"Au revoir."
Posted on 11/29/2005 5:05:34 AM PST by XR7
LAVANNES, France — The gesture was simple and unbidden. With two weathered fingers, French farmer Marcel Jonoux softly touched the lined forehead of Los Angeles amateur artist Gustave "Bud" Plochere.
"Ah, bon," Jonoux said, tracing an old wound. "C'est bon."
It was the second time the two men were meeting.
This encounter Saturday was graced with laughter and storytelling, champagne toasts and an exchange of gifts. Dominique Dutartre, mayor of Lavannes, made Plochere an honorary citizen. Plochere presented Jonoux with a plaque.
Each man thanked the other, and in the way of men who have seen so much, there were no tears. Only a long hug.
Jonoux, 80, with thick, bushy eyebrows and a ramrod-straight back, and Plochere, 82, who still bicycles three or four times a week, first met and became heroes to each other 61 years ago.
On Oct. 2, 1944, as the Allies pushed Hitler's army eastward, Plochere's P-47 Thunderbolt warplane crashed into a field where Jonoux was working. Jonoux thanked God that Plochere had guided his wounded plane into a field instead of the village full of people. Plochere thanked God that someone had pulled him out of the wreckage.
As the fighter plane broke in half, Jonoux dashed to the cockpit, certain the pilot was dead. In a haze of fumes and the heat of a crackling fire, Jonoux took out a pocketknife to cut Plochere out of his seat.
Just when it seemed too late, the straps loosened. Jonoux reached for Plochere's head, which had slammed into the cockpit instruments.
"The wound was so deep," Jonoux said, "that my fingers almost touched to his brain."
Still, Jonoux said, he knew the young pilot was alive. So with the help of a neighbor, Robert Jean Leroy, he dragged the unconscious Plochere out and put him into a hay wagon.
The wagon went into Lavannes, a village of 100 people about six miles outside Reims. Jonoux waited by the plane as American soldiers came. The soldiers wanted to know where the pilot was. Jonoux pointed. And that was all he knew about Plochere until about a year ago.
Plochere knew even less about Jonoux.
To this day Plochere said, "I have no memories of anything two weeks before the crash until two weeks after." It was then Plochere woke up in a British hospital encased in a full-body cast. In addition to the head wounds, he had a broken back.
When he was better, Plochere traveled back to home to Los Angeles. But he was unable to find anyone to tell him the story of the crash.
"I believe I was testing a new engine," Plochere said. "That's all I knew."
Until a simple housecleaning exercise, Jonoux didn't know who the pilot was. Jonoux's brother found a letter among their father's papers. It was from an American lieutenant colonel thanking the people of Lavannes for saving a pilot named Gustave Plochere.
With a name, Marcel's grandsons Fabrice Mathieu Jonoux, Jérôme Jonoux and Benoît Jonoux began searching the Internet, and quickly found Plochere.
The grandsons wrote a letter to Plochere, who had been a member of the 9th Air Force, the 362nd Fighter Group and the 379th Fighter Squadron. They asked if this was the Gustave Plochere who had crashed in October 1944. Plochere sent a letter back, but it never reached them.
A couple of months ago, Plochere mentioned the letter to his cycling friends, Leo and Muriel Schuerman.
The Schuermans travel every year to a cycling-equipment convention in Las Vegas. It was there, seven years ago, that they became friends with Joel Glotin, who owns a cycling-equipment company in Orleans, France.
Glotin located Jonoux and helped arrange Saturday's meeting.
Plochere traveled with Leo Schuerman to Paris and met with Glotin on Saturday at a hotel near Charles de Gaulle airport. Glotin drove them through an early snowstorm, 95 miles northeast to Reims, the center of France's champagne-producing region.
It was in the parking lot of a local hotel that Jonoux and Plochere met face to face.
With Glotin serving as interpreter, Jonoux, his wife Christiane, Plochere and Schuerman haltingly exchanged stories over lunch. Jonoux wanted most of all to know about Plochere's family.
He has been divorced for more than 25 years, has a daughter and three grandchildren, Plochere said. Plochere most wanted to know how it was his plane crashed and he ended up rescued.
Jonoux told of watching Plochere do loops and turn the plane on its back. It was after one of these turns, Jonoux said, that he heard, "Putt, putt, putt, pfft," bad news in any language.
Jonoux told Plochere of his own three children. "And I have not only grandchildren but great-grandchildren."
After lunch, the party moved to the field where Plochere had crashed, to Lavannes City Hall and to the town cemetery across the street, which includes a dozen graves of British Royal Air Force pilots who also had crashed near Lavannes.
Inside City Hall, the mayor thanked Plochere for fighting to save France. Plochere thanked Jonoux for saving his life.
After the toasts and slices of cake and conversations conducted through Glotin, plans were made for a tour of Reims the next day. Phone numbers were traded. The grandsons practiced their English and blushed when Plochere told them over and over how well they had done to find him.
The snow had stopped, but it was nearly dark. The party slowly broke up.
"Au revoir," Marcel Jonoux said.
Plochere bowed his head.
"À demain," Plochere said, using a bit of French. Until tomorrow.
My eyes sure aren't dry.
It's stories like this that prevent me from feeling too harshly towards the French.
"Au revoir."
Yeah, me too, though it sure is tempting at times.
My experience is that the rural French are considerably LESS anti-American than those effete snobs living in and around the larger cities, especially Paris.
Sounds like the difference between the blue states and the red states here in the US.
And it probably goes to some thoughts one Thomas Jefferson recorded over 200 years ago, to wit:
"The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution." --Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia Q.XIX, 1782. ME 2:230
I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries as long as they are chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large cities as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe." --Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 1787. Papers 12:442
"I view great cities as pestilential to the morals, the health and the liberties of man. True, they nourish some of the elegant arts; but the useful ones can thrive elsewhere; and less perfection in the others, with more health, virtue and freedom, would be my choice." --Thomas Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, 1800. ME 10:173
"Our cities... exhibit specimens of London only; our country is a different nation." --Thomas Jefferson to Andre de Daschkoff, 1809. ME 12:304
"Everyone, by his property or by his satisfactory situation, is interested in the support of law and order. And such men may safely and advantageously reserve to themselves a wholesome control over their public affairs and a degree of freedom which, in the hands of the canaille of the cities of Europe, would be instantly perverted to the demolition and destruction of everything public and private." --Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1813. ME 13:401
"An insurrection... of science, talents, and courage, against rank and birth... has failed in its first effort, because the mobs of the cities, the instrument used for its accomplishment, debased by ignorance, poverty, and vice, could not be restrained to rational action. But the world will recover from the panic of this first catastrophe." --Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1813. ME 13:402
"I fear nothing for our liberty from the assaults of force; but I have seen and felt much, and fear more from English books, English prejudices, English manners, and the apes, the dupes, and designs among our professional crafts. When I look around me for security against these seductions, I find it in the wide spread of our agricultural citizens, in their unsophisticated minds, their independence and their power, if called on, to crush the Humists of our cities, and to maintain the principles which severed us from England." --Thomas Jefferson to Horatio G. Spafford, 1814. ME 14:120
ping.
Bump for a great story.
"My experience is that the rural French are considerably LESS anti-American than those effete snobs living in and around the larger cities, especially Paris.
Sounds like the difference between the blue states and the red states here in the US."
A good friend of mine has been to France twice and shares your opinion. He grew up poor in southern Ill. and said that the rural French are very similar to the people he knew back home as a boy. Very friendly and generous. He called some of them "Rose' necks" and said that the area even looked like home, except it's a Renault on blocks in the yard instead of a Chevy!
One of his favorite 'stories' to tell us... was that he had to bail-out over France and a beautiful French girl saved him from the Germans...
and then he'd wink.
I had no problems when I was in France. The people were perfectly nice and this was right at the start of the Iraq war. The only problem I had from anyone was from an Irishman in a bar who jumped all over me for being American.
My cousin was married in Paris last year. She has a dark complexion, and when they came out of the cathedral, many on the street must have thought she was Italian. When they heard them speaking English, they started booing and spitting. Again, this coming from a liberal city. I'm sure the "red" portion of the country is much different.
I know. Me too. It's not usually the people who live and work hard everyday. It's the greedy, lousey, you know what's that sit above everyone else. Thank God for the underground back in those days as well. They did a lot of good.
Yeh. We need stories like this about now!
Uh-huh! France is to Paris as Nebraska is to New York!
Thanks, I needed that!
As we know, the press in our own country is against Bush. The press in France, with help from Chirac and his gang of thieves, is feeding the frenzy of the most arrogant of all people -- Parisians of the "upper class".
Even de Gaulle disliked his own people. In his book, "Leaders", Nixon wrote of an amusing tale of this:
An aide was trying to get through the tangle that is the Paris telephone system. Giving up in frustration, he slammed down the receiver and exclaimed, "Death to all fools!" De Gaulle, who had come into the room without his aide noticing, remarked, "Ah, what a vast program my friend!"
Many French people are very much on our side but have no voice. The ones that do, however, are very much like our own idiots on the left.
In bigger cities, you'll find stupidity the world over. France does not have a monopoly on it.
Let's hope the full story of their "oil for food" fiasco reaches the light of day.
Regards
Alfa6 ;>}
My sister was in France during the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom and she didn't experience any hatred, but she was in the rural south. It might have been different in Paris, I don't know.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
