swallowing sea”.

[...]Mr Ponticelli, who up to his 111th year appeared every November 11th in his flat cap and brown coat, lean and bright-eyed, gamely managing the few steps required to lay his small bunch of carnations there. The most astonished and serious observers were always children, to whom—if they wanted—he would tell his stories. [...] he was the last.

What had become of the others? The stretcher-bearers in the Argonne, for example, who had told him they didn't dare leave the trench for fear of German fire. The man he had heard from no-man's land, caught in the barbed wire and with his leg severed, screaming to be rescued, until Mr Ponticelli ran out to him with wire-cutters and dragged him back to the lines. The German soldier he tripped over in the dark, already wounded and expecting to be killed, who mutely held up his fingers to show him that he had two children. The comrades who helped him, because he could not read or write, to keep in touch by letter with the milkmaid he had met before the war. Or the four colleagues who held him down when, after the battle of Pal Piccolo, the army surgeon gouged out of his cheek a piece of shrapnel already lodged in gangrene.

With each new round of shelling, he said, they all expected the worst. They would reassure each other by saying, “If I die, you'll remember me, won't you?” Mr Ponticelli felt he had a duty to try, but struggled. These were mes camarades, les gars, un type: faces, not names. And as he faded, even those faces lost their last hold on the living.
[...]
Increasingly, however, people wanted to talk to him about the war. He always courteously obliged them, though by the end his thin, scratchy voice came out in gasps. It was as important to him as it was to them to underscore the horror and futility of it. More than anything, he was appalled that he had been made to fire on people he didn't know and to whom he, too, was a stranger. These were fathers of children. He had no quarrel with them. C'est complètement idiot la guerre. His Italian Alpine regiment had once stopped firing for three weeks on the Austrians, whose language many of them spoke; they had swapped loaves of bread for tobacco and taken pictures of each other. To the end of his life, Mr Ponticelli showed no interest in labelling anyone his enemy. He said he did not understand why on earth he, or they, had been fighting.
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It's probably beyond the understanding of the holocaust deniers who would find only industrial-scale death worthy of their interest, through...
 
I think there will always be interest when something will soon no longer exist. I study local history a lot, and people often ask me why. To them I say they should look at all the wonderful buildings our city has lost, the overhead railway dismantled, the docks that no longer see ships. I'm not especially against change, but I do think that if I don't go and see what's left then one day I'll no longer have that chance, and I'll always wonder what it was like.

In the same sense if no-one took any interest in these veterans we would only have a very limited understanding of what the war was like. Statistics, official reports and newspaper cuttings can only go so far, and without speaking to those involved you will never get a very good inkling of just how dreadful war can be (and even then I don't think non-combatants are ever likely to get that good an idea thank god).

Apart from anything else they seem by and large to want to tell their story, and if you ask me after all they went through I think the least we owe them is to have the decency to listen, or the manners not to do the written equivalent of yawning.
 
Swedishguy said:
For the same reason I don't honour all the other millions of people that die every day. It's meaningless.
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Don't you care about your fellow humans' lives? Every one is a soul that can love and contribute to the human experience. And Jesus loves every single one. Every one lost is like losing a child to him. Doesn't that seem important to you? Plus, death liberates the soul and sends us to heaven to be with Jesus and our loved ones forever.
 
Swedishguy said:
Oh? I'm supposed to see these old men as anything more than old, primitive, old men? There is nothing further to learn from WWI. Don't expect me to worship these people just because you think they're cool.
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The Gr€at War was a lie, huh . . .
 
Huayna Capac357 said:
Don't you care about your fellow humans' lives? Every one is a soul that can love and contribute to the human experience. And Jesus loves every single one. Every one lost is like losing a child to him. Doesn't that seem important to you? Plus, death liberates the soul and sends us to heaven to be with Jesus and our loved ones forever.
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No, sorry. My brain isn't very altruistic. And there is no god.
 
Swedishguy said:
No, sorry. My brain isn't very altruistic. And there is no god.
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Wow. You disagree with everthing I say. Okay, hear goes:

1. The World is round.
2. America's capital is Washington DC.
3. The Moon is made of rock, not cheese.
4. 2+2=4
5. Pi=3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510...
 
Huayna Capac357 said:
Wow. You disagree with everthing I say. Okay, hear goes:

1. The World is round.
2. America's capital is Washington DC.
3. The Moon is made of rock, not cheese.
4. 2+2=4
5. Pi=3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510...
Click to expand...
1. The world is slightly flat by the poles.
2. That's the state, not the city.
3. I'd say it's made of stone.
4. Where are you getting the twos from anyway?
5. It goes longer than that...
 
The Yankee said:
It's kinda like that now even if you only get to 60, but the huge leaps made between then and now are even more profound. Reminds me of a columnist in a local paper talking about Canarsie (a neighborhood in Brooklyn) with horses and farmland in the 1930s.
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I don't want to grow old now.

Besides all the unpleasent side effects of aging of course.
 
Swedishguy said:
1. The world is slightly flat by the poles.
2. That's the state, not the city.
3. I'd say it's made of stone.
4. Where are you getting the twos from anyway?
5. It goes longer than that...
Click to expand...

Wow..............

1. In, say, SWEDEN it's round!
2. DC is not a state! Washington, DC refers to the city. I'm American. I think I would know the capital of my own country (Yours is Stockholm).
3. Stone and rock are essentially the same. I think rock sounds better :p.
4. What does that mean? I got the "twos" from the keyboard! :confused:
5. Duh. That's why I included the "...".

Let's stop before the moderators close the poor OP's thread.
 
I found the last line of The Economist obit interesting.

“He said he did not understand why on earth he, or they, had been fighting.”

I wonder if Mr Ponticelli ever had the desire to read a history of the war to better understand his part in it, or would the attempts to explain the reasons and justify the casualties simply make him wretch.
 
Perhaps he had and still wondered what in the hell he was called to fight for. At any rate, it's great to see that he seemed to have built a good life for himself after the Great War.
 
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