On March 15, not two weeks after the meeting of the commission at the Trocadéro, Father Lamey, parish priest in nearby La Courneuve, was riding the tram at 1:40 in the afternoon about a hundred yards from the church in Aubervilliers. A mile and a half north, at a grenade factory at 25 Rue Edgar Quinet in La Courneuve, three men carrying a box of hand grenades heard a click; they dropped the box and ran for their lives. The contents exploded and triggered more blasts, resulting in the deto-nation of twenty-eight million hand grenades, killing fifteen people and injuring another fifteen hundred. People forty miles away reported hearing the explosions. Four miles away, observers reported seeing two vast plumes of grayish-black smoke, turnip shaped and rising thousands of feet into the air, carried by winds, spreading a pall of smoke and fog over the flattened blackened rubble of the town and surrounding farmlands. The explosions destroyed the many brick buildings of the town, including a local maternity hospital—though, miraculously, no babies there were hurt. The explosion also blew out numerous windows at the Basilica of Saint-Denis and other area churches, but many of the basilica’s stained-glass windows had already been removed.
The grenade factory was supposed to store no more than two hundred thousand grenades at any given time. Two weeks before the explosion, the artillery authority at Vincennes, which managed the depot of grenades at La Courneuve, had warned of danger, reporting that more than eighteen million were being stored at the site.
Six days after the explosions at La Courneuve, the Germans launched their spring offensive, which would reach to within fifty miles north of Paris, the deepest advance by either combatant force since 1914. But by late April 1918, the danger of a German breakthrough seemed to have subsided.
In April and early May, at Chartres workmen were already prepositioning iron scaffolding pipes in the attics of the ambulatories on the lower sides of the cathedral. From there, if ordered, they planned to move the pipes to required locations, row by row, to begin removing the cathedral’s stained-glass windows.
The Historic Monuments Commission convened another meeting in mid-May, attended also by commission president Charles Bernier, a Mr. Berr de Turique, and Paul-Louis Boeswillwald, chief architect and inspector general of France’s historic monuments. Also present was Eugene Will Lefevre-Pontalis, architectural historian and professor of medieval archeology, who had taught at the School of Chartres for two decades and had served on the commission since 1911. Nonmembers also participated, including Pierre Paquet (who would go on to become the commission’s inspector general in 1920) and Gabriel Ruprich-Robert, chief architect of France’s historic monuments in Eure-et-Loire and other locations and assistant to the Inspectorate General, tasked with the monuments’ preservation.
The La Courneuve accident and the others before it were a slap in the face to the Historic Monuments Commission. Mr. Ruprich-Robert introduced a proposal made by Émile Brunet, chief architect of the department of Eure-et-Loir, recommending that the commission order the stained-glass windows of Chartres Cathedral to be removed and requesting funds to pay for the work. The members approved. Brunet called it a precautionary measure, motivated by the proximity to the cathedral of the Lucé artillery factory.
On May 25, the ASEL membership met again to discuss the procedures to be used in the removal, approve funds for the work, adopt a plan to photograph each window before removal, observe the work, and ensure that it would be performed only by specialists. In addition, Étienne Houvet was designated to photograph each window as a whole and each individual panel before it could be separated from its window.
Shortly after the meeting, employees of three master-glassmaker workshops began removing most of the stained-glass windows from Chartres Cathedral, storing them off-site. The work was performed by the Lorin workshop in Léves, run by Charles Lorin, founded by his father in 1869; the Parisian workshop of Albert Bonnot, who had been involved in an 1886 restoration at the cathedral; and the Parisian workshop of Jean Gaudin.
The upper windows were removed from the exterior, the lower from the interior. When the windows were removed, workers inserted canvas mounted on frames into the window openings. For the upper stained-glass windows, workmen installed scaffolding outside the cathedral and lowered it from the roof by means of construction equipment consisting of specialized hoppers. For the lower windows, they lowered scaffolding pipe down to the floor of the cathedral, or to each successive level of constructed scaffolding, by rope through openings in the vaulted ceilings of the ambulatories. They painted a number on each panel and prepared a tracing in duplicate of the panel’s images and design, placing one copy of the drawing inside the box holding each panel and affixing another on the outside of the box. Among the challenges they faced were the need to remove the brittle glass from hardened cement.
As the work at Chartres progressed, danger increased of further German advances. The Germans were planning an attack against the British through Flanders. But to disguise that intention, the Germans launched a long offensive against the French across the River Marne, which had been the scene of the heavy fighting four years before, in 1914. On July 15, 1918, the Second Battle of the Marne began with an attack by fifty-two German divisions across the Marne using temporary bridges near Dormans. But soon the British Twenty-Second Corps and several new American divisions reinforced the French and followed with a large Allied counterattack, including twenty-four French and ten US divisions with a force of 350 new French tanks. The counterattack forced the Germans to retreat almost back to their July 15 starting point while suffering 168,000 casualties and 30,000 of their soldiers taken prisoner.
Less than a week after the counterattack, the membership of the Archeological Society of Eure-et-Loir again met to debate dangers to the project at Chartres, including whether to pursue the project, and confirmed that it should continue.
Ten days later, the Allies began a major counteroffensive with the Battle of Amiens, using new artillery techniques and operational methods, including surprise attacks, and using Canadian and Australian mobile assault forces. The offensive, eventually growing into what was called the Hundred Days Offensive, was seen by many as the tipping point in the war and signaled the end of trench warfare.
Later that August, on two successive nights, enemy planes dropped several bombs at Chartres, damaging roads and some buildings but not the cathedral.
On August 30, the commission convened another meeting at the Palais-Royal. President Bernier had received a letter from Henri-Louis Bouquet, bishop of Chartres, asking the commission to halt the removal of the windows and offering to bear responsibility for the abandonment of the removal and replacement of any windows already removed. His reasons likely centered on concern for breakage or loss of the windows. He may also have shared the belief, discussed below, that the cathedral and its windows would be protected by the Virgin Mary and that mortals should refrain from interfering with Divine will. Bernier had also received a letter from Émile Brunet, chief architect in Eure-et-Loir, alerting the president to the August 15 and 16 bombings by enemy aircraft. Bernier concluded, and the members agreed, that under the circumstances there could be no question about stopping the removal and that the commission should even expand the operation to also remove the windows of the Church of Saint-Pierre and take steps to protect the statue-covered porches of both structures.
For five months, through the war’s end and the armistice, they continued the removal work, completing it before either of the two buildings could sustain further war damage. They rescued a total of twenty-nine thousand square feet of stained glass among the 174 windows of Chartres Cathedral and an unknown portion of the windows of the Church of Saint-Pierre. One accident occurred during the removal at Chartres. Specialists dropped a twelfth-century panel, the Virgin, from the stained-glass Tree of Jesse Window. It would be repaired or replaced by a replica. Any crates in which the window panels were stored appear to have been discarded after the windows were reinstalled.
Over the next five years, wi
th the oversight of architect Émile Brunet, the craftsmen of the Lorin, Bonnot, and Gaudin studios restored and reinstalled the stained-glass windows in Chartres and Saint-Pierre, beginning with resealing the windows with hydraulic lime and cement to ensure a better seal and reinstalling the Chartres windows in a modified, more logical arrangement developed by Canon Delaporte according to his research, to better reflect the windows’ original pattern that had not been followed in previous refurbishings.
The authorities learned lessons in their World War I removal and reinstallation of the windows. First, Canon Delaporte’s scholarship of the cathedral and cataloging gave them courage and the confidence to identify and document the complex, delicate collection of windows. The process then was to remove, package, and store them and to repair many before reinstallation. The canon’s scholarship into the iconography, interpretation, and cataloging of the panels was essential to retaining the stories illustrated by the windows. Second, they developed a conceptual framework to identify, label, describe, and place the windows into context. Third, those carrying out the removal, repair, and reinstallation created an early solution to the problem of replacing hard cement with soft caulking to make the task of future removal and reinstallation even conceivable. Before the 1918–1924 project, the risks of breakage of the older windows in the collection may have seemed almost insurmountable.
The last lesson was a subtler one. Over the years, many church supporters and congregants used their faith to assure themselves and convince others that through some miracle the cathedral would protect itself and that intervention by man would impair that process. But as the machines of war became more efficient, the grip of those old notions appeared to weaken, which allowed the authorities to adopt more pro-active policies in response to citizens’ calls for action to protect historic monuments. Would those changes hold for the next war?
Ironically, the great work of Canon Delaport and other supporters, such as the Marianites of Holy Cross—a group of devout laywomen dedicated to the Virgin Mary who had always had a close relationship with Chartres Cathedral—may have detracted from the cathedral’s protection, in that it overly reassured those who opposed so-called passive defense. They were deterred from building shelters to protect vulnerable structures and creating detachments of residents to prepare for and deal with aerial bombardments and just wanted to withdraw into prayer in the hope that the war would bypass the cathedral. In the long run, these detractors were in a sense correct, in that Chartres Cathedral escaped direct bombardments, and in large part the escape was due to factors other than the passive defense measures. Perhaps, as the Marianites claimed, it would come to pass that the Virgin Mary would look over the cathedral during all future wars that would cross France.
One aspect of the window work certainly benefited the cathedral in World War II: The removal of the windows and their replacement with flexible expandable material would have the effect of allowing shock waves to pass through the cathedral with less resistance. That likely proved important in helping the cathedral endure nearby bombing and bombardment and leaving it better able to bear damage from rain, snow, and the elements during the last fraction of World War II after the liberation of Chartres.
A handful of young men who gained important experience in the military during World War I would go on to play vital roles in saving the stained-glass windows at Chartres in World War II. They included Achille Carlier—who as a teenager was so dismayed by the vulnerability of Notre-Dame de Paris to the German bombardments of World War I—and René Planchenault, Ernest Herpe, and Lucien Prieur. Others, in civilian roles, learned from the World War I window removal and restoration in ways that would prove valuable in the next world war.
CHAPTER FOUR
Griffith Faces the World: Texas, New York, Manila, and Shanghai, 1918–1935
IN LATE SUMMER 1918, WEB ARRIVED IN DALLAS, ALREADY HOME TO 150,000, its central area packed with brick buildings, mostly five stories tall, and church steeples. There were none of the open lots Web had been used to in Quanah. Trolley cars screeched past horse-drawn wagons, while autos and trucks clamored on paved streets lined with curbs and sidewalks. Electric signs and streetlights kept the night alive—a new world for Web.
Sometime after he arrived, Web seems to have wanted a new name, because soon he would be called Griff (likely because that’s what he wanted), but Quanah folks, and relatives, would continue to call him Web.
Within days, word reached him that his friend Sydney Good from Quanah had died at El Paso’s Fort Bliss, which was the Army’s cavalry center and a rail hub for soldiers returning from Europe. Flu had broken out the prior spring and was now spreading to pig farms and converting into a human pandemic, with a rapid course, some victims dying within hours of contracting it.
Griff rode the train back home to Quanah for the funeral. Graveside at Memorial Park Cemetery, on its windy hill with a few scattered trees along the road, Griffiths and Goods and a large group of Quanah friends watched Sydney’s casket lowered into a plot near the grave of Alline, Sydney’s mother, who had died when he was four.
Back in Dallas, James Wilson oriented Griff to his job as clerk at the Wilsons’ retail grocery store. Griff got settled in the Wilson home as well. The Wilsons had been long-standing friends of Griff’s parents and watched over him but likely gave him more latitude than they had given their own children. He likely had his own room in their house to be alone, read, and study, and he would have been able to explore the city. He probably missed his family but would have been glad to not have to devote time to caring for his siblings, and he surely wouldn’t have missed the extra harvest work required of Quanah children and mothers that fall, with manpower to harvest the cotton having been absorbed by the war.
Web’s work at the store and school filled his days. Time off wasn’t in the cards. He would have ridden buses and the noisy streetcars, but he probably did a lot of walking between home, the store, and school. Trucks and autos were everywhere and were breaking down in the street and clogging traffic amid the dwindling number of horse-drawn wagons and riders, signs of continuing transition, and the grime of congestion contrasted with Quanah’s dust and wind and open horizons.
That fall, he started twelfth grade at Bryan Street High School, located in a four-story rectangular brick building downtown that was two to three times the size of Quanah’s Hardeman County courthouse, the biggest building Griff had seen up close until then. He began with English, geometry and trigonometry, bookkeeping, military science, and physics and inorganic chemistry, both with a laboratory component.
About this time, the influenza pandemic hit Dallas. Newspapers reported cases in two counties by early September. In Dallas, there were calls to ban gatherings, but pressure mounted to save the September 28 Liberty Loan parade, in which five thousand civilians and 2,500 enlisted men paraded down South Harwood Street to launch the government’s fourth campaign to sell Liberty bonds for the war effort. The gathering was good for the campaign but bad for public health. On October 3, Dallas had 119 reported influenza cases and one death. By October 9, there were one thousand. On the tenth, all Dallas theaters, playhouses, and other places of public amusement were ordered closed, and on the twelfth all public and private schools were closed, by which time the total number of cases had exceeded 2,700, the pandemic peaking in the fall, but new cases continuing to arise into winter and spring.
On October 31, the schools reopened.
Before news of the November 11 armistice reached Dallas, Griff had longed to join the military but knew that for him World War I had come too early. Still, he was determined to be ready for the next war. Finally, availing himself of the Junior ROTC cadet training at his new school, he was able to do something about it. When he put on his cadet uniform as Private Griffith of Company B, with high black collar over white shirt and solid vertical stripe down his chest, his extraordinary good looks showed as never before. He already stood at six feet, one inch tall, and he was handsome with his short, cur
ly hair, dark eyebrows, broad forehead, and pronounced chin, with the beginning of what would become a distinctive dimple; yet his complexion still reflected a boyish softness.
Even without his family, Griff thrived in Dallas, keeping busy at the store and school—while at the store in Quanah Griff’s brothers took up the slack caused by his absence. Later in his first year at Bryan Street High, and in the half year that followed, Griff’s studies included Spanish, civics, and economics, and he shone in geometry, physics, military science, and bookkeeping.
During the year, he rode the train south to College Station, two-thirds of the way to Houston, to visit his cousin Orville (F. O. Jr.) at Texas A&M and to see what life might be like as an Aggie in the Corps of Cadets—the next step after Junior ROTC—if he were to matriculate there. Orville was three years older than Griff and had F. O. Sr.’s prominent forehead, closely trimmed hair, but his thicker eyebrows framed the focused, no-nonsense look he shared with this entrepreneurial father. Orville showed Griff around campus, with its line of stone buildings surrounding its Greek-style domed administration building, paneled halls, huge classrooms, dining halls, cavalry barns, and training and parade fields. It had to have made a strong impression on Griff.
Back in Dallas at Bryan Street High, Griff found time for football practice and made the Wolf Pack team, at left tackle for the 1919 season.
After fifteen months at Bryan, Griff’s demeanor had developed a seriousness, a focus, and a sense of concentration that distinguished him.
On a Friday in January 1920, Griff graduated from Bryan Street High School, and on the following Monday he enrolled at A&M, intending to major in agriculture, rounding out his course schedule with classes in chemistry, rhetoric, composition, and literature. Upon matriculation, however, the majority of his time was spent as an ROTC Company D cadet, among the school’s mile-wide, open-grass parade grounds and training woods. Drills included calisthenics, escort to the colors, pitching tents, bayonet practice, and mapmaking. Signal corps maneuvers included the military’s new use of radio, map reading, and telegraph practice. Artillery drills including marching with rolling caissons, fording rivers with mobile cannons, and firing practice. And parade formation and cavalry drills included work with sabers, saddling instruction, and equestrian class.
Saving the Light at Chartres Page 6
