KEY POINTS:
PARIS - They were two men who took up arms on opposing sides in "the war to end all wars" and, nine decades on, became their country's last survivors of that awful conflict.
But the last soldier who fought for the Kaiser has died in almost complete obscurity,
whereas his French counterpart is to be honoured with a state funeral, a contrast that poignantly shows how some of the scars of World War I have yet to heal even today.
It was only thanks to an anonymous contributor to German Wikipedia, who spotted a death notice in a regional daily, that the world learned of the passing of Erich Kaestner, believed to be the last surviving soldier of the Imperial German Army.
Kaestner - unrelated to the writer of the same name best known for Emil and the Detectives - died in an old people's home in a suburb of Cologne on January 1.
He had had the misfortune to have been born in 1900. It meant that having survived World War I - he had just graduated from high school when he went into uniform in 1918 - he was still young enough to be called up for World War II.
In Nazi-occupied France, he served as a major in a Luftwaffe anti-aircraft unit in Angers, in France's Loire Valley.
The German media discovered that the authorities themselves had had no idea that the country's last warrior from World War I had died. Indeed, Kaestner is only presumed to have been the last survivor, as no one can confirm otherwise. The Bundeswehr, the German War Graves Commission and the Federal Military Archive admit that they keep no records of survivors.
"The German public came within a hair's breadth of never learning that an era had come to an end," the weekly Der Spiegel said. "With Erich Kaestner's death, there are now no Germans left who can talk [about World War I] with first-hand experience."
In contrast, France is already planning a state ceremony for when its last survivor of World War I meets his maker.
The tribute was proposed by former President Jacques Chirac, who called for "a solemn funeral of nationwide scope".
The last two survivors, Lazare Ponticelli and Louis de Cazenave, refused this tribute, saying that to place the focus on a single person would dishonour those who had died anonymously on the field of battle.
After Cazenave died on January 20, Ponticelli, 110, reluctantly accepted a ceremony, but on several conditions. He insists there be "no big racket, no procession" and there is a Mass in Les Invalides military chapel in Paris for his dead comrades.
"I can only think of my brothers in arms who fell," Ponticelli told the daily Parisien. "They are the ones to whom honours are due. I am just their humble representative, who has had the good luck to survive."
Of the 8.5 million men who fought for France between 1914 and 1918, 1.4 million were killed and 4.5 million injured. Three generations on, the industrialised butchery still affects France, demographically and emotionally: even today, the name of Verdun can evoke anger and bitter tears. Ponticelli is the last living link to this awful era, and his funeral will provide a form of closure.
Germany suffered even more than France, losing two million of its men. But the humiliation of defeat, followed by Nazi genocide and the second defeat in 1945, cast long shadows that are felt even today.
Kaestner's son, Peter Kaestner, said he was not surprised the country had no record of its veterans. "That is the way history developed. In Germany, in this respect, things are kept quiet - they're not a big deal."
"An unwritten law says victors have right on their side," observed the German daily Die Welt. "The losers escape into an emotional realm of self-pity and self-denial, which they try hard to ease through forgetting."
