Saving the Light at Chartres

by Victor A. Pollak

  The loading and transporting would have to be done quickly. Moulin likely knew that the situation in France—from the view of leaders in Paris—was deteriorating fast. News was already spreading that French prime minister Paul Reynaud had dismissed his supreme military commander, Maurice Gamelin, and replaced him with Maxime Weygand, and Reynaud had named Philippe Pétain, hero of World War I, as deputy prime minister. As would become apparent, neither Weygand nor Pétain felt the Germans could be defeated. They began looking for a way out of the war.

  By the time Moulin and the others had gathered at the cathedral on June 8, the security situation had become perilous. Trains filled with refugees were departing Paris’s Gare d’Austerlitz train station with no announced destination. When the prefectural assistants arrived at the cathedral from Jean Chadel’s office by midmorning to meet Moulin, they would have told Moulin that calls were coming in from Paris: German shelling could be heard in the Paris suburbs.

  That morning, Moulin, Mastorakis, and Prieur would have been faced with a crowd of men lined up outside the cathedral—likely an amalgamation of Czechs, Poles, Belgians, and French from Alsace-Lorraine—eager to start work, yearning for pay of any kind. Many would have spoken no French, so the matter of issuing orders would have been somewhat complicated, with those who could speak some French and another language doubling as translators. Michael Mastorakis, Louis Linzeler, and Roger Grand probably got the crews working right away. There was plenty to be done.

  Mastorakis led the first five-man crew of workers down into the crypt. There, the windows rested in more than one thousand fully loaded crates, stacked on end like huge slices of bread in loaves. The smell of freshly cut pine saturated the damp, dark air of the crypt. Each pine crate rested on its narrow edge, the glass carefully packed tight inside. The two rows consisting of crates resting flat side to flat side, along the long walls under the sixteen-foot barrel vaults, looked like two lengthy rows of giant volumes resting in two gigantic bookcases facing each other; these newly assembled volumes, however, now contained not pages with words but precious panes of nine-hundred-year-old glass, displaying variegated, tinted graphic stories, each sealed in a wooden receptacle for safekeeping to ward off war damage. For every few crates, workmen had hammered slats of wood in place to secure against falling if crates were to be removed or jarred.

  The gallery’s walls beneath its barrel vaults, some sixteen feet tall, were mostly covered with frescos starting at shoulder height. Each team of five men, cautioned to avoid scraping the walls, began by hauling a crate by hand from its position in the row of crates across the smooth-worn old herringbone-brick floor. Four of the men in each team, working in pairs, two men on each side of the crate, flung ropes over their shoulders, the partner of each man on the other side of the crate doing the same, draping the rope over his shoulder and around his back and then wrapping it around his wrist to increase traction for lifting and control. The men then lifted the crate and hauled it along the gallery toward the hall doorway. The fifth man in the team stood by for relief, in case anyone faltered or to guard against obstacles. The team edged down the hallway, step by careful step, and then up the first flight of smooth stone stairs, their surface polished by centuries of shoes of priests and pilgrims, and subsequently through the crypt’s iron gate and up the second flight of steps to the cathedral’s first floor, sounds reverberating throughout the open expanse far above them up to the nave’s vaulted ceiling.

  Workmen called out questions, and supervisors answered with orders and encouragement and prodded them to keep moving, with wheels of carts creaking, coils of ropes being cut to carrying length, the smooth surface of the amber-colored stone floor reflecting dust kicked up and fibers from ropes floating in the air, with wisps of cigarette smoke illuminated by thin shafts of natural light peering through cracks between the temporary vitrex window coverings, and everything infused with smells of incense, sweat, drying pine boards, cork powder, and grease under the high vaulted ceilings of the nave.

  At the top of the stairs, the team placed the crate onto a waiting handcart, which they rolled toward the front door and then guided up and over each of the three newly constructed ramps, down to the level of the courtyard, finally rolling the cart across the rough cobblestones of the courtyard to a waiting truck.

  At least half of the thousand crates would have to be loaded and hauled out in a first convoy of trucks by midafternoon in order to arrive six miles south at a railhead at Berchères-les-Pierres, and from there the crates would have to be unloaded and transferred to the first train cars. After that, the trucks would have to return to the cathedral for the second load of crates and return to the railhead and unload for the trains to depart during the night.

  The first couple of trucks arrived at the cathedral early and took their positions side by side in front of the west entrance shroud. Each driver then climbed into the back of his truck to meet a pair of additional workers and prepare their ropes to receive the first crate. As the first cart with its crate arrived, two men waited in the cargo hold of the truck with the driver. The men used ropes to pull the crates on to the trucks.

  At any given time, several handcarts were making their way from the doorway of the shroud out to the waiting trucks. In all, the project would have required as many as 115–140 men.

  By midmorning, Michael Mastorakis had probably made enough progress with Louis Linzeler—assembling teams of workmen and arranging for their supervision—to attend to other issues. The effects of the June 3 and June 5 bombings on the cathedral were a concern. Mastorakis and Linzeler, with binoculars in hand, at some time would have walked slowly along the interior and perimeter of the cathedral, peering up at its walls, inspecting for any damage that may have been sustained from impact of the exploding bombs affecting the temporary vitrex window coverings, or in the structure of the cathedral. Because the cathedral was sealed with temporary window coverings, the air pressure and vacuum force resulting from bomb explosions were a concern. Mastorakis and Linzeler may again have considered prophylactically removing some of the window coverings to permit free passage of shock waves to avoid damage to preserve the remaining temporary coverings and the supporting armatures.

  Soon it was noon, and Mastorakis called for a break for the teams of porters. Jean Moulin, his staff, and the curate worked with Roger Grand’s volunteers and with nuns and priests from the seminary to arrange for townsfolk to supply food and drink and servers to distribute to the workers. Wash buckets filled with water provided cooling wet relief, cotton rags providing a sense of order. Double French doorways of the bishop’s palace across the courtyard were flung open to reveal long tables staffed by smiling matrons and daughters, perhaps even a few girls flirting with the workers. Water and wine poured from jugs into cups, soup filled bowls, and stacks of baguettes and cheese and sandwiches of coarse bread and sausage and mustard quickly dwindled and were replaced with new stacks. Reused cans as serving vessels were heaped with pickles and slaw, celery and carrots, the cans rattling as they emptied into cups carried away by the hungry workers. Bowls of red and yellow fruit, sweet green peppers and peas in pods, resembled dessert. Simmering coffee, with its mist rising, was poured into cups, its aroma spreading across the workers, who were eating, drinking, and probably resting on chairs in the shade of the courtyard between shifts, some perhaps lying in the shade along the walls of the courtyard to catch a quick nap before resuming work.

  The men deserved this break. This great effort of men working as a team in unison—like the rituals that had been repeated for centuries at the cathedral, through wars and disputes and campaigns of terror and fires and storms—was what it took to watch over the great cathedral and its art. The dedication and sweat of men—generations of men—through the centuries. And these men were doing their part. Some had grown up in Chartres, attending the cathedral’s weekly events for years. Some were occasional visitors. Some were simply accidental visitors, looking for a few francs to feed their families while
looking for other work, having left their homes in the east as the German invaders moved in, thankful to have their wives and children alive and nearby, at least safe for the day, with the prospect of a roof over their heads and something to eat until tomorrow’s search for more.

  By early afternoon, the time was approaching for the first convoy of trucks to be heading down the hill and out of the city, south to Berchères-les-Pierres. That tiny village wasn’t much more than an intersection of two dirt roads a few hundred yards off a paved one. A few dozen scattered buildings surrounded the intersection, including barns for storage of wheat, a gateless-train crossing, and a small pale-brown-stuccoed train station of two stories plus attic, with a three-door waiting room on the first floor facing the track, with several brick-lined windows on the second floor, each framed by a pair of green wooden shutters. The station’s attic could quarter a seasonal extra stationmaster. A single rail track ran past the station, toward Chartres on the north and Courville-Sur-Eure on the west. Twenty yards south of the station, the dirt road, without crossing gate, passed over the track next to a one-room railroad switch hut. Nearby, along the track, a spur a few hundred yards long joined the track where boxcars could be parked to be filled with seasonal wheat to be hauled to markets. A sea of fields of freshly planted green wheat stalks surrounded the village on all sides. Distant explosions could be heard to the east.

  By midafternoon, a small black steam-switching locomotive came to a halt at Berchères-les-Pierres, pulling two boxcars with wood siding painted a fading brown. The switchman jumped off and stood next to the SNCF letters painted in red on the side panel of locomotive’s tank. The engineer looked out from under the visor of his flat-topped engineer’s uniform cap, as the engine’s steam slowly hissed, a dog barking nearby. He called out to the switchman, asking whether there was anyone in the station. The switchman shrugged and walked over to the station, knocked on the locked doors, and called for anyone inside. There was no answer—no one inside the station or anywhere nearby.

  The waiting engineer looked through the window of his locomotive cab behind its black steam-simmering engine and saw thin streaks of smoke rising in the sky far to the north and east. Deep-toned, faint thumps of artillery and muted bomb explosions recoiled far off in the distance. The switchman, finding no one, looked around, puzzled.

  The engineer asked where everybody was and whether this was the right place. He’d been told to drop the boxcars and return the engine right away to the yards where it was needed for repair work and repositioning cars and other equipment.

  He called out to the returning switchman, “15:00 latest, they said. If no one comes in twenty minutes, we’ll spur the cars and leave them unlocked.”

  The switchman shrugged in agreement.

  Within minutes, the sound of an approaching car caught their attention. A black Renault sedan pulled off the main road in the distance and headed toward them, trailed by its approaching dust cloud along the dirt road. A young man jumped out, introducing himself as an assistant to Jean Chadel, confirming that, yes, this was the right place and that the first trucks would be arriving within the hour and that preparations for their arrival would be needed. The engineer answered that the switchman could stay for a short while if someone could drive him back to the marshaling yard at Chartres before the afternoon was out, but the engineer had to get the locomotive back right away; the engine was needed there. He or another engineer would return to Berchères-les-Pierres later with two more empty freight cars.

  Jean Chadel’s assistant directed him first to position the cars as close to the road as possible, to minimize the distance crates would have to be hauled, but the engineer said he couldn’t do that. He couldn’t leave them on the through-track. He’d have to park them on the spur. A rough dirt road came close to the spur. They’d have to haul the crates by hand from there to the boxcars. So the assistant jumped back into the sedan to return to the cathedral for additional men.

  The engineer and switchman moved the boxcars onto the spur, disconnected and unlocked them, and then left. Good luck, they said. They’d be back. The switch engine chugged off to head back to Chartres.

  Back at the cathedral, the assistant told Jean Moulin that the boxcars had arrived but more men would be needed to carry the crates from the dirt road to the railcars on the spur. Vehicles would be needed to shuttle at least two dozen, and maybe three dozen, workmen to the train siding.

  A half dozen of the trucks had been loaded with crates. As the loading of the others continued, Michael Mastorakis directed two supervisors to round up a dozen men each and to locate vehicles right away to shuttle those men to Berchères-les-Pierres. Only one van could be located initially; Mastorakis directed its driver to take him with a dozen men while two of Moulin’s assistants left with the other dozen to gather up any cars they could find to transport them. Meanwhile, one of Lucien Prieur’s team sent men back to the Rupp District to commandeer an additional military vehicle or two. The first six trucks, loaded with crates, pulled out from the cathedral as a convoy, accompanied by two military personnel carriers (one in front, one in back), journeying down the hill and south to Berchères-les-Pierres. Several porters hopped into each truck with handcarts and dozens of ropes for hauling crates.

  When the trucks arrived, the supervisor directed the first to back onto the road next to the spur as close as possible to the boxcars. The first team of five moved in with its ropes. Two helped on the truck, the others lowering the first crate to the ground, and two hopping down to help haul the crate to the rail car, the fifth in reserve in case of a trip or fall. The five-man team carried off the crate, and a team approached the truck to repeat the process for another crate; then others continued until each truck was empty. By the time the first group of trucks had been emptied and was ready to depart to return to the cathedral for more crates, another half dozen full trucks had arrived. The first trucks returned as a group, leaving the men and military vehicles at the rail-head to unload the next.

  Teams of three climbed into the boxcars such that when others arrived with each crate, two climbed up into the boxcar to help haul and stack the crate on its edge in a riding position inside, the third man to tie ropes to secure the loaded crates while more were loaded. The crew returned to the truck for another crate and repeated the process. Each of the two railcars would have to carry almost 270 crates, plus two armed guards and at least one agent of the Historic Monuments Service to oversee arrangement of the crates and watch over them and to be available at the destination to ensure that the crates were properly handled and stored. Prieur’s men also loaded fire extinguishers, along with a handful of days’ provisions to sustain the guards and crew.

  The second group of trucks arrived at Berchères-les-Pierres from the cathedral, and Moulin and Mastorakis arrived by car. They would have been worried that the whole project was taking longer than planned and that dangers of additional German attacks in the area were growing. By dusk, an engineer with his brakeman returned from the marshaling yards in a larger locomotive pulling a tender loaded with coal and two more empty boxcars, which it backed onto the spur and dropped off. The larger steam locomotive—an SNCF 141 R class 2-8-2, painted dark grey with red trim—could travel long distances better than the small switch engine.

  The engineer told Moulin and Mastorakis that reports were coming into the rail marshaling yards: air strikes were hitting rail lines in the east and at some surrounding Paris. Moulin gave the order that the first two rail cars should be fully loaded with as many crates as possible, no matter how the crates had to be stacked, and the locomotive should depart without delay for Courville-sur-Eure, the first leg of its journey to La Tour-Blanche. Perhaps he thought it could wait at Courville-sur-Eure, or at some location farther west, for the second pair of rail cars to be brought from Berchères-les-Pierres to meet it. From there, the route would take the train to Le Mans and points south. At dusk, the locomotive pulled out from the spur and headed south, hauling the first two boxcars
loaded with 539 of the crates, leaving the remaining two railcars to be loaded. Aboard were the engineer, a brakeman, two military guards, and the representative of the Fine Arts Department.

  On Moulin’s order, the local stationmaster called the Chartres marshaling yard from the tiny station at Berchères-les-Pierres requesting that a second locomotive be dispatched to pick up the two remaining boxcars when loaded and haul them to La Tour-Blanche, hoping that the second train could meet up with the first train somewhere along the route to Courville-sur-Eure or a point west or south. The second convoy of trucks with the remaining 395 crates arrived at Berchères-les-Pierres. The crews worked into the evening hours, continuing to pull down the crates and haul them to the railcars to be stacked, finally finishing when the fifteenth truck of crates had been unloaded. The second train, when fully loaded, departed, but very close to the railhead it slowed to a halt. By then, continuing German disruption of the rail system by damaging tracks and equipment had blocked the routes west and south. Late in the evening, Moulin was forced to conclude that there would be no way for a locomotive to get through to Berchères-les-Pierres, pick up the remaining boxcars, and proceed to meet the other train.

  But he was determined to press for a solution. He ordered the train to pull back to the railhead and the men to remove the crates from the boxcars and transfer them all back onto the trucks, which were to make the run directly all the way to La Tour-Blanche rather than back to the cathedral. But the truckers whose trucks had been hauling the crates that day were unable, for various reasons, to make such a long-distance run. So Moulin’s staff made calls for trucks to other firms in Chartres and surrounding towns as far as forty miles away—including Dreux, Nogentle-Rotrou, Charray, and Gallardon—without success. But Moulin kept calling. As the hours passed and the men loaded the trucks with the crates, the roads became increasingly unsafe for convoys. As the German invasion pressed westward, the roads became more clogged with refugees fleeing Paris and points east.