Saving the Light at Chartres

by Victor A. Pollak

  In Chartres, with its right-wing mayor, Raymond Gilbert—and its largely agricultural economy—the mood was likely no less polarized than in Paris and the other metropolitan areas of France. In reality, conservatives were likely no more eager for war than their liberal counterparts; yet they undoubtedly felt they had no alternative but to support the League of Nations and the agreements of the Locarno Treaties, since the only way France itself could again demilitarize the Rhineland would be to mobilize, which would be politically unpopular and cost far more than France could spend. The left, however, was on the ascendency—as the 1936 elections would show. The citizens of Chartres, however, were of one mind: townspeople of all political persuasions felt the need to act to protect the cathedral windows.

  On March 9, Carlier arrived at the cathedral by truck with the two experimental scaffolds. At Carlier’s request, Jean Maunoury, architect of historic monuments in Chartres, had arranged for all the metal scaffolding to be set up in the attic above several windows that were to be removed as a test of Carlier’s procedures. Further, a pulley was to be installed in the attic ceiling to permit a rope to be used to lower equipment through the keystone opening in the vaulted ceiling 120 feet above the base of the lower windows. Maunoury also arranged for Yves Mellot, a Chartres fabricator, to install a metal sheet in the keystone opening to protect the surrounding stone from rope damage. To test the scaffolding’s functioning for the removal of a pair of high windows, they would install another pulley from the edge of the roof for a rope to reach along the outside wall through a small trapdoor eighty feet below that had been cut in the ambulatory roof near the base of the windows. They would hoist scaffolding up from below and would lower any removed windows in their cases down through the trapdoor.

  Days later, Carlier put out the word for helpers to assist in the tests. He visited Mellot and asked for a team. Within two weeks local leaders created a special committee whose lone purpose was to rescue Chartres’ stained glass, which brought together nine volunteers and sent Carlier a written commitment of further support.

  By March 28, Carlier had everything in place for the test removals. At the cathedral, he met the volunteers and two employees sent over from Charles and François Lorin’s master glass workshop, along with the inspector of the Fine Arts Administration and a photographer. An observer timed and documented every step of the test removals. The volunteers lowered all scaffolding parts from the attic to assemble them at the two test windows. They assembled one on the floor of the nave at the base of one of the six-by-twenty-foot lower windows to give the workers access to the entire window. They positioned the other parts beneath the trap-door for hoisting to a sill at the base of a pair of seven-by-twenty-seven-foot upper windows, where they assembled it to face the windows, resting on the five-foot-deep stone sill along the bottom edge of the windows.

  One photograph taken that day shows three of the volunteers standing on their newly assembled six-layer scaffolding, perched high on the cathedral wall. They looked out like Lilliputians, dwarfed by the windows between two of the cathedral’s flying buttresses. One of the men standing on the top level grasps one of the scaffold’s vertical struts with both hands and, gazing down, looks like a reluctant high-diver questioning his resolve before his first plunge. The Lorin employees, wearing their white smocks, climbed up, chipped away the cement that secured the glass panels, removed them, and placed them in metal cases that Carlier had produced for the tests, which were then lowered through the trapdoor and shuttled to the crypt.

  That same day, the team ran a separate test, employing in place of the scaffolding a two-man enclosed platform atop a mobile hand-cranked telescoping crane on wheels. They invited the Lorin employees to climb inside to be hoisted up so they could remove a lower window and then repeating the process on a higher window. For each test, the workers removed the windows and packed them in the cases that were then lowered to the floor and subsequently moved to the crypt. After the tests, all of the windows were reinstalled.

  The tests having been completed, Yves Mellot assured the Fine Arts Administration that the people of Chartres would provide any support necessary to save the cathedral. Carlier and Chartres’ stained-glass-rescue committee deferred to the administration for evaluation of the test results. Carlier followed with a letter to the administration director, relinquishing all rights he might have to the scaffold design.

  But there was tension. The tests had revealed new risks and showed that the time required to remove the windows was four times that estimated by Carlier.

  Within a week, the Historic Monuments Commission decided—based on recommendations in a report by Eugéne Rattier, chief architect and inspector general for France’s Fine Arts Administration—that the administration would employ Carlier’s scaffolding for the upper windows and the telescoping platform for the lower windows. It would order twenty such scaffolds for the upper windows and four telescoping platforms for the lower windows. The Historic Monuments Commission appointed Rattier and Émile Brunet to study arrangements for the cases to hold the windows.

  The next week, in mid-April, the committee concerning itself with Chartres’ stained glass sent the director general of the Fine Arts Administration a set of resolutions the committee had passed, endorsing Carlier’s resolve to ensure that the stained glass would be removed within the two hours of word of any attack and imploring the director general to plan for “the rapid and simultaneous removal of all windows” because that “enormous task . . . far surpasses the capabilities offered by existing professional businesses” and that without volunteer assistance and advance preparation by the local population, the administration would be “caught completely off guard.” The Chartres committee promised also to install a set of stained-glass windows at a separate designated location on which to promptly train teams of volunteers—who were not (within the initial hours of the war) subject to being mobilized—to pass a test of skill to be judged by the Fine Arts Administration.

  Two weeks later, Carlier fretted that he’d not heard any decision from the Fine Arts Administration’s director general, so he published in a second supplement to his Chartres study in Les pierres de France: “Supplement No. 2” ran some thirty-four pages and also included a full-page aerial photo showing Chartres Cathedral’s proximity to the military air base. He included a copy of his letter to the director general of January 24, 1936, and another letter sent to the director general on April 17 from the Chartres’ stained-glass-rescue committee, asserting that “any stained-glass still in place two hours after the opening of hostilities will inevitably and irretrievably be destroyed by the explosions produced on the nearby airfield.” That letter continued,

  It would be criminal to resign oneself to the loss of such an inestimable and irreplaceable treasure, the unique testimony of an incomparable spiritual exhalation, bequeathed from the past to the future and to which our age has the even-more sacred and formidable duty of conservation. . . .

  In the certainty that you will appreciate and make full use of all the possibilities of collaboration that are being spontaneously and voluntarily offered, we assure you, Mr. Director General, of our very strong attachment to the Cathedral of Chartres.

  Carlier also reported that forty-two newspapers had participated in his publicity campaign in France and abroad. He wrote that with this publication he hoped to inform anyone interested in Chartres Cathedral’s preservation of his progress. But his ardent and sustained efforts to raise public awareness to garner support and funds for the project may have gotten under the skin of the Fine Arts Administration’s staff, concluding the piece as follows:

  IX. WHAT WILL BE THE SIGNAL FOR THE REMOVAL?

  The administration could do nothing, we said, to save the windows of Chartres in less than two hours without the immediate assistance of the population. Therefore, we address . . . a question . . . to the administration: TO WHAT SIGNAL, FROM WHAT EVENT, WILL WE HAVE THE RIGHT TO PROCEED WITH THE EFFECTIVE REMOVAL OF THE STAINED GLASS? Will
it only be the alert, that is, the entry into the war? Could it not be an earlier stage, the decree of mobilization, for example, supposing that it precedes heavy attack?

  For it is quite evident that, from the decree of mobilization, for example, telephone and telegraph lines will be exclusively given over to the service of the military authority and that OUR UNHAPPY OFFICE OF FINE ARTS, so often considered secondary in our era among the State machine, WILL THEN BE MATERIALLY UNABLE TO MAKE KNOWN ANY ORDERS. It must therefore be established in advance that this or that next step of tension automatically leads to the implementation of a particular safeguard measure. . . .

  It is now well known that on 28 March, during the tests, one of the most directly responsible officials, questioned in this vein, replied: “The question is solely a matter for the Fine Arts Administration, and the city does not need to worry about it; the Fine Arts Administration will send specialists from Paris.” To do what? To make an inventory? To discover that there will no longer be any stained glass in the windows and that everything will have shattered?

  So to those who think that they have to wait for orders, one can only respond by admonishing them to wait for nothing and no one before gathering, readying, and preparing themselves.

  It would not be surprising if the administrators and staff had taken umbrage at his tone.

  The men and women of the Fine Arts Administration may not have communicated their decisions and actions to Carlier or to the committee dedicated to saving Chartres’ stained glass, but, as we’ll see, they had already been moving forward with the project—even if many of their decisions conflicted with Carlier’s notions of how to proceed. But would their planning move quickly enough to save the windows before war struck?

  PART II

  THE INTERWAR YEARS

  CHAPTER SIX

  Spy Hap: Shiojiri, Japan, 1935

  IN JUNE 1935, ARMY LIEUTENANT WELBORN B. GRIFFITH JR. ARRIVED in Osaka on a ferry from Shanghai, spent a night in a hotel, and walked to the train station through neighborhoods pervaded with the smells of incense, steaming rice, and fermented soybeans. He found the platform for the morning train to Shiojiri, a city in Japan’s interior highlands, and boarded the first coach, which jerked with a burst of steam and heaved from the station. Griff arched over the aisle and looked for a spot in the overhead rack for his backpack, to keep an eye on it. A man in a blue suit, white shirt, and tie boarded behind him at the end of the coach and walked past. This man placed a leather satchel in the rack and took a seat ahead, looking over his shoulder, peering at Griff as if probing for something to report. Something about the man’s eyes, the way he kept looking over his shoulder, puzzled Griff. The man looked down, yet peeked up again, furtively, as though he didn’t want to be caught staring.

  Griff was perhaps not overly surprised to be an object of curiosity in Japan. Now six feet, three inches tall, he’d likely already attracted his share of stares on this trip and was headed to see parts of real, non-Westernized Japan; in the Philippines bush he had been intrigued by its indigenous people—the first he had seen since Comanches in Texas—but in Manila and China he had been confined to areas whose cultures had been attenuated by English, Spanish, and Americans. Now he was determined to encounter people and cultures untransformed by the West. He gazed at passing country through a portside rail yard and industrial and residential zones and rundown neighborhoods—no surprise, given Japan’s depressed economy.

  A pall permeated the coach. A man in threadbare clothes in a seat across from Griff would look up from his newspaper with haggard eyes, glance at Griff, avoiding eye contact, and a woman glimpsed at Griff watching him and then looked away.

  Soldiers sat at the rear. Passengers avoided eye contact with them, too. Nationalist groups were infiltrating the Japanese military, rejecting party politics, pressing to unite Japan under the emperor, and staging coups and assassinations, transforming the country to a police state.

  The train headed northeast. After a stop in Kyoto, it headed east, out of the dense urban region and past open lots, a lake, and another city (Nagoya) and then continued northeast, past factories flanked by queues of military trucks and planes with red zeros. After several stops, the train climbed a winding valley through hills into a narrowing, steep notch. Finally, a high village emerged among slopes of matsu, persimmon, and cherry trees. The sign read Shiojiri.

  Griff meandered through town, snapping pictures of forested slopes, homes, and locals. He glanced toward a man skulking a block behind who wore a gray robe, but Griff didn’t give him much thought. The quiet, wagon-wide street passed between weathered clapboard sheds and narrowed to a paved lane rising along a creek bed on the facing hillside into forests that surrounded the town.

  Griff was drawn by sounds of metal clanging from a small building tucked between houses and peered inside. It was a ceramics works. In a large room, several men in shirtsleeves supervised a dozen or two shop-apron-clad workers carrying trays of parts. Other laborers fastened, stacked, and inspected amid the clanking and whooshing of a furnace that piqued Griff’s curiosity. He put down his backpack to snap a picture inside.

  A man yelled something Griff didn’t understand, something sounding like “Same nasahl!” The man—in a robe—came running, shouting, waving his arms. He drew his revolver, pointed to Griff’s camera, and snarled a few orders Griff couldn’t understand. Griff guessed the man was telling him to cease taking pictures, so he set the camera down.

  He reached for his own service forty-five, only to remember he’d left it in his trunk at the Shanghai barracks across the East China Sea. Now, from inside the doorway, Griff faced the gunman and shrugged to show he had no clue what the gunman was ordering.

  The workers fixed their eyes on the robed gunman, who edged toward Griff.

  “Does anyone here speak English?” Griff called out.

  An elderly man in the back raised his arm over his paper-strewn desk. “Yes, a little bit,” he said. The glare of the old man’s desk lamp reflected off his metal-rimmed spectacles, obscuring Griff’s view of his eyes. Griff summoned him, and the old man shambled forward. “Can I help?” the old man asked. “I am Jiro Katsu.”

  “Thank you. Can you tell me in English what he’s ordering?”

  “He says you must tell him why you’re looking inside our establishment. He says pictures are forbidden. All works are secret.”

  “Well . . . please tell him I’m just visiting. I’ve never seen a furnace like that. I’d like to know what you’re making, how the furnace works—that’s all.”

  The gunman yelled again.

  “He says you must not ask questions,” Katsu translated. “You must tell him what you are doing here. He says he is Agent Yoshida, special police. You must go out through the same door and leave.”

  Griff recognized Yoshida. He’d been on the train: that same man who’d boarded in Osaka, wearing a blue suit and tie and carrying a leather satchel. Yoshida again tilted his head down, yet peered up, but this time staring at Griff. Now Yoshida was wearing that robe over his suit and tie. Griff could see them beneath his robe.

  “Please tell him I’ll stop,” Griff said to Katsu. “And ask him to put down his weapon. I’m just a vacationer.”

  Katsu, in Japanese, relayed Griff’s consent to Yoshida, who barked further instructions.

  “He says you must put your camera away. This factory is secret. You must go.”

  “Thank you. I’ll go. I’ll just pick up my backpack and leave slowly. See?” he said, reaching for his backpack. “Please tell him.”

  Yoshida spoke again to Katsu, signaling for Katsu to come to the door. Yoshida inserted his gun beneath his robe as he conferred with Katsu.

  Katsu turned toward Griff. “He says you need to tell him where you are going now.”

  Griff said he would retire to his hotel, which he assumed was back in town near the train station. He had the name and address on a letter in his backpack and offered to pull it out to show the policeman.
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br />   Katsu spoke further with Yoshida and finally said, “He will go with you to your hotel. Show him the letter, and he will know where to go.”

  Griff pulled the letter out and introduced himself. Katsu bowed, smiling in relief. He showed conspicuous deference, even obeisance, toward Yoshida. Katsu then spoke some words of reassurance to the employees, and most shuffled back to work.

  Yoshida scanned Griff’s letter for an address, nodded, and returned it to Griff. He then glanced back toward town and set out in the lead, waving for Griff to follow. As Griff fell in behind him, he noticed another of Yoshida’s surreptitious nonlooks, with head pointed down and eyes peering up whenever looking Griff’s way. Griff hesitated, not quite sure what Yoshida was up to. Was Griff free or not?

  The two walked back toward the center of town, Yoshida walking several steps ahead of Griff. The mountains loomed above the village, with ridges that faced each other and joined like the tip of a giant wishbone. After a time, Griff lost track of where he was. Things were closing in around him. This wasn’t his boyhood big-sky Texas, but as he passed between buildings he could see the forested slopes of the hills surrounding the town, reminding him that he was heading back toward the train depot.