Saving the Light at Chartres
Page 17
In any event, it seems that the Fine Arts Administration in 1940 had at its disposal all necessary information regarding disposition of the removed windows in 1918 and the years that followed. Several members of the Historic Monuments Commission present at its meetings in 1937 and 1940 were also involved in the commission’s meetings during World War I. They would have known or been able to determine where the removed windows had been stored between 1918 and the time they were reinstalled at Chartres.
The record is not clear on why the Fine Arts Administration had failed to identify a storage location for the Chartres windows even as late as April 1940—or, if they had identified one, why they waited even beyond that date to give the order to move the windows.
There were likely many reasons. It was such a large collection, including the largest concentration of twelfth- and thirteenth-century stained glass in a single location anywhere in the world. As such, breaking it up into segments to be stored in multiple locations may have seemed unthinkable. Jeanne Laurent reported at the February 23 meeting that there were over a hundred additional sites already serving as storage depots but most may have been already filled, which would have required that the Chartres collection be divided into pieces. Trucks and fuel were in short supply, but surely if there were a will to move the Chartres windows, wouldn’t there be a way? Ironically, the events of June 1940 themselves decided for everyone whether the Chartres collection would be separated into pieces or remain whole.
In addition, the French wondered what parts of the country would become embroiled in conflict, so the Fine Arts Administration was searching for places far in the southwest, yet still away from the Atlantic coast. And there was growing unrest throughout France from relocation of defense workers and, to a much greater extent, displacement of refugees.
That all being said, it would prove to be only the shock of German onslaught and the clear prospect of French defeat at the front—and the realization that war would be different this time, without a “front”—that would convince the Fine Arts Administration to take the huge risk of moving the Chartres windows.
By the late spring of 1940, the nation’s entire infrastructure was becoming overwhelmed and frayed by, among other things, the arrival of masses of refugees and spreading fear.
But Chartres was fortunate. Jean Moulin was unique in his dedication as prefect of Eure-et-Loire, and, despite his young age, he had a multitude of personal acquaintances among the prefecture staffs of various western departments. It was a stroke of luck that he hailed originally from the southwest of France and had worked a short stint as a prefect in one of its departments—as an attaché to the cabinet at the departmental prefecture for Hérault, centered in Montpellier. It was even more fortunate that he had known Marcel Jacquier, who was now serving as the prefect of the Dordogne. Jacquier, a World War I veteran, had served in the interwar years in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in various foreign assignments and in the prefectures of various departments, starting with the department of Hérault, located in Montpellier, where Jean Moulin had attended law school at Montpellier University.
On March 22, 1940, Paul Reynaud replaced Daladier as prime minister of France. A week later, France and Britain agreed that neither would enter into a separate peace without the other. Less than three weeks later, on April 9, Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, and then the British and French forces who were sent to confront those incursions failed to stop the German forces. Shortly thereafter, Churchill replaced Chamberlain as British prime minister.
The citizens of Chartres felt the war was moving closer. Reports of the German bombing in Poland, Denmark, and Norway fueled those fears, and the Fine Arts Administration likely felt mounting pressure to find a safe place to hide the windows.
In Paris, the first air-raid sirens sounded on May 10, but planes did not appear. Even so, the Minister of Information announced to the Parisians on the radio that “the real war had begun.” Parisian suburbanites reported hearing cannon fire and bombs exploding. The Wehrmacht invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxemburg, the Luftwaffe entered French airspace, and three days later the Germans entered France.
Fear of the invasion spread rapidly though the northern French departments. The government offered only limited assistance to residents in those departments, and it forbade civilians from participating in what had been an “official evacuation” of Alsace-Lorraine. Within a week following the German attack, Belgian refugees swarmed into France. Although the newspapers were not reporting the military movement, those refugees were spreading the word. Then, as bombs fell on urban centers, millions of civilian refugees fled from northern France, heading west and south. And soon thereafter, the French State, and any organized evacuation structure, headed toward collapse.
The staff at the Fine Arts Administration finally caught a break. Jean Trouvelot had made a request specifically directed to Yves-Marie Froidevaux, of Périgord, chief architect for historic monuments of the department of the Dordogne. Périgord architect Paul Cocula had had the original idea to hide the Chartres windows in an underground quarry. He knew that the excellent stone from quarries at Ribéracois had been used in restoration of monuments. Froidevaux had been appointed chief architect in the Dordogne only the year before but was familiar with the château in his department. By then, the Departments of Museums and Fine Arts had already hidden many deposits of artworks and museum pieces in the basements of several other castles in Périgord.
Together they identified a possible site, Château de Fongrenon, a castle in the village of Cercles, close to the town of La Tour-Blanche. The castle was listed in the General Inventory of Cultural Heritage that René Planchenault had refined. Château de Fongrenon was listed as a “classic-era” castle built in the seventeenth century, perched on a small rocky promontory and surrounded by a moat. Over three centuries, masons had drilled underground high-ceilinged quarries into the promontory, which were sealed by large lockable doors. And, critically, besides being equipped with its underground quarries, Fongrenon had a nearby railroad spur, served by a road that also led to other roads up to the quarries’ entrance.
The Fine Arts Administration—working with Jacquier in the Dordogne prefecture—obtained the right to use an inactive portion of the quarry at Fongrenon for two hundred francs per month. Once they had done so, Captain Lucien Prieur and Ernest Herpe of the Monuments Service of the GQG went to work with Michael Mastorakis and the local Chartres staff to plan the evacuation of the crates. They still had to find a way to transport them. Long-distance trucks would be nearly impossible to obtain for the nearly three-hundred-mile voyage south to La Tour-Blanche. For such a long trip, Prieur’s obvious choice would be conveyance by rail, but to get the crates onto a train, together with the contingent of guards and workmen to accompany them, he would have to find trucks to transport the crates to a railhead. By late May 1940, crowds of refugees at the railway station at Chartres would make it necessary to find another rail-head. A convoy of trucks could not possibly find space to deliver the crates to, or near, the station. Besides, Prieur must have anticipated that the freight yard at Chartres would be an early target for German planes. No, they would need to search for another site near Chartres to which freight cars could be shuttled and parked long enough to be loaded and then hauled by a locomotive across the country toward the rail hub nearest Fongrenon.
Prieur set out to locate trucks that could navigate the narrow streets of Chartres up the hill to the cathedral, get as close as possible to the cathedral for the crates to be loaded, and then carry the crates to the railhead—once one could be located. He would need fifteen trucks, each with a capacity of five to eight tons, that would be expected to carry the crates in two trips.
By the end of May, Parisians were losing their determination to remain in the city. Refugees in increasing numbers were passing through Paris. Then news of crisis sounded with reports of the British evacuation of Dunkirk. By the start of June, war was closing in, and fear caught hold in Paris.
At about the same time, Lucien Prieur’s team received word from the railway that it could deliver four railcars to a siding in the small wheat-farming village of Berchéres-les-Pierres, six miles southeast of Chartres. Prieur and Mastorakis knew what they had to do. Could they round up the trucks and manpower and get all of the crates to that village in time? Could they make the journey and get the crates loaded onto the train before detection by German planes or ground forces? And, once loaded, could a railroad engine get to that site to haul the cars far enough west to avoid being sighted and hit by attacking German forces?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Transport: Chartres and Berchères-les-Pierres, June 1940
IN THE JUNE 3 BOMBING RAIDS, FIVE WAVES OF GERMAN PLANES OF twenty-five or more each attacked Paris around 1:00 p.m. and again just before 2:00 p.m., part of Operation Paula, Germany’s plan to destroy the French Air Force, the first against any belligerent capital and the first to hit Chartres since World War I. Antiaircraft fire blotched the sky with gusts of white smoke, which, together with attacking French fighters, forced the German bomber crews to remain above thirty thousand feet, preventing them from accurately hitting military targets. Over one thousand bombs fell in the area, eighty-three in western Paris and the balance in a circle around the city, including the Citroën automobile factory. Planes attacked the airfield of Issy-les-Moulineaux, between Paris and Versailles. Other bombs fell at Le Bourget Field, east of Saint-Denis, on the city’s northern edge, and other airfields as far southwest as Chartres, where at least twenty bombs fell on that city’s west edge. From the highest point in Paris, atop Montmartre on the north riverbank of the Seine, observers could see flames and smoke from bombs bursting at points over a five-mile area with columns of smoke from five fires. The all clear was given at 2:18 p.m.
Two days later, on June 5, a second bombing raid on the Chartres airfield killed eight and injured many more. In his role of prefect of Eureet-Loire, Jean Moulin visited the wounded in the hospital. The raids were worse twenty-one miles north in Dreux, with over one hundred dead and much of the town center destroyed, including most hospitals. In the days following, journalists reported that 254 persons had been killed in that day’s bombardments. Nearly two hundred were civilians. In the operation, German formations had attacked twenty-eight railways and marshaling yards, but all of that damage inflicted was light. None were out of action for more than twenty-four hours.
Even while the June 5 raid was under way, Jean Moulin, Jean Chadel, and their prefectural staff were probably working with Roger Grand to arrange for Chartres volunteers to come back to help remove the windows from the crypt for transport to a safe haven. Moulin had much to do, first consoling wounded in the hospital and then mobilizing teams of volunteers and soldiers, tools, and equipment. Some who had helped with the window removal during the eight days in August and September 1939 probably would come back to help, but the situation in Chartres had deteriorated since then. The climate of fear caused by the bombings of June 3 and 5 and the stresses of a threatened invasion—including displacement of large numbers of people from the east and from Paris through Chartres and surrounding areas—made it difficult for civic leaders to find Chartres residents willing to volunteer for the tasks that would require them to be away from their families for a full day and possibly into the night. It would be a rush of collective multicultural sweat, blisters, aching arms and feet, and diesel exhaust—at the cathedral, at the railhead at Berchères-les-Pierres, and along the train route south.
Captain Lucien Prieur’s military group would have been inundated, and Ernest Herpe’s Fine Arts Administration could do only so much, working through private contractors, given the wholesale disruption of Paris life.
On the morning of June 8, a Saturday, Jean Moulin would have been disheartened that the weather was fair. He would have been hoping for rain and fog—or, at the least, overcast skies—to degrade visibility from the air, to shroud the cathedral and the streets and roads south of town from the eyes of German pilots who were continuing to terrorize Paris and towns south and west to force the French to surrender.
To accomplish the day’s enormous workload, Moulin and his team must have known they would need 115–140 men. So, probably on Moulin’s instruction, Jean Chadel’s prefectural staff would have solicited in the train station and refugee shelters for men seeking work to come to the cathedral on Saturday, and maybe Sunday, likely for two shifts of ten to twelve hours of work, one shift to start early in the morning, the other in midafternoon. Ironically, they could be turning to foreigners and displaced persons for a significant part of the manpower needed to save the windows, a French historic and artistic treasure.
Moulin would have been lucky to have managed even a few hours of sleep in the predawn hours of that day, having had to work well beyond dark—even on those long days of June, night after night, especially since the bombing—his head probably swimming as he arrived at the cathedral. The tidal wave of emergencies swirling around him would have been enough to turn anyone’s mind to a blur: he would have shuffled through crowded prefecture hallways to Chadel’s and other staffers’ desks, reaching truckers and drivers by telegram and phone. He would have taken calls and meetings in his office with people begging for help, exchanged messages with Lucien Prieur to press railroad managers to summon to the cathedral the few soldiers who’d remained in town, to haul crates and serve as guards on the train carrying the windows to Fongrenon. He would have ordered soldiers to guard the trains along the journey and the trucks at either end and implored Roger Grand to line up more volunteers of his citizen contingent to come back to the cathedral to haul the crates onto trucks and to provide food and drink for the workers.
But Jean Moulin had stuck with it. He was no ordinary man. He was determined to get the windows out before the invasion could overrun Chartres.
Moulin walked up the hill from his rooms at the prefect’s residence. The smell of cordite lingered in the air from Wednesday’s bombs, a smell Moulin knew from his nearly two years of work for Air Minister Pierre Cot. Moulin’s official residence lay in the shadow of the cathedral, a residence he called “comfortable enough” but “ostentatious and in bad taste.” His own Citroën would have just been an impediment at the cathedral, with the fleet of more than fifteen lorries soon to arrive. Even a small grouping of trucks in those small spaces would cause a tangle, but the much larger conglomeration of trucks summoned to the cathedral for the busy day ahead would create a dangerous confluence, requiring planning and control amid the mass of men and machines on the site that day and into the night.
The earliest sunlight reflected off the sun-bleached masonry and white stucco of the buildings and limestone of the cathedral’s towers and sculptures and illuminated the weathered pale-green patina of the great roofs of the cathedral and the rust-red roofs of the surrounding buildings. Early rising Chartres residents emerged from their homes to begin the day, but the sounds of hammers and vehicle engines were already fracturing the tranquil morning of the town. Dogs barked, buckets clattered, milk bottles rattled, and brooms swept as the townspeople began their chores amid the sounds of work at the cathedral.
Moulin came within a couple of blocks of the cathedral, and he could hear sounds of activity: carpenters called out measurements, saws sliced lumber, hammers struck nails, and boards slapped and clanked as workers hauled lumber off trucks. Michael Mastorakis had assigned the earliest task to the carpenters. They were to build a set of three wooden ramps to enable men to push handcarts bearing the window crates out through the cathedral’s west door and down its steps onto the courtyard for loading onto waiting trucks.
Joiners had been hard at work since before dawn among piles of tools and supplies—wheelbarrows, sawhorses, tool belts and -boxes, water cans, nail buckets, and piles of boards scattered around the front of the cathedral and on the broad floor of the nave inside the west entrance.
The day’s work would be to haul the nearly one thousand wooden crates out of the cathedral’s basement crypt into the courtyard to be loaded onto trucks. From the crypt, a vaulted hallway led through an arched passageway and up a five-foot-wide set of more than a dozen stone steps, leading through an iron gate to another set of eight stone steps up to the main floor of the cathedral, one hundred feet from its west entrance. At the top of those steps, teams would place each crate onto a handcart to be rolled to the entrance. There, they would have to push it over the three new ramps. The first ramp ran over the entrance door’s threshold into the portal’s shroud. The second ramp ran down the cathedral’s half dozen front steps beneath the temporary shroud or rampart toward the outside entrance. The third ramp ran over the threshold of the shroud’s outer door to the courtyard. From there, each cart would be rolled to a waiting truck.
The second task facing Moulin and the military and civilian teams would have been to organize those of the workmen they’d instructed to arrive early. They divided them into teams and instructed them on what to do and how to do it—all in time for the arrival of the first couple of trucks whose drivers they’d told to arrive before 8:30 a.m. The remaining drivers would have been told to schedule their arrivals later—in intervals throughout the day.
Moulin and Mastorakis, along with Captain Prieur, likely had estimated that the work would take all day and continue into the night. They planned for the fifteen trucks to make two trips from the cathedral to the rail spur. Risks of additional German attacks were growing. They had to pack the crates in and move as quickly as possible to come back to the second load. Traveling during daylight, they would have to somehow minimize chances of being spotted from the air. Later, the waxing crescent moon on June 8 would provide only 7 percent of full moonlight and furnish a cover of darkness, but only if lights were avoided or modified under blackout protocol.