Posted on 11/10/2006 6:08:35 AM PST by Republicain
DRAGUIGNAN , France, Nov 10, 2006 (AFP) - Maurice Floquet, one of France's last five surviving servicemen from World War I, died overnight at the age of 111, one day before Armistice Day, the ministry of defense said.
Floquet, who enlisted in the infantry at the outbreak of the war in 1914 and was badly wounded the following year, died at the house in southern France where he was looked after by his two daughters.
He was the oldest of the surviving "poilus" -- as French veterans of the war are known.
On Saturday President Jacques Chirac is to lead the traditional ceremony at the Arc de Triomphe in central Paris to mark the anniversary of the end of the Great War on November 11, 1918.
For the first time since 2003 the ceremony will be attended by a "poilu" -- Rene Riffaud, who at 107 is the youngest of the remaining four.
Last year Chirac promised that the last World War I veteran to die will receive a state funeral. Some 8.5 million French soldiers fought in the 1914-1918 conflict, of whom some 1.38 million died in action.
Floquet was born in December 1894 and joined up in September 1914. He fought in the first battles of the Somme and in September 1915 on the Marne front he received serious head wounds from a grenade.
Invalided out, he spent the end of the war working in an armaments factory. After the war he ran a garage until his retirement in 1952.
Eight British servicemen from the Great War are alive today, one of whom attended the 90th anniversary commemoration of the battle of the Somme in July. The Germans have no records.
Details of the state homage to the last "poilu" have yet to be decided. There are calls for him to be buried at the Invalides military hospice in Paris, at the battlefield memorial in Verdun, or in the Compiegne forest clearing where the armistice was signed.
Vive' le France!
Wow, that was some sacrifice. I take my hat off and bow to the greatest generation of France. Their kind is no more.
Back when the French had some fight in them. They should do a DNA test on Maurice Floquet and see what changed...
Sad that a generation that sacrificed so much is now all but gone.
You know, we really rip on France here (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly), but in World War I, they endured slaughter on a scale that has never been seen in this country, except maybe during the Civil War. When you look at the casualty figures back then, and then compare them to what we've suffered in Iraq in three years, it's mind-boggling. 2,800 dead was just an average single day on the Western Front.
The figure that always sticks in my mind was from the first day of the Battle of the Somme. There were twenty thousand British and Commonwealth troops killed on that day. Not "casualties," which means killed, wounded, and missing. KILLED. In one day. For advances of no more than one mile, if that. Ninety years later, we simply can't get our heads around numbers like that. We hear about ten soldiers or Marines getting killed in a single helicopter crash, and we hear how much a tragedy it is...and it is. But in 1916, you had hundreds of soldiers dying in a few minutes, and the nations put on their stiff upper lips, shrugged, and fed more fodder into the muzzles of the machine guns.
Sir Martin Gilbert has an absolutely fantastic single-volume history of the Great War that concentrates more on the human side of the conflict than a simple retelling of dates and places. I highly recommend it. It's a very sobering read.
}:-)4
World War I, back when the French were still cool and still had a spine.
Thats true Europe lost a generation of young men on the battlefield
It seems hard for those who are not students of history to believe, but from the mid-17th century through 1940, the French were regarded as both warlike and very competent at it.
That image began to change with their humiliating defeat by the Prussians in 1870-71 in the Franco-Prussian War. Then they rallied to fight well in the First World War. It was only their utter collapse in 1940, followed by the disaster in Indochina and the humiliating loss (though not through French military incompetence) in Algeria that solidified the French reputation as cheese-eating surrender monkeys.
RIP brave soldier.
My (German) family lost during WWI two of its sons in France. Today (my uncle married a French woman) a part of my Family is French. The French once were our "Erbfeind" (enemy of heritage) and today my cousins (cute girls - real hotties ;) ) are French. When I was a member of the German forces I worked together with many French comrades. Therefore I never gave much on the widespread "cheese eating surrender monkey" stammering here on FR. Most of them are the finest soldiers you can think of.
It would be a great achievement if the whole West (and that includes France) could find together again. Maybe the example of this old fighter will remember some of our friends who have a different opinion, that not all French are waving white flags.
Greetings from Lake Constance (Germany)
Andreas
It's things like this that indicate how "pussified" Western society has become. It's just damned sickening!!!
I heard on Bill Bennett this morning the US has 9 WW1 vets left.
What a terrible tragedy World War I was! It didn't have to happen.
"Pussified," perhaps, but the fact is that World War I was a useless, mindless, stupid slaughter. In the end, it destroyed an entire generation of Europe, gave Communism the foothold it needed to begin a reign of terror around the world, and so horrified the men who became Europe's leaders that when Hitler rose twenty years later, they wouldn't consider armed force to stop him until it was too late.
}:-)4
What's the title?
Here in England, many public places, and places of work, old schools etc have plaques comemorating the fallen in the Great War.
It is sobering as you say to see how many men were lost, even in quite small communities.
Personally I feel a lot of blame towards the military leadership at the time, whose idea of tactics was to send men at walking pace, into massed machine gun, artillery, and gas attack.
No wonder few of survivors, (including one of my Grand-Fathers who survived being captured)would talk about it.
I tried to find a picture of war graves, but unfortunately single photos can't capture the scale of the cemetaries.
Aw - come on. I even give my Southern accented boys a good ribbing or two, from time to time, about losing the War of Rebellion. Like you never asked a French comrade (after a couple beers in the pub) why do the French plant tress on the Champs Elysees? (So the German Army can parade in the shade.).
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The world had never seen anything like it. The evil by-product of WWI was the fear of "here we go again" thanks to Hitler. You have brought up a valid point.
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