Saving the Light at Chartres

by Victor A. Pollak

  At this juncture, two Boy Scouts appeared. They knew all about No. 4 camp, and they promptly took command of the ammunition wagon. One of the boys mounted the nigh wheel horse, and the other perched on the driver’s seat in front. . . .

  “Get under that canvas and go to sleep!” said the Scout in the wagon. “We’ll take you where you belong.” . . .

  The lads are as resourceful as a North American Indian, and as ready to accept hardship as a veteran of four years’ fighting.

  The Griffith boys did summer fieldwork at ranches, like the ranch of their father’s closest friend, John R. Good, along Groesbeck Creek, a half dozen miles from town. Good had built a house at the ranch and used an 1885 stagecoach building for his barn. He was a town father, game warden, gun-club founder, member of the First Masonic Lodge, and a musician in Quanah’s first band. On occasional weekends at the ranch, for Web and the other boys, trees and shrubs along the creek provided relief from the weekday dust and dry winds of Quanah’s streets and surrounding fields. Welborn loved to ride horses, and he named all of them John, in honor of John Good. He also hunted wolves and owned wolfhounds, which he kept at the Good ranch.

  Welborn and his sons rode horses, hunted with dogs, and fished alongside John Good and Good’s four children. John’s second wife, Josephine, had died of illness in 1913, and her death opened Web’s eyes to what it was like for Sydney—her son and Web’s friend—to lose his mother and for John to lose his wife a second time.

  During those summers, Web worked with his brothers, and they had their share of sibling quarrels. Once Web accused his brother Lawrence of not pulling his own weight in the fieldwork, harvesting wheat with a traveling crew and their horse-pulled thresher. Another time, brother Philip accused Web of the clumsy handling of a horse—“uncoordinated but determined,” Philip said—which Web took as a challenge. These incidents fired Web’s temper, which would be a notable trait throughout his life.

  Congress created Junior ROTC in 1916, and Web would have read about it, but there was none in Quanah. His father was often working at the store or on civic projects, and mother Lula was tutoring neighborhood kids, substitute teaching, making bandages in her Red Cross home-land war-support group, conserving war materials, planting trees with her 1904 Club, campaigning for women’s suffrage, cooking for her family, baking bread, or skillfully making clothes for Web and his siblings. As a result, much responsibility fell to their oldest son. And even when his parents were not so engaged, Web’s plans might often be thwarted by an urgent customer order that had to be filled or a direction to watch over his siblings at home.

  His friends, like John Good’s sons, seemed to be free, and cousin Orville, F. O.’s son, was preparing for college.

  Web appreciated early the need for leadership, being the oldest of five and with cousins in an extended family. His store work and ranch work meant his intelligence and leadership were spotted by superiors, which, in some way, helped him develop a talent for planning. But tension between work and play—sports, hunting, and doing the things teenagers do—probably muddled him as much as anyone his age. As his responsibilities grew, he was—like other adolescents—focused on learning who he was, sifting through identities to find one that suited him. Web’s view of the world was probably changing, away from marbles, backyard ball games, and bike rides to a new sphere. In early high school, he was above average in his English and Spanish classes, his personal best being history class, his weakest early algebra. Writing did not appeal to him. He would rather talk—often fast—in his Texas drawl. Later, in his third year at Quanah High School, he excelled in advanced algebra and plane geometry and improved in English.

  The outside world was encroaching, and Web was noticing it at school, home, and work.

  After America declared war in the spring of 1917, cousins Fuller and Welborn J. Griffith, the former, Uncle F.O.’s son, and Web’s friend Sydney Good all enlisted. Welborn J. would sail from Boston in June 1918 with the 345th Field Artillery Battalion. Web wanted in too, but the war had come too soon for him.

  That July, Web took the train to Temple for a two-week visit with his parents’ families, where he got to know his mother’s brother, Uncle Harrison “Tex” Smith, who had trained as a civil engineer at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York and formed a Texas company to build roads.

  Back in Quanah, Web sat on the backyard swing, perhaps first with his mother and then with his father, and asked for their permission to move to Dallas to finish high school. He had bigger ambitions than working at the grocery.

  In December, Uncle Tex came to visit the family in Quanah soon after Welborn had taken a trip with F. I. Hendrix and Charles Welch, two other Quanah business leaders, to inspect the plains across the proposed Quanah-Roswell highway. It’s probable Tex used the trip to discuss bidding for another highway-building project.

  In August 1918, Web, suitcase in hand, boarded a train to Dallas, where he would live with the James Wilson family, friends of the Griffiths from their Dallas years. Web earned his keep clerking in the Wilsons’ grocery—the company for which his father had sold groceries at wholesale before the family move to Quanah—and meanwhile enrolled at Bryan Street High School.

  Web had learned a kind of willfulness in Quanah—the gulp-your-sobs, hold-up-your-head kind of stubborn composure—and how to care for himself and to take care of his siblings and customers. Now he was opening a new chapter of his life in Dallas, where he would soon learn to lead men.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Risks: Paris and Chartres, 1915–1918

  ON JANUARY 15, 1915, FRANCE FOUNDED ITS MILITARY AVIATION school at Chartres to train three thousand pilots—becoming its most important such school—but the choice of Chartres would obviously increase the risk to the cathedral. The Germans had already been bombing London, and in March they bombed Paris, beginning with a raid by zeppelins that caused nearly a dozen deaths and thirty other casualties. Thereafter Paris protected itself with barrage balloons.

  That spring, new voices began drawing attention to war’s impact on monuments and artworks and began advocating for proactive monument protections to meet new conditions of war. In May, Camille Enlart—a fifty-six-year-old archeologist, lawyer, and photographer—organized France’s first exhibit of photographs to document and publicize German military destruction of French buildings and art. Enlart would later become a mentor to the young Achille Carlier, who would play a significant role in the protection of the Chartres windows. Enlart’s efforts to publicize war damage to monuments failed, however, to mobilize widespread support. His was merely another voice in a chorus of world outrage surrounding the Germans’ destruction of Reims Cathedral and other great buildings that did not sufficiently move the French public, who still supported the war and could not yet see the value of devoting precious wartime resources to minimize damage to buildings. Also that May, Albert Thomas became undersecretary of state for artillery and munitions.

  Around this time, Louis Billant invented a new, improved type of hand grenade, the pear-shaped “P1.” Its spoonlike arming lever and percussion igniter were impact-detonated, so long as it landed with the heavy end down on sufficiently hard ground. Undersecretary Thomas solicited Billant to produce large quantities of the new grenade. And so Billant built a factory in a triangular lot beside his workshop on Rue de Tolbiac in a densely populated industrial and residential district in south Paris packed tightly with buildings ranging from three to a half dozen stories tall. The factory consisted of wooden sheds and employed a staff of reportedly more than two hundred workers, of which eighty were women and young girls, most younger than age fifteen, working night and day in two shifts.

  On October 20, 1915, at a quarter past two in the afternoon, the factory exploded when operating at full capacity; a quarter of an hour later it exploded again, with equal violence. Reports of the cause conflicted. One journal said the first explosion was caused by the fall of a bundle of grenades from a truck on which a cargo had just been loa
ded. The explosions blew the factory into fragments and generated a cloud of toxic fog over the area. Another newspaper reported that, in the alley separating two groups of buildings, a truck loaded with different crates, passing over a gutter, violently exploded. The same factory had experienced two prior accidents, with victims.

  The Prefecture of Police, anticipating the risk inherent in this type of facility, had prescribed limits on the quantity of explosives stored. It had ordered that explosives magazines be separated from the detonator shop, that separate workshops be maintained for each manufacturing operation, and that grenades be shipped out twice daily to limit the number on hand to five thousand. But the national government was asking for more grenades for the troops, and the shop responded, increasing production to thirty thousand per day.

  President Poincairé arrived on the scene, going to an old movie theater that had been converted into a morgue, accompanied by the minister of the interior, Undersecretary Albert Thomas, and local officials. A newspaper reported that the president “and those who accompanied him bowed, moved to tears, in front of these mutilated bodies, almost all corpses of women,” with forty-five dead and another sixty injured, many of whom were wives or daughters of soldiers mobilized at the front. A month later, Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris hosted a national funeral service for the victims, with officials in attendance, but though the shock waves from the Rue du Tolbiac explosions brought names and faces of victims to the public’s attention, the tragedy did not result in significant reform. Billant, rather than moving the armaments factory to a rural setting, rebuilt the plant in his home city of Bourges, farther from the front.

  Nearly a half a year later in the town of Saint-Denis, about six miles north of Paris, a few soldiers were moving boxes of grenades in an area dense with homes and commercial activity when they must have dropped a box. It exploded and triggered other explosions that “disemboweled” buildings and blew a nearby streetcar off its tracks, splitting it like a log and tossing twenty-pound stones into neighboring streets, killing cart drivers on their seats and leaving horses lying on the road, body parts shredded. People rushed toward the noise to deal with the dozens of wounded. Twenty-eight people died, including eighteen civilians and ten soldiers. Only the nearby police station, constructed of solid stone, remained standing; all other buildings and houses within hundreds of yards from the blast were flattened. The shock wave blew out windows at the town hall of Saint-Ouen, three miles away.

  Again dignitaries traveled to the site to lend support, including the city mayor and the president. Two weeks later, on March 8, 1916, notables conducted another national funeral for the victims, in which Undersecretary Albert Thomas delivered a speech. But the state refused to recognize its responsibility for the explosion and to compensate the victims.

  The Basilica of Saint-Denis lay less than four miles away. This was one of the great remaining ancient churches of France, where almost all the kings of France from the tenth to the eighteenth centuries, and many from before then, are interred. Still, no proactive steps were taken to prepare it or other historic buildings, or their windows, for the risks of factory explosion or other war damage.

  A year later at Reims, ninety-four miles to the east of Saint-Denis, German bombardments resumed on April 15, 19, and 24, 1917, the worst group of bombardments causing the cathedral at Reims the most damage of the war.

  Six months after those attacks, in early October 1917, Count d’Armancourt, president of the Archeological Society of Eure-et-Loir, convened a meeting of the society in Chartres. Twenty or so ASEL members gathered, including Father Yves Delaporte, a thirty-eight-year-old priest who had been ordained in 1904 and was serving as archivist for the Diocese of Chartres.

  At the meeting, the paramount concern was for the safety of the cathedral’s windows. An artillery-shell factory had emerged and expanded at Lucé, a suburb on Chartres’ southwestern edge. Although Undersecretary Thomas, in his authorization order for the factory, had specified in detail the nature and maximum quantities of explosives permissible in the plant, the locals were worried about the likelihood of an accidental explosion or the Germans bombing it. Either event could blow out the stained-glass windows and structurally damage both Chartres Cathedral, which was less than three miles from the plant, and the Church of Saint-Pierre, a mere third of a mile south of the cathedral, even closer to the plant. The society determined at the meeting to urge the prefect, as chief executive of the department of Eure-et-Loir, and appointed by the national government in Paris, to write to the undersecretary of fine arts in charge of historic monuments to warn him again of the dangers posed by the plant and to ensure that all precautionary measures prescribed by the authorization order be applied.

  Within weeks, the prefect had written the undersecretary, arguing that the factory posed an extreme danger to the cathedral and Saint-Pierre. The undersecretary responded that he did not believe the cathedral and the church were in danger, because the authorization order issued by the armaments undersecretary would have meant that those materials were being handled safely and that the factory was surely applying all appropriate safety measures. The maximum charge of the various explosives permitted at the factory, the undersecretary continued, was calculated such that the workshops of the neighboring depots would not even suffer shocks in the event of an explosion.

  But for those who lived in Chartres, such assurances were no comfort. They perceived three dangers that compounded the risks of German attack: the artillery factory on the southwest of Chartres, the growing military airfield on the east, and the growing mainline railroad traffic from Paris to Bordeaux through the Chartres depot and switchyards, located less than a mile west of the cathedral.

  Three months later, in January 1918 at Reims, the Historic Monuments Commission took action in Reims to salvage the remains of the stained glass of the windows of the roofless cathedral. Workers salvaged the remains of the stained glass that were still intact, including some of the nave’s best. Because the authorities thought scaffolding would have furnished the Germans an expedient for more barrage, the Fine Arts Administration arranged for a small group of courageous firemen from Paris and two glassworkers to attempt a salvage operation. In foggy weather, and before daybreak, the team climbed high up to the iron framework of the windows, dismantled what remained, and lowered it to the floor of the nave.

  That same month, at the Basilica of Saint-Denis, fifty-eight miles northeast of Chartres, many of the most valuable stained-glass windows were removed and stowed in the cellar of Turenne located within the crypt of the Basilica of Saint-Denis. And they hadn’t acted a moment too soon: less than three months later, Gotha bombers would arrive over Paris and bombard by night, wreaking damage in unpredictable locations throughout the city.

  The protection efforts in Saint-Denis served as beacons for other activists around France. And on February 22, 1918, the Historic Monuments Commission convened a meeting, attended by twenty of its members. The commission president was Charles Bernier, a man in his early sixties who served as a lawyer at the Ministry of Public Instruction and Fine Arts and as an emeritus jurist. He was known as the “father” of France’s Law of 31st December 1913 on Historical Monuments, which first authorized automatic classification of private property to enable the Fine Arts Administration to impose protection on a monument’s owner and even carry out work on the monument to guarantee its preservation. Also guest attendee at the meeting of the Historic Monuments Commission was Pierre Paquet, the commission’s chief architect who in 1920 would go on to become its inspector general and who since 1914 had been working to restore France’s war-damaged historic buildings.

  The Historic Monuments Commission met in a ballroom at the Ministry of Culture’s main offices in the seventeenth-century Palais-Royal on Rue de Valois in Paris, an apt setting for the task before them: The room’s sixteen-foot ceilings were ringed by gold plaster moldings, and beveled glass spanned from wainscot to ceiling, along with rich tapestries, reminding all pr
esent of the grandeur of historic monuments the commission was to protect.

  During the meeting, President Bernier read aloud a letter from the president of the Society of Friends of Reims Cathedral asking permission to have debris, consisting mostly of lead scrap that came from Reims Cathedral, to be sold for use in making small souvenir reproductions of the cathedral, with proceeds to be donated to the cathedral. The Historic Monuments Commission approved, also sanctioning additional appropriation for the removal, packaging, and transport of the remaining stained-glass windows from Reims Cathedral to Paris. Camille Enlart, also a member of the commission, reported that his comparative sculpture museum at the Trocadéro Palace was currently storing two hundred cases of stained-glass windows in its cellars. Enlart proposed, and the commission approved, that the museum’s basement be cleared of rubble to allow for installation of the windows from Reims. The commission appointed a delegation comprised of Enlart and three other members to inspect the space at the Trocadéro museum and give the appropriate approvals, which they did on March 2.

  Later in March 1918, the Germans began using their rail-mounted Big Bertha cannon to shell Paris, causing death and destruction. After the cannonades, more Gotha bombings hit Paris on April 12. The attacks of the Gothas would make a deep impression on one Parisian, fifteen-year-old Achille Carlier—then a high school student and future architectural historian and crusader for the protection of French medieval monuments, who in the next war would lead the fight to spur the Fine Arts Administration to proactively protect the Chartres windows. Twenty years after living through the bombardment, Carlier would write that he had felt indignation upon seeing how inadequate were the measures put in place to protect the gates of Notre-Dame de Paris from possible obliteration during the nightly air raids.