A Keeper Of Their Flame

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Atlanta, Georgia

A few days ago, with as much fanfare as can warrant a collection of 110-year old bones, a quiet part of world history was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery.

Frances Lupo was a doughboy, just a kid enlisted in the American Army and sent charging bravely into a thing called World War I. His remains, left at the second battle of the Marne in 1918, were never found.

Until last month.

To most of us, it is much like the sudden discovery of Lucy's ancestors in the mountains of Kenya or the withered child bride of Beauregard Knox of the second cavalry of Kentucky.

Surely, of the nearly 5 million men and women sent to fight across the great ocean in 1918, there can be none left. That's ancient history, after all, a war when they tried to drop grenades from helium balloons and threw bricks at each other. That was what Will Everett thought a couple years ago as he walked through the thousands of crosses on the fields of Flanders.

"What can this sea of graves mean?" he thought to himself. As he strolled, he watched bent old men holding the hands of their grandchildren, explaining just that.

"Then, as I discovered, there were perhaps 250 veterans of World War I left. I had plenty of time and put off telling their story.

"When I suddenly remembered it late last year, that number was down to 25 and now, as I speak, it's 13. There were 14, but I lost another yesterday."

Irving Berlin (pictured here) wrote "Oh How I Hate To Get Up in the Morning" as a tribute to a generation of Doughboys. Now only 12 remain.

Thirteen and slowing counting down. Soon – and after all, we are talking of men and women deep into their hundreds – there will be no one left to tell the stories of The War to End All Wars. Like the men of Mission Hill and the Rubicon, painted figures in dull history books.

But Will Everett decided to at least give the remaining doughboys a voice. With the help of the good people at Veterans Affairs, he tracked down most of those still alive. Some were in nursing homes, invalid and silent forever. Others were still sharp but quiet. With the help of their families, he persuaded them to tell their stories.

"I wanted trench talk," says the 39-year old independent radio producer from Port Isabel, Texas, "but the three old guys I found who had been in the trenches wouldn't talk about it, refused, had kept it locked deep within themselves all these years. It must have been horrible beyond belief.

"But eventually, their families nudged them, urged them to tell their stories. ‘C'mon, Granddad, if you don't tell, it will be lost forever.'"

Soon, in the shadow of Armistice Day as we celebrate veterans of every war, Will Everett will air a wondrous documentary involving his discovered heroes on NPR entitled "The World War I Living Project." Walter Cronkite, who as a 5-year old, sold soda out of a tin bucket of ice to the old soldiers as they came to celebrate the opening of the World War I Memorial in Kansas City in 1921, is the documentary's voice.

This is not simply a collection of grizzled old stories strung together but instead a well-written full-blown documentary of that war that set us on a different path along our planetary travels. He has enlisted the help of several talented friends in the area to read from old newspaper accounts and letters home. A brilliant English woman named Chris de Diesbach, who spent some early years on the London stage but now runs a bed-and-breakfast in South Padre Island, tells the weary, broken tale of the men coming home. Her husband, Yves, describes how the war affected the French countryside.

We have forgotten them all, haven't we? Assumed they were long gone, like their little war. But along comes a Keeper of their Flame and we all become brighter…and better because of both him and them.