KEY POINTS:
PARIS - One is so frail he spends most of his day bedridden, attended by home helps and his 81-year-old son. The other is in a wheelchair, but can still coax his ancient body to stand to attention for the Armistice Day silence.
They are France's last two
soldiers from World War I, and their survival into the opening decade of the 21st century is both an extraordinary personal odyssey and a political thorn in the Government's side.
Louis de Cazenave, 110, and Lazare Ponticelli, 109, have slapped down an initiative by former President Jacques Chirac, who in November 2005 proposed France stage a "funeral of nationwide scope" for the last French soldier of the Great War. His remains would then be interred in a symbolic place.
Chirac did not spell out where this would be, but supporters of the idea enthusiastically began campaigning for the last "poilu" to be given a resting place in the Pantheon, the gilded necropolis in the Latin Quarter which houses the remains of Voltaire, Rousseau, Saint-Exupery, Louis Braille and other French greats.
Alas for the politicians, the last two survivors of the 8.4 million Frenchmen called to arms in the 1914-18 conflict have rejected Chirac's scheme as an odious glorification of war.
"If I turn out to be the last survivor, I say no. It would be an insult to all those who died before me and were not given any honours at all," Ponticelli said as he attended an Armistice Day ceremony near his home in Kremlin-Bicetre, a suburb south of Paris.
Born in Italy, Ponticelli came to France to escape poverty. In 1914, aged just 17, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion and survived some of the major battles of the Western Front before being transferred to the Italian Alps to fight Austrian troops. He was demobilised in 1916, surviving with just a wound to the cheek.
"War is completely stupid. You are firing on fathers of children," he said.
De Cazenave, a survivor of the Chemin des Dames offensive at Verdun where 100,000 men lost their lives, says the notion of a state funeral "is a con".
He lives in a small house in Brioude in the Loire region, and says he wants to be buried "in simplicity" alongside other members of his family in Saint-Georges-d'Aurac.
"The idea of honours has always made him angry. He used to tell us that those who died on the field of battle didn't even get a coffin," said his granddaughter Alix. "He's become a hard-and-fast pacifist. He's always said that war is horrible."
Faced by such obstinacy, officials are starting to emphasise that any funeral arrangements will be held in accordance with family wishes and the idea is taking root that the anniversary of the war's end should be an occasion for European reconciliation rather than a show of patriotism.
In November 2008, France will hold the rotating presidency of the European Union.
At the Armistice commemoration, President Nicolas Sarkozy paid tribute to European integration as "a great dream of peace born out of the blood and tears".
