Saving the Light at Chartres

by Victor A. Pollak

  NOTES TO CHAPTER 10

  “War production into high gear”: Nicole D. Risser, France Under Fire: German Invasion, Civilian Flight, and Family Survival during World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 31.

  “Peace dissolved into war”: Czechoslovakia split into two parts when its German-leaning Slovak portion left behind its remaining Czech portion, which the Germans occupied in violation of the Munich Agreement. Hitler soon demanded the return of Poland’s Danzig, and the French and British stepped in to guarantee Polish independence.

  “Four hundred thousand exiles”: Risser, France Under Fire, 30.

  “He had taken charge”: He rejoined the military in September 1939 as chief of the military’s Monuments Service to the GQG. S.v. “Grand Quartier Général (1939–1940),” Wikipedia, last edited January 5, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Quartier_Général_(1939–1940).

  “Train almost a quarter of the workers on-site”: Karlsgodt, Defending National Treasures, 105.

  “Zay launched both evacuations”: It is not clear what event, precisely, triggered his action. It was likely the rapidly escalating tension between Germany and Poland during the second and third weeks of August 1938. The French and British had been trying to convince the Polish to permit the Soviets to enter Poland in the event of a German invasion, but as late as August 20, the Poles continued to refuse, and the French and British negotiations for a military treaty with the Soviets turned sour on the twenty-first.

  “Windows . . . with rigid flashings”: Removal of windows sealed with hard cement took six times longer to remove than windows sealed with soft putty. Their old, hard cement made it difficult to remove their glass panels from the masonry without breaking many of them. Most of such remaining windows likely consisted of windows that, while of stained glass or in some cases of clear glass, were of relatively recent vintage, installed in modern times, most likely the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  In the 1938 work, priority would have been given to the majority of the windows that dated back to the Middle Ages—those most worthy of saving in case of an early attack. To extend such work now to the newer windows, some of the artisans began training workers to remove hard cement and to loosen them from the jambs.

  “Positioning the scaffolding”: Stained-glass windows consist of an arrangement of individual panels, each depicting a scene, such as a biblical or allegorical or historical scene, all grouped into a geometric design. Between the panels within the window is a heavier geometric iron framework that holds the panels together, each in a unique shape, with all pieces joined together to form a graphic image. The individual pieces of glass had been pieced together by inserting their edges into flexible lead “cames” consisting of back-to-back grooves, and held in place by soft putty pushed into the cames to hold the panel together. The putty was made from a mixture of powdered chalk, linseed oil, and clear spirits, to accelerate the drying process. The putty had a firm viscous consistency and set slowly.

  The many panels of a window are held together by a framework or armature, constructed of iron, fashioned into a pattern of circles or quatrefoils and other shapes with room in between them for a series of background panels. As the windows were removed, the heavy iron framework that held the panels was left in place, and substituted coverings were inserted into the framework to provide a substitute temporary seal of the building from the elements. Two materials were used: One was a particleboard known as vitrex. The other was the earliest form of clear Plexiglas, intended to permit light to enter the building. On the lowest levels of such substitute windows, scenes were painted, to be viewed by parishioners and visitors, in a crude effort to at least remind them of the withdrawn stained-glass windows.

  The larger stained-glass windows of the cathedral contained as many as thirty or forty panels. On the outer edges of the windows—such as the tall, narrow, arched shape of a lancet window—there often appears a narrow band of edging up to several inches wide, sometimes shaped in a scalloped pattern. In the cathedral, most edging like this consisted of stained glass, but quite a few consisted of clear glass; this edging tended to be fashioned of thin, brittle glass that was susceptible to breaking. During the 1918 removal of the stained-glass windows, many such edging pieces had been broken, and so the teams were determined to use extra caution to minimize damage during the 1939 removal.

  Each stained-glass window also contained two additional types of supports, called saddle bars. Those were horizontal metal bars whose ends were inserted into the masonry on either side of the window to give it structural support. The saddle bars are of two types. One type is used in pairs and is positioned within horizontal slots formed by the upper edge of one panel and the horizontal lower edge of the panel above it, with one horizontal bar placed on the outside of the window and the other on the inside. The outer bar had welded onto it small cleats that formed keyholes; the inner bar contained slots that fit over such cleats and are attached by means of keys or clavettes. The cleats fit between the lower and upper panel of glass and the saddle bars are wide enough to hold the lower and upper panels in place and are secured in place by means of the keys inserted into the cleats.

  A second type of saddle bar is used on one side of the window only. It has metal ties called vergettes that are welded onto it, soldered directly to only the cames of the window wherever they intersect with the saddle bar.

  In addition to the cement holding each piece of glass into the cames of its panel, a window carries cement, which serves as “flashing” around its outer edges to seal the window into the window jamb.

  “Assumption Window”: A lancet-shaped window thirty-two feet tall and more than six feet wide, with a pair of two-foot curved-glass border panels whose continuations surround the edge of the window, forming a border about four inches wide. Its border panels join at the top to form the apex of the window’s pointed arch. The background appearing in those panels is an intricate pattern of small, multicolored glass pieces depicting flowers symmetrically intertwined around green and yellow vines. The scenes it depicts include shoemakers—who donated the window—shown using various tools, as well as scenes from the life of Mary, including her death, funeral, Assumption, and Coronation.

  “Removal of a stained-glass window”: It is essentially a six-step process: First, the scaffold is moved into position, and the designated storage crate (or predetermined size and shape) to contain the window is hoisted up to the work platform to be available to hold the pieces of the window as soon as they are removed.

  Second, in the case of ancient windows, as a precaution, a drawing or cartoon is made, in duplicate, of the complete window and of each of its panels, usually by means of a rubbing (such drawings numbered according to a master plan and then one copy of such drawing to be kept in a file and the other to be inserted into the crate in which the window is to be transported and stored).

  Third, to remove the panels, each key is removed to release the saddle bars between panels, and for those saddle bars attached with vergettes, each vergette is unsoldered and detached.

  Fourth, the putty around the edges of the panel is removed to separate it from its cames, and in the case of panels whose edges are positioned at the outer edges of the window, the flashing that constitutes the seal between the edge of the window and the window jamb must be freed or broken.

  Fifth, each panel is disassembled into individual pieces of glass, and each such piece is individually wrapped and inserted into its own compartment inside its designated storage crate.

  Sixth, the crate is lowered down to the floor to be sealed, labeled, and transported, and the workers then move to a lower platform on the scaffold to be in position to remove the next lower level of panels.

  “Chapel of Notre-Dame-Sous-Terre”: From there, the gallery’s fifty rows of moveable wooden chairs—which had for years been arranged four-abreast along each wall, with a five-foot-wide walkway running from one end of the crypt to the other—would have been cleared a
nd moved elsewhere.

  “Life of the Virgin Mary Window”: It was also a lancet, created in the early thirteenth century, the same size at the Assumption Window. It consisted of twenty-five picture panels and almost twice that many smaller panels that depict hundreds of small arches constructed of thin, curved, red-glass strips forming larger rounded arches with a background in multiple shades of dark blue. The window narrates Mary’s life in twenty-four scenes, starting with Mary’s parents and including the Annunciation, the Nativity, the Massacre of the Innocents, the Flight into Egypt, and others.

  “Charlemagne Window”: It was one of the largest class of lancet windows, also made in the thirteenth century, and consisted of twenty-two picture-scenes—about the travels and exploits of Charlemagne, including his journey to Jerusalem—and a larger number of intricate background panels.

  “Exodus of artworks”: Starting that day and for the next eight weeks, the Fine

  Arts Administration, working with the defense ministry, dispatched trucks loaded with more than two thousand cases and fifteen hundred additional objects, making more than 230 trips from national museums, including from Paris, Versailles, Saint-Germaine, and others, to storage depots—mostly rural châteaus—a hundred sites in fifty-five French administrative departments.

  The Louvre alone evacuated a thousand cases or more of Greek, Roman, Asian, and Egyptian artifacts and antiquities and 268 cases of paintings and hundreds of drawings, engravings, sculptures, and other artworks. On each trip, at least one museum staff member and one or two guards rode along, with museum personal inventorying the items both on departure and arrival of each convoy. Museum staff outfitted the buildings with firefighting equipment and notified local firefighters of the deposits and from then on conducted periodic inspections. Karlsgodt, Defending National Treasures, 74–75.

  “Daylight in the aisles . . . washing out the colors”: “To all who come there its architecture, sculptures, and windows present an unforgettable image of light, strength, and repose, symbolic of the Faith of the Middle Ages.” Dierrick, Stained Glass at Chartres, 3.

  “Then he visited Chartres Cathedral”: The same day, the French government placed the railways under military control. The following day, Britain and France delivered their final warnings to Hitler to withdraw from Poland. And the British and French proclaimed that the Germans had mobilized toward Poland.

  “Through the wide windows, a brutal light”: Zay, Souvenirs et solitude, 307.

  “Plexiglas”: A registered trademark of Evonik Industries AG.

  “Three large protective structures”: The new structures were 6–9 feet deep at the base, 30 feet high, and 45–150 feet in length. In all, they employed, among other things, 67,000 sandbags and more than 17,000 linear feet of the tubing, 3,100 feet of cable, and 650 feet of vitrex.

  “The only mishap”: Jean Trouvelot wrote in his October 19 report to the Fine Arts Administration, “We note that the restoration of certain windows is long overdue, particularly the rose windows, and above all we are pleased to express our recognition of the contractors, glass painters, workers, and volunteers who have all worked with dedication, intelligence, and initiative that is beyond praise. The mobilized, despite their desire to see their families before setting off, worked until the last moment.” Arch. Eure-et-Loir 4 T NC86.

  “Over 193,000 square feet of stained glass”: Karlsgodt, Defending National Treasures, 105.

  “On September 13, Jean Zay resigned”: Marcel Ruby, La vie et l’œuvre de Jean Zay (Paris: Éditions Corsaire, 1994), 415. See also “Jean Zay (1904–1944),” Museé Protestant, accessed October 28, 2019, https://www.museeprotestant.org/en/notice/jean-zay-1904-1944-2/.

  “Chartres’ windows rested in the crypt”: In mid-November, Mauritius Jusselin, curator of antiquities and art objects of Eure-et-Loir, prepared a detailed list of all of the crates: from the Church of Saint-Pierre de Dreux (2 cases), Saint-Pierre Chartres (123 cases), Saint Aignan de Chartres (9 cases), and Notre-Dame de Chartres (923 cases). Thierry Baritaud, La depose des vitraux de la cathedrale de Chartres (Chartres: Centre International du Vitrail, 2015), 4.

  NOTES TO CHAPTER 11

  “Lend-Lease Act”: Selig Adler, The Isolationist Impulse: Its Twentieth Century Reaction (Santa Barbara: Greenwood/Praeger: 1957, 1974), 282.

  “The Germans took them by surprise”: Max Hastings, in an article for the Washington Post, summarized the relevant question and answered it: How was it, then, that the US Army found it enormously difficult, indeed often impossible, to defeat Germans encountered on anything like even terms?

  First, there was the extraordinary failure of the Western Allies in 1944–’45 to provide their ground forces with adequate weapons. By that phase of the war, American and British technology had created a host of miracles: superb combat aircraft, antisubmarine-warfare equipment, radar, the amphibious DUKW, the proximity fuse, and the jeep. Through Ultra, the greatest cipher-breaking operation of all time, the Allies possessed extraordinary knowledge of the German order of battle, deployments, and often—though not in the Battle of the Bulge—German intentions.

  Yet amid all this, in northwest Europe the Allied leaders invited their ground troops to fight the Wehrmacht with equipment inferior in every category save artillery and transport. German machine guns, mortars, machine pistols, antitank weapons, and armored personnel carriers were all superior to those of Britain and America. Above all, Germany possessed better tanks. The Sherman, which dominated the Allied campaign, was a superbly reliable piece of machinery. But it was fatally flawed by lack of an adequate gun to penetrate the Tiger and Panther and by poor battlefield survivability in the face of German tank guns.

  These shortcomings were well understood in Washington and London before the 1944 campaign began. But the chiefs of staff expressed their confidence that Allied numerical superiority was so great that some qualitative inferiority was acceptable. This confidence was a fatal delusion. . . .

  One of the greatest American achievements of the war was the expansion of a tiny prewar peacetime force of 190,000 into an army of more than eight million men. Yet an inevitable consequence of this transformation was a chronic shortage of high-quality, trained career leaders. In all America’s wars, her allies have agreed that the able West Pointer has no superior. The problem, in World War II, was that there were nowhere near enough of these to lead an army of eight million men.

  Max Hastings, “Their Wehrmacht Was Better than Our Army,” Washington Post, May 5, 1985, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1985/05/05/their-wehrmacht-was-better-than-our-army/0b2cfe73-68f4-4bc3-a62d-7626f6382dbd/.

  “Tank destroyers would . . . perform an important function”: “In the offensive against tanks, TDs relied on mobility and heavy firepower to offset the disadvantage of their light protective armor. They operated on the offensive in conjunction with heavy armor and were utilized to supplement the speed and firepower of the slower but more heavy armored vehicles. They were particularly adapted to this role when soggy terrain would not support the weighty tank. The TD vehicle, with less ground pressure, could maneuver through friendly units, outmaneuvering hostile armor as well, using this capability to attain an advantageous position, accomplish its fire mission, and move to the flank or rear for another strike.” John A. Nagl, “Tank Destroyers in WWII: Flawed Doctrine, Unmatched Bravery,” Armor (January–February 1991): 26–31, https://www.tankdestroyer.net/images/stories/ArticlePDFs/Armor_Mag_Article_TDs_in_WWII.pdf.

  “Salem Academy”: At Nell’s college graduation, she had been called upon to read a research paper about George Washington that she had written.

  “Americans shifted their attitude”: Nicholas John Cull, Selling War: The British Propaganda Campaign against American “Neutrality” in World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 185, 241.

  “The Army reorganized the Leavenworth school”: Tyler, History of Fort Leavenworth, 11–22.

  “Changing its basic course . . . to ten weeks”: The ten-we
ek course was for general staff officers. For reservists, it developed a separate three-month course. Tyler, History of Fort Leavenworth, 11.

  “Armored Force Subsection”: Tyler, History of Fort Leavenworth, 11–22.

  “Family life close to his work”: In what could be a reflection of that enjoyment with Nell at Leavenworth, Griff wrote a handwritten note to little Alice for her keep-sake. He told her of his Welsh origins and included a copy of the Griffith family crest and explained to her that its earliest version was Gruffyedd, a combination of the two welsh words—Griff and Flyd, meaning strong and faith—and that his earliest ancestor, named Rhys ap Tudur, a Welsh nobleman who died in 1412, was a member of the Tudor family of Penmynydd who held positions of power under Richard II of England.

  Griff may have been driven by something more: years passing by quickly in relation to the pace of his own accomplishments, taking note that the training and experience he had gathered since starting out as an infantry officer at Benning had cost him a decade. If he were to stay in the military, how much longer would he have to wait to find his way into the thick of some action?

  “Camp Young in the California desert”: The US Army had created Camp Young in the desert to prepare for the Africa campaign, and General Patton activated the camp, twenty miles east of Indio, California, in April 1942, but he left in late July to help prepare for the invasion of North Africa. Camp Young would become the Army’s largest military post, by area. It started with ten thousand square miles and would nearly triple in size by mid-1943. The size made possible combined operations using aircraft and live-fire exercises employing all types of arms and moving men away from camp conveniences into harsh environments to temper them for the discomforts and hazards of combat over extended time.