Peloquin honors man who saved his brother

WOONSOCKET - It was midnight on Dec. 23, 1944 by the time Roland Beauregard and two other army medics reached the cellar of a Belgium countryside barn where 20 wounded soldiers of the 83rd Infantry Division were huddled.

"I was at an aid station just one-half mile away," Beauregard recalled by telephone for The Valley Breeze this week before Veterans Day.

Now 88 years old and living in North Carolina, he said details of the night remain vivid memories, even now.

"I picked out the worst man to treat," he recalls, the one who seemed to need him most during this break in the history-changing Battle of Bulge.

Between Dec. 16, 1944 and Jan. 28, 1945, 75,000 Americans would be killed, wounded, taken as prisoner or missing in action in this German counter-offensive launched in a freezing winter weather that claimed as many lives as bullets did.

In the early morning hours, Beauregard treated the soldier for severe shock and cold, pulling off his boots to dry his feet, elevating his legs, stuffing his clothing with insulating newspaper, and injecting him with the morphine he always carried in his bag.

Dawn was approaching when the soldier opened his eyes, the near-death crisis passing.

"What's your name soldier?" he recalls asking as he always did.

"Ray Peloquin," came the answer.

It was the next bit of information that startled him.

Both were Woonsocket boys, they learned as they shared bits of personal information.

Then they went their separate ways and never saw each other again.

Peloquin returned home to Woonsocket, Beauregard to his family who had moved to Bellingham. They lived out their lives with a shared but seldom talked about memory of a difficult night among many.

Ray Peloquin died in 1996 after living a long life that included return trips to France where he'd fought.

Roland Beauregard ended up in Fayetteville, N.C. where he still lives with his wife Muriel Martin of Woonsocket.

Like so many who served in World War II, Beauregard lived a life reluctant to tell tales from the battlefield. But one day, he shared with his niece, Vivian Carpentier of Chepachet, the story of saving the life of a hometown boy.

And that's all it took to later create a link that Ray's brother, Eugene Peloquin of North Smithfield, calls "beyond imagination."

It happened about six months ago when Carpentier turned up at the Museum of Work & Culture in Woonsocket seeking information on St. Clare High School in preparation for a 50th anniversary celebration.

And there she found Gene Peloquin, the former North Smithfield principal who's a regular museum volunteer and a man who has made it a mission of his life to honor World War II veterans.

As she was leaving, Peloquin says, she off-handedly asked if he was related to a World War II G.I. Raymond Peloquin of the 83rd Infantry Division.

Peloquin nodded, saying yes he was my brother.

And then the story tumbled out.

Peloquin said later he was "in awe and flabbergasted." No one in his family had ever heard the story. His brother Raymond had died at the age of 73 without ever telling anyone.

Beauregard says now that he lives with the memory every day of his life.

Although Peloquin was only one of hundreds of soldiers who passed through Beauregard's healing hands, the medic retains vivid detail of the four hours in the barn's cellar.

"That one incident always stayed in my mind," he said. "It's still fresh in my mind, something I live with every day. I still suffer from the trials and tribulations we went through."

Beauregard himself almost died in those early morning hours two days before Christmas.

He says that after the team left the barn and returned to the medic station, he bedded down on a cot only to awaken within an hour to sound of gunfire.

A German shell flew within 50 feet of him, scattering pieces of shrapnel that severed the legs of his cot and even hit his pillow.

The team had built foxholes, he says, but during the day they'd filled with water and the bone tired medics took a chance on the cots.

This past September, nearly 65 years after that night in snowy Belgium, the Museum of Work & Culture opened its doors to Beauregard and his wife Muriel, their daughter and other family members including niece Charpentier.

Greeting them were Gene Peloquin, his sister Connie Blais and her husband.

Beauregard retold the story for the assembled families, then all gathered near the large American flag in the museum's second-floor hallway where Connie Blais placed around Roland's neck the medal of liberation the village of Saintery, Normandy had presented to Ray Peloquin and members of the 83rd who had journeyed to Normandy to receive the citizens' thanks.

Eugene Peloquin called it "a fitting tribute for saving Ray's life."

As the two families pieced their connections together even further, they discovered Ray Peloquin once sat behind Muriel Beauregard when she was Muriel Martin at St. Ann School.

And she'd once been employed as a mender in the very building the museum is located in, the Barnai Worsted.