WWI Soldier Comes Home at Long Last

Maybe the soldiers who buried him were killed an hour later. Or the next morning. A lot of battlefield graves were lost that way in the carnage. No one will ever know.

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 for the military 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.

'A Handsome Boy'

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 in her parlor, a portrait of her son in uniform with an American flag.

Kleisinger, 73, recalls staring at it as a child, an old photo even then.

"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, deep 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. Lupo later told the Army that one of his occupations as a young adult was "pugilist." He said his last year of schooling was the fifth grade. "For one of his station he presents average intelligence," a military doctor noted.

When rabid patriotism and war fever swept the country in 1917, he was an $8-a-week "supply man" for the Cincinnati Times-Star, delivering papers to newsboys. He went off to France with a confident generation, young men eager to fight "the Hun" -- until they met the horrific reality of modern, mechanized slaughter on the Western Front.

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 that had consumed a generation of European youth in the trenches. By autumn, the war was over.

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.