Missing in action, presumed dead. And eventually he faded from living memory. His generation passed away, with everyone who loved him, everyone who mourned him. Time rendered him faceless. He was just a name, one of hundreds chiseled in limestone in a cemetery chapel 4,000 miles from home.
A lost doughboy. But now he is found.
Discovered by chance, unearthed in 2003 by archaeologists, Pvt. Francis Lupo of Cincinnati has returned from the front at last, nearly 90 years after boarding a troop ship for France. Today, the Army will bury him again, this time with honors at Arlington National Cemetery, laying to rest possibly the longest-missing U.S. soldier ever recovered and identified: a ghost of World War I.
Lupo, killed at 23, most likely on his first day in heavy fighting, will get a fine Arlington send-off, with all the Army’s Old Guard solemn pomp: a horse-drawn caisson, a bugler, rifle volleys, a tri-folded U.S. flag for his next of kin – a niece born 15 years after the armistice.
There’s great solace in that Arlington tradition, if not always for a slain soldier’s family then for the military, comforted by the enduring ritual. Perhaps no one alive now met this private, but he fell in uniform, and that’s what matters to the Army.
The niece, Rachel Kleisinger, says she is probably the only surviving descendant of Lupo’s who knew he existed. And she’ll be the only person at the service who knows for sure what he looked like, from a photo she saw as a girl.
His battalion was pushing through wheat fields in northern France under German fire that summer Saturday when Lupo was killed. Hastily buried in a shell crater, he was left behind with the rest of the dead as the battalion kept up its advance.
Lupo wasn’t alone in that shallow grave. A second doughboy had been buried with him. Their bones were mingled. Small remnants of two uniforms were found, along with bits of gear. No identity tags turned up. But the dirt yielded pieces of a wallet, the name FRANCIS LUPO embossed in the brittle leather. Anthropologists and other specialists confirmed that Lupo’s bones were among those in the hole. But who was the other poor fellow? Unknown. What’s left of him is boxed on a lab shelf, a number without a name.
Another ghost.
Lupo’s service record and a lab report describe a fireplug of a man – muscular, 5 feet tall, maybe shorter, with olive skin, black hair and brown eyes. His Sicilian-born mother, who grieved his loss terribly until she died in 1949, kept a big picture of him, a portrait of her son in uniform with an American flag.
Kleisinger, 73, recalls staring at it as a child.
“Such a handsome boy,” she says. “And very proud, I think.”
It’s long gone, that photo, and the military knows of no other.
Still, pieces of his story survive, in archives and libraries – footprints of a lost doughboy whose short life mirrors a big part of the American experience.
He grew up in a polyglot neighborhood near Cincinnati’s riverfront, one of eight siblings born to Sicilian immigrants, his father a laborer. They lived in tenements before the war.
When rabid patriotism and war fever swept the country in 1917, Lupo was an $8-a-week “supply man” for the Cincinnati Times-Star, delivering papers to newsboys. He went off to France with a generation of young men eager to fight “the Hun.”
The war had been raging on several fronts for three years, with millions dead, when the first Americans landed in France. After a months-long buildup, the doughboys began fighting in large numbers in major battles in the spring of 1918 – just as Lupo reached the front – and eventually helped break a murderous stalemate.
The price for the United States: about 116,000 dead, roughly 53,000 in battle, most of the rest from illnesses, mainly influenza. Tens of thousands of them were immigrants or, like Lupo, the first generation of their families to be born in this country. Nearly 4,500 of those killed are unaccounted for.
The limestone chapel stands about 60 miles east of Paris, its tower rising above the headstones of more than 2,200 doughboys killed nearby. No one who knew them visits anymore.
In the chapel’s vestibule, an inscription tells of 1,060 other men, U.S. soldiers who fought in the region and “sleep in unknown graves.” Lupo’s name is among those chiseled on a tablet to the right of the marble altar. His mother, Anna, traveled from Cincinnati to see it in the summer of 1931, a month-long round trip, a government-paid pilgrimage for Gold Star mothers. She was about 60 then. Her husband had died of pneumonia in 1922. She spoke no English.
Years later, it was plain to Kleisinger that the journey did nothing to ease her grandmother’s suffering.
“Sweet” had always been one of Anna Lupo’s pet names for Francis. “Ducce” was how she said it in her Sicilian dialect, or “sciue” when she used Neapolitan. In her late 70s, she sometimes would begin to cry.
“We’d say, ‘Grandma, what’s wrong?”‘ Kleisinger recalls. And Anna Lupo, still weeping, always in black, would stand, open a window and call out: “Sciue-ducce! … Sciue-ducce!”
“It was like she was telling him, ‘If you can hear me, come home,”‘ she says. “You couldn’t stop her. The best thing we could do was just leave her alone.”
Lupo was inducted Oct. 3, 1917, and went off to fight in size 5 1/2 boots. On June 2, he went into the line northeast of Paris, joining E Company of the 18th Infantry while the regiment was positioned near the battered village of Cantigny. The 18th, bloodied in fierce fighting to hold the town, needed replacements.
And here came Pvt. Lupo, in clean breeches and tunic, ready to fight the Germans. He carried a prayer card in his wallet. It bore the image of a deceased French nun who would soon be canonized, St. Therese of Lisieux. And it bore the words: “I will spend my Heaven in doing good on Earth.”
He fell amid the acrid stench of manure and cordite. His skeletal remains are long past telling what killed him: a shell blast, machine-gun fire. The soldiers put him and the other man in a crater out there between the villages and kept moving.
Not until the next day was Lupo recorded as missing.
The campaign, eventually known as the Second Battle of the Marne, was a victory for the Allies. After more big battles, and thousands more casualties, the war ended in November.
The fields stayed mostly farmland. Because ancient remains have been found in the region, the law requires an archaeological survey before new construction takes place.
That was how Lupo and his fellow doughboy turned up in 2003.
In 2004, the bones and artifacts were delivered to the Defense Department’s Joint POW/ MIA Accounting Command in Hawaii. Anthropologists, historians and other specialists there work to find and identify missing U.S. military personnel, almost exclusively from World War II on. None had dealt with a doughboy before.
After the lab finished its work last fall, the Army searched for next of kin, eventually finding Kleisinger in Kentucky. She is the daughter of Lupo’s youngest sibling, Rose, long dead. Rose was 7 when her brother Francis went off to Ohio’s Camp Sherman.
So Kleisinger will get the tri-folded flag at Arlington. No old men of E Company will be there, no aged veterans of Saint- Mihiel or the Meuse-Argonne. Of the 4.7 million Americans in uniform during Lupo’s war, all but a dozen or so are dead.
And his mother, in her grave 57 years.
“I used to go to church with her and help her light the candles,” Kleisinger says of Anna Lupo. “She would always ask the Blessed Mother to please bring him home. And I kept telling her, you know: ‘He can’t come home, Grandma. He’s gone.’ But she could just never accept it.”
