With the death of Louis de Cazenave in January, Lazare Ponticelli assumed the mantle of le dernier poilu. Now, less than two months later, Ponticelli too is dead, the last of the French Army veterans of the Great War of 1914-18.

He was in fact born Lazarro Ponticelli in northern Italy in 1897 in a small mountain hamlet near Bettola in Piacenza province. He was one of seven children in a desperately poor family: his father was a jobbing carpenter and cobbler, his mother tried to scratch a living from the family vegetable plot and three times a year left home to go down to the Po valley to work on the seasonal rice harvest.

When Ponticelli was 2 his mother left for France in search of work that could make some meaningful contribution to domestic, most of the family eventually following her. He was left in the care of neighbours. When his father and brother were killed in an accident, he made his way by train to Paris, though speaking no French. Eventually he found work as a chimney sweep at Nogent-sur-Marne, which had a fair-sized Italian community.

When war came in August 1914 he lied about his age and joined the 1st Régiment de Marche of the French Foreign Legion, where he found himself a comrade in arms with one of his brothers.

But in 1915, with the entry of Italy into the war on the Allied side he was told he must join the Italian Army and was discharged. Refusing at first to be parted from his French uniform, he was firmly escorted by two gendarmes to Turin, where he joined a regiment of Alpinieri for service on the Austrian front.

There he was serving as a machinegunner when he was seriously wounded by a shell burst during one of the many futile Italian assaults on welldefended Austrian mountain positions. After surgery and convalescence in Naples he returned to the front, this time to be gassed in 1918 an Austrian use of the chemical weapon that killed hundreds of his comrades.

Demobilised in 1920, he returned to France and with two brothers founded a stovemaking and pipework company, Ponticelli Frères, which did a roaring business supplying industry both in France and abroad.

When the Second World War broke out he obtained French nationality, but he was adjudged too old for active service and instead put his company at the service of France's war effort. When in 1940 the Germans invaded and occupied France he moved his factory to the unoccupied zone. But when Vichy France too was occupied, he returned northwards and worked for the Resistance.

After the war he restarted his company, guiding its business until his retirement in 1960. Latterly he lived in the Paris suburb of Le Kremlin Bicêtre, and regularly attended Armistice Day ceremonies.

Ponticelli held both the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille Interalliée for his services in 1914-18. More recently, like all surviving veterans of the First World war, he had been appointed a Chevalier, Légion d'honneur.

Lazare Ponticelli, French Army veteran of the First World War, was born on December 7, 1897. He died on March 12, 2008, aged 110