Saving the Light at Chartres

by Victor A. Pollak

  Now she’d have to get used to the idea that he’d be gone for a long time and that he’d be exposed to a lot of danger.

  During another pause in the conversation in his mind, he caught a quick vision of her coming home from her office job to her parents’ house in Brooklyn, eager to sift through the mail for a new letter from him. She’d be hoping to learn that he’d been stationed far back from the fighting—doing something important and satisfying, yes, but not something that would get him injured or killed.

  So he gave a little thought to what he could say to her that would give her a little assurance, a little something good to be hoping for. But his mind went blank.

  And Nell, too, was trying to think of something to say that would keep him from worrying about her—especially since he had so much important work to do, and so many men (and their families) depending on him. But she, too, had trouble thinking of anything else to say, except that she realized that for the first time in his life, he would now be getting the chance to use all that he’d learned and been training for, and training others for. And she realized that this was an important war and that each of them had to do everything they could to support the war effort and to support our men fighting in it, especially her Griff. And she really, really didn’t want him to have to worry about her. She’d be fine, really. After all, they were two ordinary people: two of the many, many people who’d been going through the same thing and would have to keep going through it until this big awful mess of a war got won and over with.

  “After all,” she finally said, “I guess all of my thinking and hoping was based on the premise that our lives are somehow special and more important than anyone else’s. But we’re not. We found each other a little later than others, and we’re just who we are.”

  “You’re right,” Griff told her. “We just have to do our part. Hopefully, it’ll all work out and we’ll be together, soon as I get back.”

  He paused and she paused.

  “You do understand why I can’t tell you more now, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said, “I’m grateful that we had our night on the town, with Alice, and we’ll just have to leave it at that, won’t we?”

  And with that, he felt that he’d said about enough and had nothing more to say. And neither did she. And they said goodbye. And that was it.

  Two days later, Thursday, February 10, 1944, all troops at Fort Slocum were assembled and given orders to pack up immediately, to ship out at 20:00 hours.

  That night, Griff and all the other officers and enlisted men of the corps climbed aboard a convoy of launches that shuttled them down the Long Island Sound, into the East River and past the Brooklyn Navy Yard. They were off to war.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  War Hits Again: The Dordogne and Chartres, June 1940–May 1944

  TO MANAGE THE OPERATION AT CHTEAU DE FONGRENON, THE FINE Arts Administration assigned Jules Pillot to be supervisor. He had been chief keeper of Château de Pierrefonds, a castle in the northern French department of Oise. The Fine Arts Administration also rented a house in La Tour-Blanche in which Pillot would live. The state arranged for the house to be officially rented in the name of Mrs. Eva Faure, in an apparent attempt to maintain secrecy. In confidence with Alexis Moreau, manager of the Fongrenon quarry, Pillot recruited people to serve as the guards at Fongrenon between June 1940 and July 1941. The quarry at Fongrenon would continue to operate for extraction of stone, but operations only continued in an entrance area of the quarry, which apparently eliminated the need for additional watchmen during the day, so long as the men who quarried the stone inside could be trusted, which itself presented a persistent risk. Pillot arranged for a succession of night watchmen to arrive at the end of each workday to watch over the crates during the workweek and on weekends. The seven watchmen consisted of Pillot, Moreau, and five others. To provide shelter for the guards, the workmen constructed a small shed in a recess in the quarry, equipped with a woodstove for heat and, likely, cooking.

  After a year, Pillot asked to be reinstated back to Pierrefonds, apparently to be with his family, and the Fine Arts Administration appointed a Mr. Eschlinger, followed by a Mr. Vonau. Before those assignments, both Eschlinger and Vonau—from Alsace and Lorraine, respectively—had been posted at the Hautefort depot, in Château de Hautefort, a castle forty-five miles east of Fongrenon, near which members of the Alsace and Lorraine fine arts administrations had taken refuge at the beginning of this latest war.

  In 1943, the guards in the quarry observed that some of the crates had deteriorated from moisture seeping into the quarry. The cliff into which the quarry had been dug overlooked a reservoir that collected water from an underground river passing under the surrounding valley. On request of the administration, architect Foidevaux came to inspect the quarry and determined that seventy of the crates needed repair, so he arranged for a local carpenter to mend them with poplar planks. He also recommended that the quarry be ventilated, and so the men dug a ventilation chimney, which extended from the last of the watched rooms upward to the top surface of the cliff.

  Throughout the occupation, the Germans compelled French authorities to hand over to the German ministry in charge of collections of museums and monuments detailed inventories of the French collections that had been placed in the numerous depots. Thierry Baritaud, whose scholarship in 2007 had rediscovered the use of the Fongrenon quarry as a depot, argues that the Germans knew of the existence of all the deposits of works of art, including Fongrenon. Yet he has concluded that the Germans never came to Fongrenon to inspect the crates. Although the turnover of information had been required by the Germans ostensibly for safekeeping and security, certain elements of the German regime went on to use the information to organize thefts of art during the war. It may have been only a matter of time before word of the Chartres treasures at Fongrenon would have worked its way through the German hierarchy within the occupation zone and into the Vichy government.

  It was likely fortunate that Fongrenon was ten miles inside the Vichy zone. However, as noted by historian Elizabeth Karlsgodt, although most Vichy members believed the state should protect the nation’s cultural heritage, historians and other analysts since the war have classified certain Vichy figures as collaborators and others as resisters, but there were gray areas of activity between the two categories in the context of occupation, even without German pressure. The Vichy players who were more likely to have been engaged in assisting German confiscation of artworks would have been those who were anti-Semitic, and confiscations applied mostly to Jewish-owned art, not state property or cathedrals.

  One night, probably after 1942, Alexis Moreau, manager at the Fongrenon quarry, slipped away from his security-guard post when his grandson, Jacques Moreau, came to relieve him. Alexis was on his way to join the Maquis, the guerilla band of French Resistance fighters, a group to which Alexis’s son also belonged. The young Jacques, armed with a shotgun, stayed awake all night inside the little shed, but it seems that for the remainder of the occupation no one denounced Alexis Moreau or his son for their participation in the Resistance. Had the Germans inspected the quarry, trouble could have arisen, because by September 1944 one or more workers or guards had drawn several satirical drawings on the walls of the quarry that denounced the Nazi regime. The drawings were discovered by Baritaud in 2001. One consisted of a cartoon image representing Hitler, with an adjacent inscription that read, “By his fault, here 130 cases.”

  The crates would rest in the quarry without further incident as the war dragged on, but the other half of the windows back at Chartres faced peril. On May 26, 1944, during the aerial combat that preceded the Normandy landings, the American Ninth Air Force attacked the airfield at Chartres. The bombs hit Place des Halles and Rue au Lin, not half a mile from the cathedral, causing enormous damage, including forty-nine deaths, and a fire that destroyed most of the library of Chartres and the library annex in Chartres’ city hall. Other planes also dropped their bombs too early and hit
Porte Guillaume (in the lower town) and the rue du Bourgneuf.

  The fire consumed the library collection, including half of the two thousand medieval books and parchments that had been relocated in 1939 to the Château de Villebon but had been returned to the library in 1940 on orders of the occupation authorities; ironically, as recently as February and March 1942, the library had celebrated this return with an exhibition of the books and manuscripts, proceeds of which had benefited prisoners of war. By the time the fire was under control, nearly half the manuscripts had been destroyed. The rest were left in varying states of distress—some barely singed, others charred into agglutinated blocks and badly damaged by the water civilians had used to fight the fire. Volunteers moved in to save what they could from the smoldering ruins. Although thousands of texts were recovered, the inferno carbonized most and rendered them unreadable.

  Initially the library fire was thought to have been caused by either a British plane that had dropped its bombs after being hit by German fire or a German plane that had released its bombs accidentally, but it appears to have been the work of the American planes. Photographs of the city hall reveal that only the library’s front and back facades remained standing, with supports for the burned-away roof pointing to the sky like the rib cage of a dead whale on the sea floor.

  Later Allied bombing of Chartres and its airfield in the lead-up to D-Day would blow out the cathedral’s west-window coverings and damage the iron armatures of the window jambs, but the stained-glass windows that were concealed in the crypt of Saint Lubin had escaped damage—for now.

  Within two weeks following the fire at the library, the remains of the damaged books and manuscripts were sent for restoration to the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. Technicians separated leaves of parchment fused together by the heat, but hundreds of fragments had suffered successively from heat and water and been converted into a glasslike substance—translucent and no longer naturally elastic—so that the fragments crumbled on impact.

  The citizens of Chartres were left in fear over how much worse it could get.

  Despite their great concern, many French were stepping into the fight to resist. But that resistance was dangerously fragmented. Since 1943, Charles de Gaulle had referred to the four hundred thousand French Resistance fighters opposing German occupation as les Forces françaises de l’intérieur—the French Forces of the Interior, or FFI. But Jean Moulin would be the man credited with uniting all French partisan activities under de Gaulle. Prior to 1943, Moulin had played the leading role in trying to coordinate all the scattered Resistance forces in France under the Mouvements unis de la Résistance—or the MUR.

  A period of days after Moulin’s June 1940 arrest and torture in Chartres by the Germans and his subsequent attempted suicide, Moulin had resumed his prefect’s work, only to be removed from his post in mid-November of that year for refusing to carry out the Vichy order to dismiss all left-wing elected mayors of the towns and villages within his prefecture. He followed by joining the Resistance. By September 1941—operating under the name Joseph Jean Mercier —Moulin had been smuggled into England to meet General de Gaulle. The general, impressed with Moulin, assigned to him the responsibility of unifying the various Resistance groups. Moulin received from de Gaulle a simple order that he would carry back to France on microfilm in the false bottom of a box of matches: “Mr. Moulin’s task is to bring about, within the zone of metropolitan France not directly occupied, unity of action by all elements resisting the enemy and his collaborators.”

  In January 1943, the British Special Operations Executive had parachuted Moulin back into France, where by May 27—working under the code names Rex and Max —Moulin had persuaded the eight major Resistance groups to unite and form the Conseil national de la Résistance (the National Resistance Council), which first convened in a historic clandestine meeting, at a Paris apartment, among sixteen representatives of more than a dozen Resistance groups—large and small—from both the south and the north of France, including communists, socialists, radicals, trade-union confederations, and three parties of the political right. In days, Moulin sent a detailed report on the meeting to de Gaulle. Six months after his return to France, while Moulin had been in another meeting with Resistance leaders in the home of a doctor near Lyon, the Gestapo arrested him, along with the others in attendance, and imprisoned him in Lyon, where Klaus Barbie, the head of the Gestapo there, interrogated and tortured him. But Moulin revealed nothing of value. On July 8, on a train transporting him to Germany, Moulin died, either from injuries sustained during the torture or by suicide.

  Moulin achieved legendary status as the leader of Resistance, its most famous fighter, and its symbol, revered as a patriot with great courage and fortitude. Schools, colleges, streets, and squares in France are named after Moulin, and he is considered one of the foremost citizens of Chartres. In a speech delivered in Paris in 1964, on the occasion of transfer of Moulin’s ashes to the Panthéon, André Malraux spoke of the final day of Moulin’s torture by the Germans, when Moulin’s lips “never let fall a word of betrayal: on that day, his was the face of France.”

  Moulin is known in France as a model of moral rectitude, civic virtue, and patriotism. Even at the beginning of the war, in his role as the youngest prefect, he demonstrated the skills of organization and leadership that would prove so effective later in the struggle: he could convince others of the vital need to have an overall plan and to execute it as a united group in a common struggle.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Collared at HQ: Marlborough, UK, and Normandy, Spring 1944–July 1944

  BEFORE MIDNIGHT ON FEBRUARY 10, 1944, FROM THEIR LAUNCHES IN the Long Island Sound, Griff and his men crowded onto a Navy ferry that steamed down the East River for four hours into the night, past the tip of Manhattan at Battery Park, and into the Hudson to Pier 88 at Forty-Ninth Street. The men could make out the ship on which they would find passage to England, the 80,800-ton luxury liner the RMS Queen Mary, in gray paint, converted into a troop ship, stripped of deluxe furnishings, with each stateroom fitted on three walls with floor-to-ceiling hammocks, five-high, to accommodate its share of the sixteen thousand men coming aboard. During the night, a blizzard moved in and caused a twenty-four-hour delay, but eventually the ship got under way down the Hudson, passing Governor’s Island where little Alice lived with her mother and grandparents. She did not know her father was on the ship sailing past the island and past the Statue of Liberty and Ambrose Light on the way to the war.

  For a full week, the ship sailed in a zigzag course at more than thirty knots, with its sixteen thousand passengers receiving two meals per day, wearing life jackets at all times, carrying their own mess kits to and from meals, and conducting daily drills.

  On February 18, the ship reached Gourock, Scotland, in the River Clyde, where Royal Air Force aircraft met the ship to escort it. Colonel William A. Collier—the corps’ chief of staff, Griff’s immediate boss—came aboard to greet the men, who were then cheered by large groups of British civilians lining the streets. Women with the Red Cross handed out coffee and doughnuts and led the way to a line of trucks, accompanied by the wail of bagpipes. The men climbed twelve at a time into the trucks that took them to troop trains for an overnight trip to the new Twentieth Corps headquarters at Marlborough Downs, on the north edge of the Salisbury Plain, twenty miles north of Stonehenge and fifty miles west of London.

  At Marlborough, Walker continued to demand soldiers and staff carry on with hard, physical training. Without notice, he ordered the corps headquarters to leave its garrison at least once a week and establish a command post in the field, under battle conditions, under camouflage, and practicing dispersion. These maneuvers included simulated infantry and tank attacks against concrete and other dug-in machine-gun pillboxes, along with artillery fusillades. Top brass, including General Patton, observed the exercises. He had arrived in England following his African and Sicilian campaigns. The corps’ Fourth Armored Division set up
firing ranges along the coast and shot at targets floating in the water while the corps fine-tuned for its mission for battle in cramped English countryside settings.

  Coming to and from HQ, Griff would have seen in Savernake Forest, three miles from Marlborough, hidden under the crown of the wood’s one-hundred-year-old oaks and beeches, the second largest ammunition dump in the United Kingdom. Enormous stacks of shells and bombs arranged by dimension grew in scope almost daily to be ready to supply the invasion force.

  On April 8, Griff composed by hand, in neat block letters, a V-mail note to Nell:

  Sweetheart:

  Big business—four letters and the shirt package came today. Now I’m all set. Thanks.

  Now I’m O.K. but sucrets should be a good guarantee for the future. Also the vitamines [sic] sound interesting. Please send some of both.

  I’ve seen several other interesting places in England. Guess all discussion of them is banned. When events pass a historical place I try to see it. In fact carry a guidebook given me by an elderly Englishman.

  Love you, Pinka, Grif

  Early on a spring afternoon at Marlborough, Griffith walked up to the green Nissen hut that served as HQ, stretching before him like a long tubular car wash. He gave a nod to the sentry at the brick center entry portal. A sign over the door read, “XX CORPS HQ—G-2 & G-3, Authorized Personnel Only.”

  Griffith heard a truck horn sound and looked over his shoulder. Army trucks and jeeps approached from left and right, converging at the intersection of dirt driveways. Behind him, beyond the intersection in the camp, dozens of Nissen huts descended toward rows of tents and parked trucks. Soldiers scurried across muddy gravel driveways with boxes and gear. Three low-flying C-47 cargo planes growled overhead, circling to head north the fifteen miles to Swindon airfield and drowning out sounds of passing vehicles. Each plane towed its own cargo-loaded glider to prepare for release and practice landing.