CHAPTER 25
Coming Through the Battle
La Gleize, Belgium
February 1, 1945
Walker Hancock arrived in La Gleize, Belgium, on a deadly cold February afternoon. Before the Bulge, he had spent a delightful afternoon here in the company of a kindly hostess and a lovely, unknown sculpture of the Virgin Mary. During the Bulge, he had watched with dismay as the enemy lines advanced west across the map, engulfing Aachen, crossing the Siegfried Line, and finally bulging into Belgium, where they began to slow, then creep, and then finally grind to a halt in the Amblève Valley. Right at the point of stalemate, underneath the pin on the map, was the town of La Gleize. Every time he looked at that pin, he thought of the young woman and the extraordinary Madonna, only weeks earlier so far removed from the war. Nothing is beyond this war, he kept thinking, wondering if they had survived. Nothing is immune.
Now that the Bulge was over, and the Allies had pushed back the German advance, Walker Hancock was anxious to see what had become of the peaceful little village. Bill Lesley, the first Monuments Man to tour the valley after the Battle of the Bulge, had reported La Gleize virtually destroyed, but nonetheless Hancock was surprised by the horrid conditions. The houses were all ruined, the stores burned out and abandoned, shattered equipment and spent bullet cartridges lined the streets. The cathedral, battered by heavy artillery, was little more than a shell. It appeared to teeter on the hillside, ready to fall and wipe out the last remnants of the town. Strangely, the door was locked; Hancock entered through a gaping hole in the wall. The roof had been blown apart, and the broken beams swayed in the vicious wind heavy with snow and ice. The pews had been turned over and piled up to form barricades, the chairs tossed. In the wreckage, he saw ammunition, bandages, ration cans, and shreds of uniforms. The Germans had used the cathedral as a fortress, then as a field hospital, and Hancock suspected bodies, perhaps both German and American, were frozen under the snow. Nothing is beyond this war, he thought again.
But one thing was: the Madonna. She stood just as he had seen her two months ago, in the middle of the nave, one hand on her heart, the other raised in benediction. She seemed hardly to notice her surroundings, focused as she was on the distant divine. But against that backdrop, she looked more miraculous and hopeful than ever, her beauty triumphant even in the midst of devastation and despair.
The town wasn’t abandoned, at least not entirely. As Hancock walked down the icy main road, he noticed a few stragglers, shell-shocked and worn, peeking out from the ruins of their homes. The curé of the cathedral was again missing, but a man named Monsieur George, the perfect picture of a war survivor right down to the bloody bandage around his head, offered his assistance.
“I’ve come for the Madonna,” Hancock said, sitting across the table from Monsieur George and his wife in their sparse kitchen. He produced a letter signed by the bishop of Liège, who held authority over this parish. “The bishop has offered the crypt in the seminary at Liège until the end of the war. The weather is bad, I know, but there’s no time to lose. I have a truck and a good driver. We can take her today.”
Monsieur George frowned. So did his wife. “The Madonna isn’t leaving La Gleize. Not today, not ever.” In fact, Monsieur George had no desire to even see her moved from the cathedral.
What about the snow, the cold, the wind, the unstable roof? Hancock argued as best he could, but the man would not be moved.
“I’ll call a meeting,” Monsieur George said eventually, ending the conversation. An hour later, a dozen frowning people—Hancock wondered if this was every living person in town—were crowded into Monsieur George’s house, listening to Hancock hopelessly argue his case.
“This house has a good cellar,” Monsieur George said finally. “The curé stayed with us here during the battle. Though some of us were wounded by bullets that came through the little window, that danger is now past. I propose we bring the Virgin to the cellar.” 1
Hancock wasn’t happy, but it seemed the best possible compromise. At least the house wasn’t in imminent danger of collapse. “She can’t be moved,” someone said. “The attachments between her irons and the stone pedestal are unbreakable. I should know. I cemented them together myself.”
“Then surely,” Hancock replied, “if you did such clever work to bond them, your cleverness can part them, too.”
The mason shook his head. “No power under heaven can break that bond. Not even me.”
“What about removing the pedestal from the floor?”
The mason thought for a moment. “It might be done.”
“She will not be moved,” another voice cried out. Hancock turned to see a short, square-jawed man rising from his seat.
“Be reasonable now… ” Monsieur George protested, but the man refused to back down. She had survived the battle, he said. She was all that remained of their old lives. She was the community now. She was God’s grace; their salvation. Who was this outsider, this… American, to tell them what to do? She should stand as she always had, in the cathedral. Even if most of the cathedral was gone.
“I agree with the notaire,” the mason said.
A few others squirmed. Hancock looked around the room at their gaunt faces and visible bandages. The Madonna wasn’t art to them, he realized; it represented their lives, their community, their collective soul. Why hide her in a cellar, they were thinking, when we need her now more than ever? She had triumphed. They couldn’t acknowledge, after all they had been through, that the danger could return.
But Hancock knew the danger was already there, at least for the sculpture, in the form of a splintered roof and badly damaged walls. “Let’s go to the cathedral,” he suggested. “Perhaps we can find a solution.”
The small procession trudged across the empty town, picking its way around snowdrifts, ice clumps, shattered artillery, and debris. Someone had the key so they entered the cathedral through the door, despite the fact that only a few feet away there was no wall. Snow was falling in large flakes and settling on the Madonna. The little party crowded around her, as if warmed by her glow. Hancock looked into her face. Sadness, peace, and maybe surprise.
He started to speak on her behalf, and that’s when the roof gave way. With a sudden sawing, a huge piece of wood came crashing to the floor, shattering the stillness. Snow and dust exploded upward in a cloud, and great chunks of ice rained down. As the air cleared and the debris settled, the notaire slowly came back into focus, his face as white as the snow. He was standing almost directly under the collapsed beam. It had been a very near miss.
“Well… ” Hancock started, as another chunk of ice slid from the roof and hit a few inches from the notaire’s foot.
“I propose that the statue be moved to the cellar of the house of Monsieur George,” the notaire said. 2
The mason was right, it was impossible to separate the statue from its base. So two broken roof beams were lashed to the stone pedestal, and a few of the men began to rock the statue back and forth to loosen it from the floor. Even though the base of the Madonna was only about four feet tall, it took eight of them to carry her out of the cathedral and down the slippery slope through the center of town. All were stooped by the weight, watching their feet and picking their way carefully through the ice. Hancock wore his combat uniform and helmet; the townspeople wore fedoras and berets, a few of the older men in suits and long coats. A young woman led the procession in a cape and hood. The Madonna rose a full head above them all, solemn and peaceful. It was the strangest parade La Gleize had ever seen.
After the Madonna was safe in the cellar, a young man invited Hancock and his driver to dinner. Accepting gratefully, Hancock was surprised to find himself once again sharing the hospitality of Monsieur Geneen, the farmer-innkeeper whose daughter had entertained and fed him on his first visit to town. Hancock wanted only his Krations and some hot water to dissolve his coffee powder, but again the family insisted on a full meal. This despite the fact that the rear half of the ho
use was gone, leaving the living area open to the cold. Through one gap, he could see a large pile of grenades, Panzerfauste (handheld antitank rockets), and other live ammunition the family had cleared from the grounds; through the other, nothing but darkness. Everything seemed wrong, unreal. And yet here were the same people, looking older and more tired, but alive and well and spreading before him nothing less than a feast. In all that destruction, freshly cooked meat and vegetables were the most wondrous and unexpected sights of all.
They talked about the failure of the German advance; the ingenuity of the American soldiers; their possible futures. Hancock ate heartily. He looked from face to face, from the gaps in the wall to the pile of explosives to the two small rooms, and finally to the wonderful plate of food before him. A realization hit him.
“This isn’t the house I visited before,” he said. 3
Monsieur Geneen put down his fork and folded his hands. “In the middle of the night,” he said, “I awoke and from my bed I saw the sky through a shell hole in the wall. And when I began to realize where I was and why I was there I thought to myself, ‘Isn’t this a hard thing to come to me at my age after a life of unbroken labor! Not even to have four solid walls around me and my family!’ Then I remembered that this was not even my house; that my friend who had owned it was dead; that of the house that I myself had built not a wall remained. And I was very sad. And then suddenly the truth came to me. We had come through the battle. During all that time we had enough to eat. We were all well and we could work.” He nodded toward his family, then at the two American soldiers seated across the table. “We,” he said, “were the lucky ones!” 4
The battle had passed. Hancock was certain now the fighting would not come back to La Gleize. But out to the east, in Germany, the war was grinding on.
CHAPTER 26
The New Monuments Man
Luxembourg and Western Germany
December 5, 1944–February 24, 1945
In early December 1944, George Stout received word that several new men would be assigned to the MFAA for U.S. Twelfth Army Group. They were all enlisted men intended as assistants to the Monuments officers in the field, but they were all accomplished cultural professionals. As usual, it would take weeks to get official assignments for them, but at least he knew more help was on the way.
Sheldon Keck, assigned by Stout to assist the newest U.S. Ninth Army Monuments officer, Walter “Hutch” Huchthausen, was an esteemed art conservator. He had served as a soldier in the army since 1943, but had only recently been assigned for monuments duty. Married with a young son—“Keckie” was only three weeks old when his father reported for duty—Keck was exactly the kind of professional man Stout had envisioned for the conservation effort.
Lamont Moore, a curator at the National Gallery who had helped evacuate its prized works to the Biltmore Estate in 1941, remained to help George Stout run the Twelfth Army Group MFAA office, an essential responsibility since he was so often away on trips to the front.
Walker Hancock was supposed to receive a ranked assistant, Corporal Lehman, but his transfer was tied up in army bureaucracy. For now, Hancock was going it alone—but with the frequent advice and assistance of George Stout.
The last new man was, without a doubt, the most impressive. Private First Class Lincoln Kirstein, thirty-seven years old, was a well-known and well-connected intellectual gadfly and cultural impresario. The son of a self-made businessman who had risen from obscurity to become an associate of President Roosevelt, Kirstein had shown extraordinary promise from a young age. As a Harvard undergraduate in the 1920s, he had started the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, a direct predecessor of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He also cofounded a literary review, Hound and Horn, which was so well respected that it published original pieces by world-renowned writers like the novelist Alan Tate and the poet e.e. cummings. Hound and Horn also published America’s first warning (written under an assumed name by Alfred Barr, the first director of the new Museum of Modern Art) about Hitler’s attitude toward art.
After graduation, Kirstein became a novelist and artist. But it was as a patron of the arts, not a creator of them, that he was to make his name. A highly respected critic, by his early thirties he was a leading figure in the New York City cultural scene, counting among his close friends the poet laureate of the United States Archibald MacLeish and the writer Christopher Isherwood, whose chronicle of Nazi Berlin, I Am a Camera, would catapult him to international fame (and eventually become the basis for the musical and movie Cabaret).
Kirstein’s major contribution to the art world, however, had occurred quietly and had, as of the outbreak of war, proved only moderately successful. In 1934, he had convinced the great Russian ballet choreographer George Balanchine to emigrate to the United States. The two men had founded the School of American Ballet, as well as several traveling ballet “caravans” and the American Ballet Company in New York City.
But like everyone else, Kirstein put his plans on hold in 1942. Chronically short of money to support his various projects, unsure of his future, and determined not to become a simple enlisted soldier, he had applied for the Naval Reserves. He was turned down because, like most Jews—as well as blacks, Asians, and southern Europeans—he didn’t meet the racially suspect requirement of being at least a third-generation American citizen. 1 He was rejected by the Coast Guard for faulty vision. So he joined the army as a private in February 1943. “At 36 I did with difficulty what wouldn’t have been so tough at 26, and fun at 16,” he wrote his good friend Archibald MacLeish, then Librarian of Congress, about his experiences in boot camp. 2 To another friend he confessed, “I am an old man and find the going very hard…. I am so tired I can’t sleep, but I believe they only care if you get 4½ hours…. I learned (almost) to shoot and disassemble a rifle, roll away from a not very big tank, do very slow an awful obstacle course and fall into assorted water hazards. I don’t think it’s fun—although most do.” 3 At least, he joked, he managed to lose forty-five pounds.
After completing basic training, Kirstein was rejected for the third, fourth, and fifth time: by the War Department division of counterespionage, Army Intelligence, and finally the Signal Corps. He ended up training to be a combat engineer at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where he wrote instruction manuals. Bored by the slow pace of the army, Kirstein began documenting artwork created by soldiers, first his fellow combat engineers at Fort Belvoir, then in all branches of the service. With the aid of his many friends and correspondents, the tireless Kirstein built the War Art Project into a full-fledged, army-supported operation. In the fall of 1943, nine paintings and sculptures by soldiers, selected by Lincoln Kirstein, were featured in Life magazine. He then organized those works and others into American Battle Art exhibitions to be held at the National Gallery of Art and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.
By then, the Roberts Commission had offered Kirstein a position in the MFAA. He wasn’t an officer, but the commission had pressed his case because of his outstanding qualifications. Kirstein was torn by his love of the War Art Project and his respect for the importance of the MFAA mission, but in the end he chose conservation and preservation. He arrived in England in June 1944, along with the three other noncommissioned Monuments Men, eager to join an efficient, well-defined military operation.
He found nothing of the sort. The original fifteen Monuments Men were all either in Normandy or awaiting passage across the channel. The base at Shrivenham was filled with civilian experts and Civil Affairs officers, but there was no military structure in place for the MFAA. In fact, with the trained officers on active duty, there was no real MFAA organization at all. Arriving in London, Kirstein and his companions discovered no one had been informed they were coming, and no one they spoke to had ever heard of Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives. They were told to wait while their paperwork was straightened out. Preoccupied with the battle for Normandy, the army promptly forgot about them.
Kirstein manage
d to contact Monuments Man James Rorimer, who as a Metropolitan Museum curator mingled in the same New York social arena as Kirstein. Rorimer wrote his wife: 4
It’s strange to think of men like Lincoln, an author of 6 books and numerous articles, 6 years at Harvard, responsible for the original “Hound and Horn,” director of the Amer. Ballet School, etc. still doing fatigue as a private. “Screwy”—we calls it. But then Saroyan is a private. He will make war plays, though. One can hardly expect 10,000,000 or more men to be properly used to the last man. I hardly know what matters most—luck, direction, friends, pull, etc. Certainly ability isn’t apt to have a high premium placed on it per se.
Unfortunately for Kirstein, Rorimer was just reaching the end of his own months-long battle for an assignment with the MFAA, and he could do nothing for the brilliant but ignored private. The tireless, well-connected Kirstein managed to get himself transferred to France, and eventually on to Paris, but even there he had no assignment. With nothing else to do, he set up an office on packing crates and woke up early every morning to write letters, poetry, and magazine articles.
He was restless and increasingly depressed by the uselessness of his tasks. This was a common recurrence in his life: manic activity followed by a grinding sense of despair. His manic periods had resulted in astonishing cultural successes, but they usually ended in a gathering gloom and sense of wasted opportunity. These depressive states resulted in a persistent wandering of attention, a seeming inability to stick to things. He was a large, hulking man with deep, penetrating eyes and a hawk nose, the kind who could intimidate paint off a wall with his stare but who could also be a matchlessly charming dinner guest or friend. Beneath his intimidating exterior, Lincoln Kirstein was an insecure, sometimes bullying genius, constantly on the hunt for a creative outlet.
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