Saving the Light at Chartres

by Victor A. Pollak

  Leavenworth students felt pride in their selection. Griff likely felt that thrill along with them. Most also felt trepidation that they might not measure up—a mixed feeling of satisfaction mingled with uneasiness. The school gave its students a status and a conviction that they were important and part of a great ongoing concern. Griff probably shared that sense of accomplishment and of fitting into the larger institution that the Army represented.

  Griff’s study and training at Leavenworth with his classmate officers consisted of classes, problem-solving maneuvers, and reading an enormity of study material, maps, and overlays. A typical day would start with rising before daylight, a shower, a shave, and a dash to breakfast, followed by a short time to glance over an unfinished assignment. Students would carry a full briefcase to their first class at 8 o’clock. The morning sessions included three classes—called conferences—many in large classrooms with a hundred or more students and three ten-minute breaks for coffee and a rest for wrists sore from note-taking. In conferences, instructors lectured and fired questions at randomly selected students. Afternoon sessions included more conferences and note-taking, followed by opportunities for physical exercise. Within a month, examinations would follow, many unannounced. Tactical problems, map maneuvers, and war games joined the mix and would constitute the final exam, beginning one day, running through the night, and finishing well into the following day.

  Early in 1939, Griff received orders that once his Leavenworth coursework concluded in June, he was to attend tank school back at Fort Benning, near Columbus, Georgia, on the border with Alabama—an assignment for which he had applied that would also allow him to be closer to little Alice in Washington. He wrote to Tiny that he hoped to go to Washington, D.C., some time to pick Alice up and bring her back to New York for more sightseeing. He also wrote that he had learned that his ex-wife would be remarrying in California in May, but he did not yet know to whom. Tiny wrote back to Griff that she was curious who the “lucky man” might be. He turned out to be a divorced Navy officer, John S. Blue, who hailed from a military family with a long line of Navy officers; he would adopt little Alice and go on to have a baby daughter with Alice Torrey.

  Tiny wrote back that her exploration of France had included a visit to Amiens Cathedral, where she had again been taken with the stained-glass windows.

  In June, Griff and his Leavenworth graduating class of 228 paraded in their dress-white uniforms into the new War Department theater, again giving Griff grounds for satisfaction and a chance to reflect on his achievement.

  Before moving to Fort Benning, he managed that trip to Washington, D.C., to pick up little Alice and take her to New York, where they saw the World’s Fair. Then Griff headed to Georgia.

  Tank school at Benning not only got Griff to the East Coast but also introduced him to a new branch of the Army, sparking new opportunities that would lead to important professional contacts for him.

  While in tank school, he lived in a white two-story house with a wrap-around, ivy-covered screened-in porch that was shaded by trees. He had access to horses for riding and amenities appropriate for a child to visit. Starting when little Alice was about eight, Griff began making arrangements for her to make a series of extended summer visits to spend time with him. Fort Benning was their first such visit. They shared some good times together. Griff tried to interest her in activities that then might have been considered more suitable for boys, like horse riding and bike riding, fishing and hunting, but Alice had become acculturated to refined city life with her mother and her Torrey grandparents. She did like horseback riding—but in a refined equestrian spirit rather than as Griff did, out of enjoyment of the horses as pets and, with Texan practicality, as transportation.

  Photos from their time together at Benning reveal Alice as an eight-year-old with a conflicted and uncertain posture, as if she were unsure of her bearings with her mainly-only-summertime father. One shows her and Griff with his big black retriever, Smudge. In another, she is standing alone in a yard wearing her jodhpurs, English riding breeches, squinting as if eager to get on with other things. In another, hugging a cat, she seems to be more at home. And in one more, holding the handlebars of a brand-new bicycle, she seems to be trying to look happy about it. In other images, whether surrounded by a litter of puppies, or side by side on a play date with another girl her age, she seems genuinely happy.

  After at least one such visit, Griff sent little Alice a pair of Sonja Henie ice skates that Alice loved. Sonja, Norway’s celebrated Olympic champion and Hollywood movie star, was the kind of female icon they could both appreciate, athletically inclined enough for Griff and glamorous enough for little Alice. She would remember Griff as an awkward and somewhat distant but well-intentioned father who tried during their times together to overcome his seriousness and meet her needs as well.

  Griff’s time at Fort Benning progressed well enough, but his time with little Alice highlighted the tension he felt between pursuing his military career and quitting it in hopes of starting a normal family life. It was a period of flux and turbulence for him, which probably weighed on him. He suffered lingering effects of the divorce and his ex-wife’s accusations that he had been abusive, which could have been quite a burden to him, and from professional demands to relocate and be separated from his family.

  By the time Griff finished tank school in 1940, the war in Europe had erupted, and changes were under way within the US military. It was time for Griff to move yet again. By the summer of 1940, the Army had created the new Armored Force to be relocated to Fort Knox, but for Griff there would be another destination: the college at Fort Leavenworth. The college was expanding its operations, shortening its regular course from ten months to ten weeks and quadrupling the number of students in its class to more than a thousand. Griff was recalled to serve in its academic command as one of its four faculty in the Armored Force subsection of its G-3 Section, out of a faculty of more than 150.

  Griff’s concerns about whether to remain in the Army or to seek a discharge would soon be resolved for him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Jump-Start: Chartres, September 1938–January 1940

  SINCE GERMANY’S REMILITARIZATION OF THE RHINELAND, A SLOW pace of events had built steadily the way a brook swelling in spring might intensify into a raging flood. Journalists and government leaders who feared that Germany’s remilitarization of the Rhineland would be only a beginning to Hitler’s aggression saw greater dangers in Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, and at the same time the demands for German-Czech autonomy in the Sudetenland in April turned into military threats that usurped the attention of British, French, and US diplomats. Through spring and summer 1938, French newspapers reverberated with headlines heralding the transforming international landscape.

  Consequently, by mid-1938 Minister Jean Zay could wait no longer to act on the question of preserving France’s most precious national treasures. He signed a four-stage advance order authorizing Georges Huisman and his team at the Fine Arts Administration to launch the removal of the Chartres windows.

  The pressure inside France only increased when the German-Czech dispute reached a breaking point on September 24. In response, France partially mobilized its military, called up reservists, and invoked controls on transportation and censorship of the press. Jean Maunoury, who had been designated as assistant to Jean Trouvelet in the Chartres removal project, was one of the call-ups, but Huisman had anticipated Maunoury’s mobilization and on the same day furnished Maunoury’s own assistant, Michael Mastorakis, with the necessary instructions and plans to take over the lead.

  On Sunday, September 25, French newspapers reported developments unfolding in Munich and Prague: Chamberlain had met Hitler, who had stiffened, now demanding that the German Army be allowed to occupy the Sudetenland and that the Czechs evacuate by September 28, which Chamberlain had put to the Czechs, who rejected Hitler’s demands, backed by both the French and the British cabinets, the Czechs having already mobilized
fully. In response, Chamberlain had proposed an immediate four-power conference to settle the dispute in a last-minute effort to avoid war.

  At 7:00 p.m. the next evening, four men left by car for Chartres: Jean Trouvelot, Louis Linzeler, and two Parisian master glassmakers, Messieurs Delange and Bourgeot. The temperature was in the sixties; a storm was moving in with windy, cloudy skies, bringing with it showers. After an hour, the men could see the hill and atop it the cathedral’s twin towers. They drove to the prefecture, where they met Jean Chadel, then serving as secretary-general to the prefect, who suggested they convene with the volunteers at 7:30 the following morning. Chadel also authorized Trouvelot and his team to request volunteers from among the military’s 150 designated troops.

  The next morning, amid overcast, windy skies and rain, the volunteers, contractors, and laborers, grouped in teams of five to eight, began lowering the scaffolding materials stored in the attics. They did so by means of ropes through the keystone holes of the vaults.

  Within hours, the first twenty-five reserve enlisted men had arrived, with more arriving throughout the morning. Volunteers helped first in clearing the cathedral’s nave of its hundreds of wooden chairs, transporting them to the crypt at the Church of Sainte-Foy, several blocks from the cathedral, and onto the esplanade of the garden of the bishopric across the cathedral’s plaza.

  To make room for scaffolds, teams moved away the wooden confessionals—already detached from the walls—into areas without windows. Workers also cleared candlesticks, ornaments, fixtures, interim decorations, and statues from the side altars, together with the high chandeliers and other large electric lighting equipment.

  Soldiers and volunteers cleared furniture, and military trucks brought the specially fashioned wooden crates, which had been stored in the cellar of Loëns. They installed the crates in the attic through four small doors in the clerestory, located more than fifty feet above the nave’s floor. In a long and difficult task, they hoisted each crate by ropes to the clerestory, each load requiring six men. They eventually used a van to assist in pulling the ropes, and they stored the raised crates in the attic of the ambulatory at the foot of each window, maneuvering through the tight passage under the attic.

  The teams initially struggled with the scaffolding, but by 9:30 a.m. they were growing more skillful, assembling scaffolding with increasing speed, assembling and installing the first of the scaffolds, each thirty-two or forty feet in height, in the narrow passage at the foot of the tall windows, completing fifteen to eighteen of the many scaffolds the massive task would require, by 5:00 p.m. While installing the upper portions, they made ready the telescopic platforms for use for the lower portions of the windows—units that consisted of crude, early versions of today’s cherry pickers.

  In the choir chapels, which were difficult to access with telescopic platforms, workers installed six scaffolds. By the end of the second day, they had installed the last of the tall scaffolds.

  As soon as access to the windows was available, the master glassmakers and glass painters, Charles Lorin and eight of his men, went to work with chisels, beginning to unseal flashings and detach the hard putty that held the windows fast to their iron framework.

  While the artisans detached windows wherever scaffolding or telescopic platforms gave them access, workers continued clearing out the attic, removing wood debris, wood paneling, and other flammable materials.

  Meanwhile, Jean Trouvelot and his on-site architects, Michael Mastorakis and Louis Linzeler, were ready for the next steps, but they were hesitant to begin the window removal. On the one hand, they sought to permit the artisans to remove as much hardened cement as possible, in order to minimize the damage that would be inflicted on the windows if rush removal were to be commanded. They feared that they had to be ready as soon as possible to remove the windows in the event of any attack—when trucks would have to be requisitioned away and specialists whose skills were needed for such work would likely be mobilized for other military duty and unavailable for the delicate Chartres work.

  Relief from the dilemma soon came. The French government had already announced that it would not intervene in a war over Czechoslovakia. Only a few days later, on September 30, Chamberlain, Daladier, Hitler, and Mussolini signed the Munich Agreement with Czechoslovakia. In that agreement, Czechoslovakia ceded the Sudetenland to Germany in exchange for a German, Italian, British, and French guarantee of the territorial integrity of the rest of Czechoslovakia—a grasp for peace to appease Hitler.

  At least for the moment, the Fine Arts Administration could postpone removal of the windows, forestall mass requisitioning of military and civilian volunteers and trucks, and allow additional time for the craftsmen to systematically “release” most of the windows from their bay jambs: it was slow, careful work replacing the flashings and seal-ants that had been made thirteen years before—which had employed hydraulic lime and cement for its perfect seal, now to be replaced by limed flashings and plaster made for quick and easy removal to avoid breakage—and reinserting them using that new malleable plastic material as caulking rather than cement so that later the windows could be removed by less skilled workers. The abatement in geopolitical tensions would relieve pressure from the risk that the skilled craftsmen would later be drafted for combat. While the “preremoval” readying work was being conducted, the Fine Arts Administration continued to line up and train a large workforce to be held on standby for the next phase of the Chartres operation.

  As an added precaution, Trouvelot, Mastorakis, and Linzeler took the step of selecting a number of windows throughout the cathedral that could be removed immediately to establish “air holes,” to relieve air pressure from nearby explosions—in the hopes of minimizing damage to the glass that remained.

  These developments allowed the Fine Arts Administration the time to select the second of the two window-removal alternatives: mount all available scaffolds and hoists, complemented by other makeshift devices; make ready all packing material; remove window flashings in situ; secure the stained-glass windows with pins (the barotères and feuillards) to be restored and kept in place; and make them ready in situ to prepare for the rapid and easy removal of the greatest number of windows if as a result of war tensions or outright invasion the need to remove, transport, and hide the windows became unavoidable.

  As events transpired, the time available for preparation would prove longer than Jean Trouvelot and his colleague would have dared to hope. Within a week of the Munich Agreement’s signing, the number of workmen at Chartres was cut to a minimum, leaving only a few craftsmen, using the scaffolding remaining in the side aisles, to continue to release and reputty the thousands of window panels and flashings and to seal the outer edges of each window to its masonry window jamb. The scramble of workmen—with the clatter of metal tools and shouts that had reverberated in the cathedral in the first days of the operation—now subsided into an orderly pattern that permitted church services to return and allayed fears of a wholesale panic and breakage. Part of the ambulatory stained-glass windows and sections of the high choir and transept were restored and reinstalled with soft putty and soft flashings.

  The scaffolding installed in September 1938 remained in place for that year, except for a few scaffolds that were moved to repair windows.

  And as it turned out, Jean Trouvelot also determined that it would be necessary to modify the strips (feuillards) of the windows of the ambulatory. Meanwhile, the Fine Arts Administration took advantage of the time between late 1938 and August 1939 to complete preparatory work on the windows and other parts of the cathedral.

  During that time, specialist volunteers rendered what Trouvelot characterized as extraordinary service, but their private businesses suffered from their having to invest time and resources into instructing the project’s workers and providing for insurance.

  In November 1938, Achille Carlier resurfaced in the debate to close and relocate the airfield near the cathedral, launching what he called a “national p
etition for the suppression of the Chartres aviation camp that threatens death to the cathedral.” He appeared in a radio interview to press his petition and campaign. The senate debated the matter, but the motion to adopt was defeated.

  In late January 1939, a new player had entered the picture—Jean Moulin, another World War I veteran, who had been appointed prefect of Eure-et-Loire, based at Chartres, early in 1939. He was a staunchly republican lawyer from Béziers near the southern French coast southwest of Montpellier, and he would become a renowned member of the French Resistance, unifying its many factions at de Gaulle’s direction during World War II. Before coming to Chartres, Moulin had served in a series of positions in the prefectures of a number of the French administrative departments and in France’s Air Ministry during the early 1930s, where he had been active in efforts to send planes and pilots to assist the Spanish republicans during the Spanish Civil War.

  Five months later, the annual religious pilgrimage to Chartres honoring the Virgin Mary had to hold Mass outdoors, next to the cathedral, for the first time in centuries.

  In late August, after three years of planning, the Directorate of Museums launched the national operation to evacuate artworks from museums.

  But still they refrained from ordering removal of the stained-glass windows from Chartres.

  CHAPTER TEN