WWI Soldier Comes Home at Long Last

The limestone chapel stands in the countryside about 60 miles east of Paris by a forest called Belleau Wood, its tower rising 80 feet above the headstones of more than 2,200 doughboys killed nearby. No one who knew them visits anymore.

Soft light through stained-glass windows bathes the chapel's vestibule, where an inscription tells of 1,060 other men, their names recorded on the walls, American soldiers of the World War who fought in the region and "sleep in unknown graves."

Lupo's name is 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 by train and ocean liner, 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 seventies, near the end of her life, a small widow sitting alone in a room, 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,' " Kleisinger says. "You couldn't stop her. The best thing we could do was just leave her alone."

War Tensions Brew

Who knows if he read the papers?

He started working for the circulation office of the Times-Star in 1913, when he was 18, and before long, the bundles he was delivering were filled with dispatches from vast fronts, telling of foreign armies clashing.

In August 1914, German divisions marched into northern France but stalled, and soon the combatants dug in, stalemated in elaborate trench lines from the English Channel to the Swiss border.

Year after year, the war brought epic bloodletting to scorched towns and river valleys: the Marne, Ypres, Verdun, the Somme. In time, Americans grew to revile the Huns depicted in British and French propaganda. Germany's intrigues in Mexico threatened U.S. security, and its submarine attacks on commercial shipping cost American lives.