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WW I Soldier Comes Home
Posted on September 27, 2006
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Danny "Greasy" Belcher, Executive Director
Task Force Omega of KY Inc.
Vietnam Infantry Sgt. 68-69
"D" Troop 7th Sqdn. 1st Air Cav
Welcome home soldier.
Long-Lost Soldier Remembered
Casualty of World War I Joins the Honored Dead 88 Years After His Sacrifice
By Paul Duggan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 27, 2006;
Pvt. Francis Lupo was buried again yesterday. This time he'll get a
headstone of white marble. Soldiers of the Army's Old Guard carried his
coffin up a gentle slope and set it down on polished rails above his grave.
A chaplain commended his soul to God. Three rifle volleys sounded, and taps
floated on the Indian summer breeze.
Then it was over, and the young soldiers of the burial detail marched off.
The few dozen people who had come to pay their respects at Arlington
National Cemetery milled by the coffin and chatted in reverent whispers. And
after a while they drifted away.
So long. Rest in peace.
He has been dead for a good lifetime, 88 years. Killed at 23 on a French
battlefield in World War I, hastily buried in a shell crater, he was lost.
And as years went by and he stayed lost, probably everyone he knew passed
away. Another world war, far more cataclysmic, marred the century, and in
time the war Lupo fought dimmed in the national consciousness.
The face of a missing doughboy, serial No. 1941919, faded, too.
"Just to be able to bring one of our own home, finally, and give him the
honors he deserves is a great thing," said Sgt. Maj. John Fourham, the top
noncommissioned officer in the Army's 1st Infantry Division, in which Lupo
served.
An accident of archaeology retrieved him from obscurity. His bones turned up
during a routine survey for ancient artifacts before a construction project
in the farm fields near Soissons, 55 miles northeast of Paris. The Defense
Department lab that analyzed his partial skeleton -- and the remains of
another, still nameless doughboy -- said Lupo is probably the
longest-missing U.S. soldier ever recovered and identified.
Fourham said he spoke briefly with Rachel Kleisinger, 73, a niece of Lupo's
who received the tri-folded American flag that draped his coffin. "I just
wanted to thank her for the service of Private Lupo," he said.
Lupo was a little fellow, physically and figuratively. He was 5 feet tall
(if that), an immigrant laborer's son, barely educated, an $8-a-week
newspaper deliveryman when the world went up in flames. It wasn't his fault.
He was in Cincinnati at the time.
But he wound up caught in the inferno, anyway.
It's doubtful he understood the forces of politics and human nature that
doomed him -- the tangle of European alliances, the militarism and ethnic
animosities, the greed, grudges and vanities that led the continent to war
in 1914. What did any of that have to do with Francis Lupo?
In just over four months in 1916, along the Somme River, more than 300,000
men were killed. But that was in France; it wasn't Lupo's fight. And
President Woodrow Wilson vowed to keep the United States out of it.
German provocations changed the nation's mind, though. In April 1917,
Congress declared war and told Lupo's generation to wage it -- to train,
sail to France and end the murderous stalemate in the trenches east of
Paris.
"It is so amazing to know that this soldier was so young," said Sgt. Maj.
Frederic Plautin of the French army, standing by Lupo's coffin yesterday.
"Many French died in battle with him the same way, but they were in France.
This American soldier was not in his country. So we really wish to share the
grief and express our thanks for what he has done."
Building an American army big enough to tip the balance in France would take
until well into 1918. The Kaiser's generals, meanwhile, had a victory plan
of their own. In the East, Germany's war with czarist Russia ended with the
Bolshevik Revolution, freeing many thousands of German soldiers to join the
fight on the Western Front.
But the great wave of 1917 doughboy draftees won the race, pouring into
France by the hundreds of thousands in the spring of 1918. Private Lupo
arrived in March, in time for the Army's first large-scale offensive
operation of the war, a French-led attack that eventually became known as
the Second Battle of the Marne.
He was killed July 20, likely his first day in heavy fighting.
"He was there at the pivotal moment, I believe," said Andrew E. Wood, a
research historian at the 1st Division Museum in Illinois. He flew in for
yesterday's service and stood in the shade by the coffin after the soldiers
had gone, as the people drifted away.
"From that point on, for the rest of the war, the Allies only gained ground,
and the Germans only retreated," Wood said. The armistice was signed in
November.
The Old Guard buried him with all its solemn pomp. But he was just a newsboy
from Ohio who went where he was told to go.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company
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