PARIS, March 17: President Nicolas Sarkozy led a national ceremony in Paris on Monday in honour of the last French veteran of World War I, Lazare Ponticelli, who died last week at 110.

Italian-born Ponticelli, the last of more than eight million men who fought under French colours in the 1914-18 war that tore Europe apart, died on Wednesday at his home in a Paris suburb.

Resting on the shoulders of 11 Foreign Legionnaires, draped in the colour of the French flag, his coffin was carried at 11:00 am into a church at the Invalides, the historic military hospice that houses the tomb of Napoleon.

State officials across France held a minute of silence, and flags flew at half mast on public buildings for the ceremony led by Sarkozy and his predecessor Jacques Chirac, Prime Minister Francois Fillon and Italian Defence Minister Arturo Parisi.

“Far more than the last survivor on our soil of the great army that fought in

World War I, he makes us proud, for his whole life, to be his brother,” the historian Max Gallo said in a tribute to Ponticelli.—AFP