The next afternoon, French military moved a dozen wounded Germans from the hospital into the cathedral on stretchers and open carriages, followed by more of the same the next day. The military carried out those transfers very conspicuously, in Landrieux’s view, to be sure the Germans’ spies—who lurked in Reims—would see the movements, in the hope that they would report to German command and deter any plans to create a “disaster.”
There were no doctors available in the cathedral for patients—only a chaplain, a deaconess, and a couple of nuns. More than a hundred wounded men lay on the floor of the nave with only blankets, accompanied by a German major, himself bandaged, wounded in the head. French soldiers guarded the doors.
On the eighteenth, with Mass under way, a shell crashed through a window of the archbishop’s palace adjoining the cathedral, penetrating interior stone, killing three men, and wounding fifteen. Repeated explosions hit the roofs and buttresses. Landrieux saw the wounded men lying in the cathedral panicking, believing themselves lost, mad with fright, not knowing where to find cover. Those who could not move groaned, begged, and cried.
Landrieux arranged for the wounded to be bundled into the clock tower staircase, which seemed to him safest in view of the direction of the firing. Those who could move, moved together. The others drew themselves to the staircase, bucking and jerking, hauling on all fours, wound coverings as their boots. Those whose legs had been amputated, shifted ahead with their stumps. The priests helped the disabled, dragging those unable to move by themselves, and though the wounded were barely clothed, the priests sat them down on the naked stone stairs. Five German officers among the wounded called out that they were under no illusion: they were convinced that fellow German units were aiming at the cathedral. Landrieux and his helpers had to repeat the process of moving the wounded a second time that evening and again the next morning.
Most shells fell in the neighborhood of city hall and the military barracks. Others fell throughout the town. Three struck the cathedral.
Landrieux had just left the cathedral by foot to visit the stricken hospital when a shell fell behind him. He retraced his steps in the smoke and found a man bleeding, stretched out on the steps, gashed in the stomach. Soldiers carried the man into the church, where the wounded German major could assess his injuries. By evening, the wounded man was taken to the hospital, nearly dead. Some wounded had been reinjured by falling stones or by pieces of lead severed from windows. Their heads bled. Landrieux and Abbé Schemberg gave last rights to those who were Catholic. A wave of sunshine through the windows lit the carnage and suffering. The wounded lay on piles of straw, in all stages of suffering. Their bluish-gray uniforms contrasted with the black of the attending priests’ robes. In the background on the steps outside, French soldiers in their red uniform trousers stood by.
The wounded German major begged Landrieux to send an emissary to the German front to tell them they were shooting at their own soldiers. But the major acknowledged that they probably already knew it and that it was the cathedral they were trying to hit, even at the cost of killing their own soldiers. How could this be a strategy? Wasn’t it unthinkable for civilized commanders to order such a thing?
When explosions hit, the cathedral’s pillars quavered. Landrieux and his colleagues heard the thunderbolt and thud of jolts pummeling the naves, the blows absorbed by the resilience of the arches’ vaults. At one point, the noise of falling stones thundered so loudly that Landrieux and his companions thought the apse was collapsing. He ran outside to see. A flying buttress of the first retaining wall had broken and fallen through the roof of the lady chapel, its remaining lower section pointing toward the sky. Stone chunks littered next to a crack in the roof, exposing timbers, broken masonry still moving through. The remaining rubble perched nearby, threatening further collapse.
During Mass on the next morning, the nineteenth, the bombardment began again. Landrieux told the altar boy assisting him, “Leave me. Go. Get into shelter.” But the boy said, “I would rather remain,” and stayed until the conclusion. The bombardment lasted throughout the day. During a lull, some of the staff ran across the plaza to the archbishop’s palace to get bread for the wounded, who were moved again to the tower. At two o’clock, Landrieux and the other priests entered the chapel to pray. The a cappella lament of their chants conjured withdrawal, sadness, and serenity as backdrop to the brutal clash and concussions of the attack’s striking shells.
That’s when the fire started. At about three o’clock word spread that smoke was coming from the scaffolding of the north tower. They rushed outside to see. Landrieux and Abbé Thinot huddled outside the west portal, searching to spot whether an incendiary shell had hit. To Landrieux, there was no doubt: Massive scaffolding of heavy lumber—which had been in place for a year of repairs, covering the north half of the west facade—had now been hit. The shell had lashed through the wooden scaffolding half way up the north tower, erupting in a flash fire. The two men ran down the steps, flinching, and were cowering away from the portal when the cathedral’s forty-foot round stained-glass rose window burst from the fire’s heat, showering sparks into the cathedral’s interior.
With that, the straw beds ignited. Fires flared in the wooden roof. Lead sheets that covered the roof’s oak frame boiled, scattering a fine rain of molten lead inside the cathedral. On the exterior, streams of the molten lead ran under vaults and out the mouths of stone gargoyles that had overseen the church for centuries. Firefighters struggled in vain to contain the fires. The nearest fire station—now empty—had been destroyed by bombing, its firemen struggling to deal with other fires in the Wool Quarter of town. Overwhelmed rescue services anguished over their incapacity to help.
Water pipes burst. Winds drove the flames up the staircase of the north tower, whose draft fanned the inferno surrounding the scaffolding as the fire consumed the carpentry of the cathedral’s superstructure and destroyed the archbishop’s palace. The combustibles that had been left throughout the cathedral, including the straw in the nave and chairs in the choir, fueled the flames. All ignited, including the wood columns that framed the main door.
Landrieux and Thinot, hoping they could help, tried to climb the scaffold. Above them, four cylindrical fires swirled, blazing one above another in stages. The two abbés tried with their arms to dismember the dense girders but could not, their calls for help drowned out by the roar of shell explosions convulsing the town.
The two men retreated, in the hope that the wooden scaffolding not supporting the building would burn, fall away, and leave the building standing. They tried, with the help of prisoners, to gather and cast the straw out clear of the building into the terrace. But outside, the fire was intensifying and eventually reached the facade. As they felt the fire approach, red tints appeared in the light, as if permeated with blood, which flushed the windows at the entrance. And with a loud cracking report, the scaffolding broke and crashed to the surface of the Place du Parvis plaza in front of the west facade.
Landrieux and the other priests collected the wounded beneath the organ and also in the apse. Those who could, dragged themselves. Others, who were ill or missing limbs, were hauled on stretchers.
The flames devoured the apse, scaled up the steeple, and spread over the roofs. The flames’ tentacles stroked the lead plates of the roof as if with hot tongues, melting the scales away, little by little, and revealed the raw enormous cluster of woodwork whose frame stood out, across the entwined arcades above the vaults, like a colossal bony structure of fire. Streamlets of lead ran in the grooves as through conduits and discharged through the gargoyles, dribbling down as if tears and then spreading on the floors and flying back in granular fragments as dust, with fiery particles passing through the air encircling in the airborne soot.
When the priests realized that the woodwork of the roof was aflame and would be lost, they turned to save the pieces of the Sacrament at the altar and then the gold and silver altarpieces, and other medieval relics stored in the s
acristy as the cathedral’s treasure. Landrieux and Thinot, joined by Abbé Andrieux and one Mr. Divoir, forced open the doors of the cupboards and ran outside to find hands to help. Several workmen responded, helping to move the treasure. The molten lead splashed and mixed with sparks flying all around, in the smoke, lit by the flames. The sparks pricked on their faces and hands as the priests and helpers traversed the courtyard carrying their pieces of treasure.
All told, the time that passed between the priests’ ascent into the scaffolding and the moment when the fire died out was about an hour. The cathedral burned at both ends, though the middle was still intact. Landrieux eventually concluded that it wasn’t the scaffolding that had set fire to the roofs: it was a shell falling on the apse and then two other shells hitting the roof of the central nave. Four distinct fires had consumed the cathedral.
And if the fire had not been catastrophe enough, after carrying the treasures, Abbé Landrieux saw a small group of French soldiers in their red uniform trousers lined up, kneeling, their rifles raised, facing the cathedral entrance. At first, he didn’t realize what was happening. But when the door opened, he saw the wounded assembled in the lobby, not being allowed to come out, as the fire roared behind them. They stood frozen, staring into the rifles.
Landrieux confronted the sergeant, yelling, “Wretched man, what are you going to do?”
“We have our orders.”
“It is impossible,” Landrieux said. “There is a mistake. What has now occurred was not foreseen. They must come out. You will not fire upon unarmed wounded men, even if they are Germans! On the battlefield it is war, but here it would be a crime.”
“We are obliged to do it. Those are our orders.”
So Landrieux placed himself in front of the door and yelled, “Very well; you will commence with me!”
After a pause—as an opening—Landrieux assured the French soldiers that none of the German prisoners would try to escape; he and the other priests would escort the wounded to city hall and hand them over to the military. The prisoners, through an interpreter, agreed and followed in a procession, those who needed supports using brooms, sticks, and boards as crutches, others being carried on stretchers.
The wounded prisoners and priests confronted a hostile crowd of townspeople, who surged forward, bringing the procession to a standstill. Fearing the crowd and seeing a French military captain with a squad riding by, Landrieux called to the captain to intervene. The captain warned Landrieux that the crowd, growing in anger, would never let the wounded prisoners and priests reach city hall and that the abbé, therefore, should give up his futile quest. Landrieux and his flock pressed forward, hesitated, resumed, and then halted. Crucial minutes passed, the two groups at an impasse.
The captain spotted a nearby factory. He ordered his squad to use their mounts to separate the crowd and Landrieux’s column, forcing all parties to freeze in place. The captain ran to the factory, appealed to its proprietor to open his manufactory doors, and, having been satisfactorily persuasive, before his horsemen had to resort to force, shuffled the German prisoners to safety. On the night of the nineteenth and twentieth, stretcher-bearers and soldiers transferred the 124 wounded to ambulances for evacuation by rail to a safe zone.
Despite the menace of that mob, most of the townspeople of Reims had made no trouble: they either had run to escape the German approach on the city or had been hiding in their homes.
That evening a French pilot, a Commandant Capitrel, flew over Reims while returning to his base and reported seeing the burning glow of the cathedral: It was a silent, glowing furnace, without flames or smoke. Its contours, outlined by the cathedral’s nave and the transept, stretched over the city as though a giant blazing cross—the Cross of the Redemption. It was as if disaster had stretched out beneath the heavens and forged itself into a symbol of hope.
The giant cross formed by the cathedral fire had awakened the world to the new dangers posed by modern warfare and eventually—but only after subsequent disasters—played a part in stirring to action the government powers charged with protecting historic monuments in France.
Cathedrals are, in Malcolm Miller’s words, “embassies,” noting that in medieval times bishops were thought of as “celestial ambassadors.” Churches are vehicles of culture and evangelization. Each such building, for its congregants, is the locus of intimate remembrances. France’s great cathedrals have served as venues, pantheons for national solemnities, for coronations and royal marriages and burials, and many cathedrals—such as Notre-Dame de Reims, the Basilica of Saint-Denis, Notre-Dame de Paris, and Notre-Dame de Chartres—have been assets of economic necessity, in need of civil defense.
Before 1914, it had been unthinkable that any army would intentionally target a cathedral, let alone one of France’s great cathedrals like Reims. And yet Reims Cathedral was hit by seventeen shells in the weeks following that first bombardment. For four years, with only brief respites, Reims was besieged by German guns, which sometimes fired for a few hours, sometimes all day long, at the rate of one shell every three minutes, and again at night.
After that initial week of attacks, Abbés Landrieux and Thinot carried on ministering to the faithful of Reims. In this “total war” that the French were suddenly facing, the German shelling of Reims Cathedral would, in the end, account for some of the greatest damage the war would inflict. The Germans did not loosen their grip on Reims until October 1918, after 857 days of bombardment. During that time, life around the city was a terrifying disaster: Over three hundred people were hit directly by shells, and portions of the city were largely abandoned. But a remarkable number of townspeople remained, in hiding. More than five thousand people were killed in the bombardments and resulting fires. The German justification for shelling the cathedral was that the French were somehow using it for military purposes—as an observation tower to aim French artillery. The French denied it. There was no evidence to support the German allegation.
The day before the first shells would be fired on Reims, on September 3, 1914, the French government had evacuated tapestries and artworks from the town and other locations as part of a southward convoy. But the stained-glass windows had not been removed. The Historic Monuments Department began taking defensive measures (beyond evacuation of nonfixture artworks) at the cathedral only in 1915—many months after the outbreak of war—even as the bombardment continued. The measures included removal of statues and installation of sandbags and supports. Most stained-glass windows had by then been destroyed, but some had survived. But the authorities feared that construction of scaffolding in the cathedral might give the Germans the false impression that the cathedral was being used for military observation, furnishing the Germans with an excuse for further bombardment, and so remedial work on the windows was postponed.
At that point in the war, much of the population of Reims had remained in the city, and they stayed on for another year still, continuing their lives and work, adapting themselves courageously to the trying and dangerous circumstances. But in April 1917, the shelling resumed, eventually rising to a level previously unimagined, which included a stretch of four days punctuated with seven-hour periods in which German barrages struck at five-minute intervals. For quite some time after this, any further work on proactive preservation of historic monuments and stained glass was subordinated to more pressing matters.
What else would it take for the authorities to protect the French cathedrals and their stained-glass windows from war damage?
PART I
WORLD WAR I
CHAPTER ONE
Chartres Cathedral and Its Windows
IN EARLY 2015, I VISITED CHARTRES CATHEDRAL ON BACK-TO-BACK days with my wife. We walked up the hill from the train station toward the sanctuary in the center of the old city. The curved cobblestone streets leading to the cathedral were lined with two- and three-story stucco buildings, and near the top, an ancient wall enclosed the church and its school, seminary, and archbishop’s palace. The twin spir
es stood watch.
Construction had begun in the early twelfth century to build a cathedral over the Romanesque church on the site that dated to the fourth century. For those who built it, the work was in effect an act of penitence, for them to feel assured of the forgiveness of their sins. The privilege to participate was granted only to those who were willing to forgive enemies. Any man who carried bitterness in his heart was deprived of the right.
At the west entrance, we entered through the lower-right quadrant of an aged wooden door, as tall as a giraffe. A frieze above displayed weathered stone sculptures that recalled the death and resurrection of Jesus, and over our door a carved image of infant Jesus on Mary’s lap professed the cathedral’s dedication to her, like the more than 180 other images of her that dress the building inside and out.
The dim light surprised us. Scaffolding draped with curtains extended along the sides of the nave and transept and reached up high from the floor to cover most of the windows. We could hear chiseling and scraping coming from behind the curtains. A sign announced that the stained glass was being restored as part of an EU–funded project. We could see only the low windows on the sides of the ambulatory and those forming a crown high above the altar at the far east end of the building.
My disappointment that so many windows were covered soon faded as an insight came to me: the sounds of the workmen and the covered scaffolding reminded me of how the windows had been removed in both world wars. I wondered what it must have been like for teams of workmen to be dismantling the windows and packing and hauling them in wartime inside the expanse of the cathedral. Now I could hear, in the clanking of tools and the voices of workmen hidden from sight, how it might have been done.
Saving the Light at Chartres Page 3