Saving the Light at Chartres

by Victor A. Pollak

  I set out to learn enough about stained glass and about Chartres to appreciate the difficulty and risks of the task—not even imagining that much of the work was done as German bombs fell around Chartres and ground forces approached.

  During my research, I came across multiple blog references to a career American Army colonel, Welborn Barton Griffith Jr., from rural Quanah in north Texas, who was the headquarters operations officer—the number-three man—in the Twentieth Corps in Patton’s Third Army in 1944. Twentieth Corps was one of what one might call the “A Teams” in the Army. Its job was to wait and come ashore at Utah Beach three weeks after D-Day to break out of the beachheads and chase the Germans across France and toward Berlin until ordered elsewhere. And Chartres was its first sizable, challenging battle after the breakout. Scattered German units had been ordered to reassemble and resupply at Chartres to resume the fight—and they did, overseen by virtue of the commanding 360-degree view from the twin four-hundred-foot towers of Chartres Cathedral, over the wheat fields that surrounded Chartres.

  Those blog references to Griffith echoed strangely similar language that credited him with having “questioned” an order for Allied forces to shell and destroy the cathedral and having “volunteered” to “go behind enemy lines” to personally inspect the cathedral and determine whether the Germans were using it as an observation post to direct artillery fire on Allied forces. The blogs went on to say that Griffith found that the towers were “not so being used by the Germans . . . and [that he] managed to call off any further Allied firing” on the cathedral.

  They said he then headed to the commune of Lèves northeast of Chartres, where he directed a tank “toward enemy forces [that] he had located and [he] was killed in action.”

  The common source I found for those many blog posts was the Army’s 1944 citation that awarded the Distinguished Service Cross to Griffith posthumously. What it didn’t mention was that Griffith had chosen to ride outside on the rear of the tank. He was killed by intense enemy machine-gun, rifle, and rocket-launcher fire, his body to be found that afternoon on the street by villagers with his empty rifle in one hand and empty pistol in the other. The next day the corps retrieved his body and buried him in a simple funeral in a nearby field.

  To this day, the French honor Griffith annually in Chartres and in Lèves as the man who saved the cathedral. Yet nothing centered around his story has been published.

  So the story of Chartres Cathedral and its windows and the story of Colonel Griffith are separate but intertwined narratives.

  I have set out to explore the colonel’s background and role in the corps to understand his motivations. It seems that simply calling him a hero is inadequate. But the further I’ve dug, the more questions have arisen.

  My challenge has been not just to seek the truth but also to spot where truth can’t be determined. During my work on this book, I have traveled several times to Paris and in 2015 twice to Chartres, and I have twice visited the cathedral, searched archives, retrieved project documents and more from Chartres and Paris, and visited Colonel Griffith’s home-town, Quanah, Texas, and have been astounded by what I have found. I’ve interviewed Griffith’s daughter in Florida and his nephew—a retired US Army lieutenant general—and also Eugene G. Schulz, a surviving GI in Milwaukee who worked as Griff’s clerk-typist during the war for more than a year up to the time Griff died, and I’ve corresponded with two other of Griff’s grandnephews and the surviving husband of one of his nieces, who provided me with family photos, letters, and other documents; I’ve also reconstructed Griff’s military career, his Army personnel file having been destroyed in a fire at the National Archives in Saint Louis in the 1970s. From those interviews, Army combat records, and an unpublished diary written by a Father Douin—a French priest who, to his surprise, encountered Griff as Griff was inspecting the cathedral during the battle—I have uncovered more questions.

  Despite all my research, there are times when I’ve had to use my imagination to depict aspects of both stories.

  Why had Griffith left his desk to take up a frontline combat role for the first time? Why had he gone to the cathedral himself rather than order military intelligence to do so? Why had he assumed command of the tank column? And why had he exposed himself to danger by riding on the back of the tank? He seems to have been driven by something. Unanswerable questions leave ambiguity and mystery in his story.

  He was consumed by a personal drive to take command—not just to lead but also to exercise his full talents, and for a once-in-a-lifetime purpose. He had a clear path for promotion to the rank of general within a month; yet, by risking his life, perhaps he needlessly chose not to take it. He was a fierce competitor, respected and valued by his superiors, revered by his peers and subordinates. He wanted something, and he discovered something big was at stake. His daughter described him as “very serious” and told me he would have been annoyed to be called a hero.

  I’ve spent several years trying to know and understand Griffith. While his saving of the cathedral was honorable, he was not a saint. In author Tilar Mazzeo’s words, making him a saint in the telling of his story would “dishonor . . . the true complexity and difficulty of [his] very human choices.” Like most of us, he was flawed and conflicted.

  Did Griffith have a public purpose, or was he driven by private vanity or ambition?

  I have come to appreciate that it is important to save historic monuments. It is important because monuments are our means to symbolize ancestors, civilizations, and ideas that teach many of us who we are, the foundation whence we have come.

  Forces of the universe have conjoined—by natural selection or higher power—to create the human mind, heart, and emotions. Humans have capacity to be aware—of themselves, other humans, other life forms, and surroundings. We can think and feel emotion, and we discern joy and have capacity to harness emotions into campaigns larger than ourselves.

  Churches are venues in which individuals’ core life events occur, through which they garner memories. For entire parishes, communities, and nations, churches host rituals that spawn similar remembrances on a communal scale.

  Historic French cathedrals reveal art and history apart from religion. As buildings owned by the state, they represent the nation’s patrimony, symbolizing France’s political essence.

  We must save monuments because without them evildoers can distort and fabricate, and impose savagery. Nazis destroyed monuments in conquered countries to eliminate symbols of culture, like Poland’s statues of Chopin. ISIS and others do so today.

  Chartres Cathedral has meaning to millions. Hundreds of thousands depend on it as their vessel for negotiating life’s passages, and the French economy has depended every year on money from millions of visitors and pilgrims.

  The tale of the World War II rescue of the Chartres windows has its roots in the French Revolution, which decimated many cathedrals. As a result, Chartres Cathedral—like most others in France—became a state-owned historic monument. The French have since developed leading methods for protection of monuments, which were invented because they had to be. The modern phase of this tale began in World War I, with the theretofore-unthinkable 1914 German artillery bombardment of the city of Reims and its cathedral (France’s Westminster Abbey). The attack destroyed Reims Cathedral and most of its stained-glass windows. Then, as the war dragged on, a string of deadly accidental explosions surrounding Paris led at long last to the first precarious protective actions at Chartres.

  During the war, General Eisenhower declared that historic monuments symbolize to the world all we are fighting for and ordered that when destruction is unnecessary and can’t be justified, commanders must preserve them through exercise of restraint and discipline.

  Apart from Griffith’s story, the story of the rescue of the Chartres windows revolves around four central characters, two of whom—Jean Zay and Jean Moulin—are among the most famous of French Resistance martyrs. The others are compelling in other ways.

&n
bsp; But without volunteer assistance and financing that was provided by local Chartres citizens—and, probably also, the last-minute strains and sweat and grit of refugee volunteer workers—the windows wouldn’t have been saved from danger and later would have been destroyed during the battles.

  At Chartres, ordinary people took responsibility for saving these symbols. A group of dedicated men and women felt compelled to protect their cathedral. Most were French. Griffith was an American whom we remember for choosing to join their cause during battle and by risking his life to prevent needless destruction, and in the process perhaps he learned who he was. Griff’s bravery saved the cathedral, and his drive to press his column forward through Lèves contributed to the corps’ success in cutting off the enemy at the Seine and liberating Paris—even allowing for the day they stopped the war to bury him.

  As I was completing this book, the April 2019 fire at Notre-Dame de Paris erupted. Frightening video reminded the world that even elaborate precautions don’t relieve us of the need to vigilantly gauge how historic monuments would hold up against all perils. Notre-Dame de Paris is the preeminent cultural and religious landmark—the romantic symbol—of France, the landmark against which all others in France are compared. Professor Peter Sahlins, who grew up near Paris, describes it as “the focal point of Parisian life in ways that surpass religion.” The 2019 tragedy at the Paris cathedral suddenly shined the spotlight of relevance on this story of how Chartres Cathedral and its windows were rescued during World War II.

  PROLOGUE—REIMS, A BURNING SYMBOL OF HOPE FOR PRESERVATIONISTS

  ON SEPTEMBER 4, 1914, AFTER HE HAD FINISHED HIS MONTHLY FIRST Friday Mass at the cathedral, Monseigneur Maurice Landrieux—archpriest of Reims for the previous two years and a cardinal for twenty-five before that—was walking near the cathedral. He was tall, with broad shoulders and a round face with a large forehead and dark hair, and his generous smile revealed strength and invited confidence. Most Reims citizens were outdoors that morning, because the fighting had ceased—for the moment. Landrieux would have seen and greeted locals—a shopkeeper minding his store, a nun heading to her convent, a civil servant nearing city hall, a child holding her mother’s hand.

  This was barely twenty days since the German armies had thrust into France at the start of World War I, and the French, in retreat, had declared their northeastern city of Reims an open city. Its hundred thousand residents expected the invading Germans to simply march in to occupy the city, and this had come to pass: an advance German Saxon Guard unit had arrived at Reims’s gates and taken city hall for the night, while French forces had continued their retreat southwest of the city. The Germans’ next moves, however, were not what the citizenry expected.

  Normally Landrieux’s walk around town helped him maintain pastoral contact with the citizens, but now it served a more complex purpose: to observe the Germans and assess their intentions. The city’s crown jewel was its cathedral, the largest in France, which could seat three thousand for Mass, with another thousand standing. Germans entering the city were assembling around the cathedral and the nearby city hall to collect orders from commanders. A line of German cars and caissons clamored into the cobblestone courtyards and plazas, followed by horsemen, infantry, and artillery. The masses of men and equipment rattled, screeched, and yelled, but their ruckus was generally peaceful. The prevailing concerns of the townspeople, Landrieux knew, were how soon and how adamantly German command would force the people to accept officers for billeting in their homes and how severe the German requisitions would be for food and supplies.

  Landrieux heard a strange detonation. Then he heard a second and a third. At first, he was not greatly concerned about the explosion, thinking the Germans were blowing up bridges or celebrating the anniversary of their victory in the last war. But as he walked a few blocks east of the cathedral, the distant whistling sounds and booming in the air startled him when a shell splinter fell at his feet. He knew then what it meant: the Germans were bombarding the city.

  He headed back to the cathedral. On the way, ten shells whistled over his head. He arrived to see the west side of the cathedral covered in a cloud of smoke and dust and could barely make out the outline of the Palace of Justice adjacent to the cathedral on the north side. Explosions continued near the cathedral’s entrance and surrounding houses. Stone trim under a cathedral porch fell from the coping. He circled the cathedral, finding his assistant, Abbé Andrieux, with a church employee, Mr. Huilleret, taking refuge in the clock tower staircase.

  Mr. Rouné, a civil defenseman, ran up to the cathedral, carrying from city hall a bed sheet nailed to a Turk’s head broom. He and Andrieux climbed the cathedral’s north tower, raised the top stairway door off its axis to get to the top, and flaunted the sheet as a flag in the brisk wind. But the cannonade stormed on. Dust rose to the roof. They heard the echoes of glass from the cathedral’s windows crashing onto the floors of the naves. Jets of smoke and dust in the town marked places hit by shells, including several houses. Fires broke out in the surrounding quarter.

  It was not only Landrieux and his fellow citizens of Reims who were astonished by the bombardment. Two German officers couldn’t believe they were being bombarded by their own guns. So they sent a car with two German soldiers and a city employee in the direction of the firing to get it to stop. Those soldiers found that batteries of a different German unit—the Imperial German Army, Prussian guards—not the Saxon Guard, were firing from Les Mesneux, more than four miles southwest of Reims. The Prussians claimed that they hadn’t known the Saxon Guard was in the city and that the shelling was a mistake.

  By 10:30 that morning, another churchman joined Landrieux to inspect for damage. He was forty-year-old Abbé Rémi Thinot, master of the chapel. The cathedral seemed to tremble, and its structure magnified the intensity of the explosion like the shell of a mammoth bass viol. They found no points of explosion inside but did locate damage to cathedral sculptures outside. A shell had hit the street on the north side, gouging a ditch that had filled with water by the time they’d reached it. Landrieux dipped his hand in the water to find it still warm from hot metal fragments. Splinters had splashed across the high arches of the buttresses. A shell had hit the cathedral at the north crossbar of the transept and dislodged large masonry. In the clock tower staircase, a violent gust of air pushed Abbé Andrieux and his companions to their knees.

  Even if the Germans had tried to miss the cathedral on September 4, their intention changed within a week. The next day, the Germans requisitioned from the town tons of meat, vegetables, bread, oats, petrol, straw, and hay. German soldiers bivouacked all over the city, including in front of the cathedral, surrounding its bronze statue of Joan of Arc, on her horse, holding her bent sword high. Soldiers and horse-drawn carts squatted in the square, horses whinnied and clopped, farriers’ hammers clanked, and everything smelled of horse manure, petrol, and grease. In this scene, the chortling German soldiers surrounded fires and gobbled sausages, black bread, and wine.

  Abbé Landrieux and his fellow priests felt hurt to see their Joan of Arc standing there lonely, lost in the middle of the German bivouac, surrounded by Prussians, as if she were their prisoner. German commands spread around the city to force—under threat—the billeting of German officers in commandeered homes, where they appropriated families’ food, water, and wine and displaced them from their beds.

  A week later, Landrieux learned that the Germans would be putting all their wounded into the cathedral. He went to headquarters to ask for reconsideration. Weren’t there other places for better quartering where the wounded German soldiers could be assisted? But on arrival he sensed quickly that there was electricity in the air. German senior officers were distracted and edgy, flustered, talking abruptly. Soldiers with fixed bayonets scurried about and fenced in automobiles that brought to the German commander the mayor, the secretary-general of the city, the deputy mayor, and the president of the chamber of commerce. The Germans were assembling one hundred Fr
ench hostages. By order of the German commander in chief, the mayor posted his proclamation that the hostages would be hung and that the town would be burned, partially or totally, and its inhabitants hung on any attempt at disorder. To choose the hostages, the Germans ordered the city leaders to present themselves and name other prominent citizens.

  That evening, word circulated of signs that the Germans were ordering their men to evacuate the town, with fighting in progress around Reims. Late in the day, workers, under German orders, brought fifteen thousand bundles of straw into the cathedral to cover the floors in the three naves. The clatter of workers and soldiers removing hundreds of wooden chairs, and piling them in heaps in the choir and sanctuary, resounded through the great space. But that evening, before the Saxons could put their wounded in the cathedral, all German soldiers evacuated the town. The French Army had arrived eighteen miles west of Reims while convoys of Germans filled the road southwest to Vitry-sur-Seine, drawing the French hostages with them.

  A citizen the next day brought a large Red Cross flag to the cathedral’s north tower and hoisted it next to the white flag the Germans had left. When the French troops entered the city, they replaced the white flag with a French Tricolor. And the Red Cross flag, although in shreds, remained and was soon replaced with a larger one that had been pieced together by locals from a clergyman’s vestment and a rose cassock. But it also was quickly ruined by the wind.

  Landrieux tried, starting on the fifteenth, to get the straw removed from the cathedral. The work finally began the next day, but the French military quickly issued an order to stop. French commanders had heard a report that a German senior officer had let slip a comment “expressing pity for the coming disaster.” From that, the French commanders suspected the Germans of planning some new attack and determined, as a deterrent, to add more German prisoners to the wounded Germans who were already in the cathedral.