FRANCE:France's oldest man, a first World War veteran who refused a medal and spoke powerfully about the horrors of war, has died aged 110.
Louis de Cazenave died at his home in the Auvergne region of central France yesterday. President Nicolas Sarkozy said his death was a reminder of the 1.4 million French who had lost their lives in the 1914-18 war.
Born in October 1897, Mr de Cazenave became an infantryman in 1916 and retired in 1941. He refused a military decoration but was eventually awarded the civilian Legion of Honour in 1999.
"Some of my comrades weren't even given a wooden cross," he told Le Mondein 2005. He gave a grim account of the offensive on German positions along the river Aisne in which he participated 88 years previously and which caused about 350,000 French and German deaths.
"You should have heard the wounded between the lines. They called out to their mothers, begged us to go finish them off," he told the newspaper.
"We found the Germans when we went to get water at the well. We spoke to them. They were just like us; they had had enough." He described patriotism as "a way of making people swallow anything" and war as absurd. "Nothing can justify it, nothing," he said.