They placed supplemental materials in storage as well: ropes, hoists, buckets, dozens of exit hatches, pumps, and hundreds of fittings. And they detached the wooden confessionals from the walls of the nave and placed them on wheeled platforms to facilitate moving them to make way for scaffolding.
Trucks delivered the thousand custom-constructed wooden crates for the stained glass, containing insulating panels of Celotex insulation. Laborers brought work lights and six large tool chests for hammers, clamps, chisels, strapping machines, and steel strapping. To the cellar of Loëns they carried more than one hundred thousand sandbags, together with more than fifty thousand square feet of vitrex (particle board) for covering window jambs to close up the bays once the windows had been removed, plus nine tons of sawdust and cork fiber for use inside the crates as packing material.
The Fine Arts Administration and the architects working on the Chartres project also drew up a survey listing all bay fixtures and the more than 7,500 stained-glass and painted-glass panels to be removed from both buildings, numbering each window and its individual panels and specifying the number, size, and category of crates for use with each. And in the cathedral attic they posted a notice listing all of the stored material.
The authorities had tried to think of everything the teams would need, even while they still pondered where they would store and hide the windows.
The French National Assembly had by then passed the War Powers Act, and in July 1938 the Defense Ministry appointed a director of passive defense to coordinate the protection of civilian lives and property with the committees of passive defense that had been set up in each French administrative department.
Le Journal published another Fouqueray article, this time describing Carlier’s plan in strikingly simple terms. “With a sum of 400,000 francs and a workforce of 350 men,” Anne Fouqueray wrote, Carlier “ensured in one hour the rescue of 5,700 panels that dispense mysterious clarity to the nave of Chartres, provided that the acquisition of the equipment and training of the teams [are] carried out in time.” She claimed that the “usefulness and the possibility of the application of this project [had] been officially verified in the spring of 1936,” referring to the tests performed by Achille Carlier’s team, which had, she said, “in thirty-five minutes established the metal parts constituting the special scaffolding against one of the high windows, and in forty-five minutes on one of the low windows, and that they unsealed the stained-glass windows to arrange them in metal cases built for this purpose.”
One can only imagine how infuriated Jean Trouvelot and his Fine Arts Administration colleagues must have been when they read Fouqueray’s oversimplification of the project. And why was there apparently no concern about revealing the plan to Germans who would read the newspaper? But the fact remained that Trouvelot and the administration had yet to make the fundamental decision about how to proceed with the removal project: Which of two solutions should they adopt for removal of the windows? Should they remove the windows quickly, without first detaching from the stone window jambs the external flashings that surrounded the windows, risking breakage, or should they defer actual window removal until first removing the flashings, one by one, and securing the glass with pins to ready them for later safe removal?
Until the third week in September 1938, the Fine Arts Administration had been able to defer that decision. But then the steam began to whistle in the teapot of Western Europe. The time for a decision had arrived.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Griff in Training . . . But for What? Wyoming to Georgia, August 1935–January 1940
ON JULY 8, GRIFF BOARDED THE USAT US GRANT, AND THREE WEEKS later he arrived in San Francisco and boarded a train to Temple, Texas, to visit his father and other family. By then, Welborn Sr. was living in the family house in Temple with only Philip, Griff’s twenty-eight-year-old brother. Lawrence and his sisters had all married. At the time, Welborn Sr. and Philip operated three different M System Food Stores, two in Temple and one eleven miles southwest, in Belton, halfway between Temple and Salado, the Griffiths’ ancestral home.
During his stay, Griff visited Philip at one of the Temple stores. Philip would stand at the scale in the central rectangular island of counters in the store fronted by a glass display case that offered sausages, cheeses, and cigars. Two other employees in white aprons worked the floor, assembling orders for customers, pulling canned goods from shelves on the left, dairy from the refrigerated display in the back, bulk items and tools from the back, and produce from wire bins in the front. Philip—in his white shirt, tie, and white apron—weighed and tallied. Since the time Griff had been working in the family’s old Quanah store, advances in packaging and distribution had streamlined such stores, now affording the customer a broad selection and swift special ordering of containers, light bulbs, canning supplies, and just about any other goods one might want in a home kitchen.
Welborn Sr., now sixty-seven, his blond hair thinning and showing more of his already-high forehead, was still taller and thinner than Griff. He usually listened and offered advice to his son. The visit afforded the two opportunities for talks, perhaps sitting in the A-frame swing Welborn Sr. had brought from Quanah, with his dog, Rosa, nearby. Griff may have brought up his marital strife, his efforts to cultivate a relationship with little Alice, and his frustrations with the lack of opportunity for advancement in the Army. Welborn Sr., then seven years a widower, would have been enjoying his work with Philip and relished living so nearby his married daughter and grandchildren. He also loved dogs; in Temple, he always owned either a fox terrier or a Scottie and had named every one of them Rosa, in honor of John R. Good’s wife.
Soon following the visit, Griff reported to Fort Frances E. Warren, adjoining Cheyenne, Wyoming, along Crow Creek. The post–Civil War fort had been a major Army cavalry post and, in World War I, a mobilization center for artillery and cavalry training, with twenty thousand horses in brick stables, five parade grounds, barracks, officer housing, and a hospital. By 1916, it was the Army’s largest cavalry post in the United States, but after the war, all cavalry had left, and by Griff’s time it had become an infantry post. Griff moved into one of the several dozen officer’s houses arranged in a circle surrounded by shaded lawns, and he set to work training infantry.
The following year, in 1936, he transferred to the Pole Mountain Target and Maneuver Area, a sixty-two-thousand-acre site east of Laramie, where he acquired further training, including in artillery and chemical warfare and a field officers’ course. Little did Griff know that the field-officer training in Wyoming would be so important to him. The repetition of the drills he and his fellow soldiers performed instilled muscle memory. He enjoyed his time there, much of it in forests, open plains, and mountains covered with trees and rock formations with scenic views, hunting, and riding. While stationed there, he learned fly-fishing. Several times over the Wyoming summers he went down to Laramie to buy fishing tackle, and on those trips he paid visits to the mother of his brother-in-law, Tiny’s husband, Count DeKay, who had been reared in Laramie.
By 1938, Welborn Sr. had contracted Parkinson’s disease. His muscles had become so stiff that in bed he could be propped into a sitting position and would stay that way with no danger of falling. Philip gradually took over the stores and within a few years would sell them.
Griff’s life at Pole Mountain, although enjoyable in summer and fall, might have taken on a be-careful-what-you-wish-for element, with the north-plains winters and never-arriving spring. Eventually, he questioned whether he was chasing some unattainable dream. The Wyoming wind and snow probably drove him to wonder what to do next and question whether to go on with his military career. In the difficult interwar years in the Army, with limited budgets, officers with personal drive like Griff’s—when confronted with lack of advancement, moribund assignments, and endless relocation—reached their end. He pondered resigning in order to pursue another career, his patience for action and for some bigger challenge or purpose nearly exhau
sted.
On leave, Griff went to Virginia to see little Alice, who was living with her mother and grandparents, Major Torrey and his wife. Griff still refused to recognize the Reno divorce as valid and was fed up with his separation from his daughter, so he sued little Alice’s mother in court in Alexandria and won the right to see his daughter at reasonable times and to have her with him for three months a year, so long as he would arrange transportation and increase monthly child care payments from $25 to $35.
Filing suit against Alice Torrey, daughter of a major from a family of military officers, took guts. Griff would have had to ponder the risks to his career before confronting her, but he pressed his case and won.
In mid-1938, Count DeKay, who had been living with his wife, Tiny, in Washington, D.C., landed an assignment as military attaché in Paris and would soon be leaving with Griff’s little sister for France. So Griff took the train from Cheyenne to see them off, taking the opportunity to see little Alice, then aged seven and living with the Torreys nearby. When Griff arrived, Tiny and Count were spending a long weekend at the D.C. home of Count’s uncle, Emory Land, known to his family as Uncle Jerry. Land was a Navy man, a recently retired vice admiral and naval architect who had made contributions to submarine design and who in February 1938 had become chairman of the US Maritime Commission. Griff joined them for part of the weekend, including a Chevy Chase Country Club party hosted by Jerry’s wife, Betty. Over that period, Griff likely talked with Uncle Jerry about career opportunities in the defense industry and government.
Griff picked little Alice up at her grandparents’ home to spend the day with her while Tiny, Count, and the Lands attended a Senators– Red Sox ball game. The next day, Tiny and Count moved out of their rented house, and Griff and Count loaded the DeKays’ car with their Europe-bound luggage and drove from Washington to the home of Griff and Tiny’s uncle Tex and his wife, Edie, in Larchmont, New York, where Griff had lived during his West Point summers. Tiny accompanied Alice on the train to New York, reaching Larchmont by late afternoon. For Tiny, it was a sad time to be leaving her family behind in the United States. On the train, Alice read the funny papers to her aunt to keep Tiny from crying.
Count and Griff arrived in the afternoon in time to drink one of Tex’s mint juleps before dinner. When Alice and Tiny arrived, Alice over-flowed with excitement about their house, moving from room to room, inspecting and commenting. The adults got a kick out of it. The next day, Sunday, the weather having turned hot, Alice swam at the Westchester Club with other neighborhood children. In the evening, she stayed with the maid while the adults attended a dinner party. The next day, Edie, Griff, Alice, and Tiny swam together in the Long Island Sound at a beach club, and then Tiny and Alice took a boat ride into the city to the Battery and saw the aquarium and construction under way for the World’s Fair, returning by boat late in the afternoon.
Griff likely talked with his uncle Tex about some career opportunities, or even about perhaps working again for Leslie Myer—who had been the contractor in charge of the Hoover Dam construction, for whom Griff had worked during his West Point summers.
Griff and Count drove Count’s car the next day into the city to leave it to be loaded on the ship for Europe, and Tex hosted a reunion luncheon party at a downtown club with several of Count’s Harvard classmates. Griff went to meet with Leslie Myer. That night, back in Larchmont at a barbecue on Tex’s terrace, Griff probably consulted again with Tex about Myer and job prospects. The next day in New York, Tiny and Count boarded the SS President Roosevelt, seen off by everyone, including some friends they had known at Fort McKinley in Manila. Griff brought Alice to the dock an hour before sailing to see the ship, which fascinated her.
Tiny received three boxes of flowers and several corsages for the send-off, rendering her quite emotional, but she was nothing but happy with the case of Folger’s coffee that their brother Philip had sent from Temple. Count locked it in the trunk of their car in the hold; they would wait to savor it in France.
Griff took Alice to see the sights in New York. They enjoyed the city together—everyone busy, determined to get some place, do something, the aural tapestry of the city, the country clubs and dinner parties, with smells of cigars and mint juleps. They returned to Washington by train. While they were together, Griff told her how discontented he was with the Army.
Within a month, Griff and the rest of the family were receiving Tiny’s letters from Paris. Upon arrival they’d had to place their furniture in storage and were staying temporarily in a friend’s Paris apartment, unable to get settled until they could resolve with the War Department an outstanding issue regarding Count’s assignment.
Tiny and Count were aware that Europe was tense, but she had also heard from neighbors that many French believed Chamberlain’s visit to Hitler would circumvent war. She had seen about her few signs of preparation for war. But she had seen swarms of reserve officers—just activated for service—surrounding the military academy near the Paris apartment where she and Count were staying. And she had learned from neighbors that government trucks were delivering piles of sand to every house in Paris to be spread four inches deep on their attic floors as a precaution against fires from bombing.
One Sunday afternoon in September 1938, Tiny and Count took a drive from Paris to Chartres to see the famous cathedral. They were eager to explore Paris and its surrounding sights, even though they could sense the fears of war in the air. They drove from Paris the sixty miles to Chartres with another American couple, Dottie and Knight Pryor. Tiny would describe their excursion in a letter to her family—one of many she sent them. In it, she asked that copies again be distributed to her siblings, including Griff.
The foursome approached Chartres at the end of their drive from Paris, and Tiny could see the cathedral towering on the top of its hill in the middle of the city.
Her first glimpse of the cathedral’s west facade transformed her visit into a daydream. She entered the archway, pushed open the ancient, nut-brown wooden door, and stepped into the dark, wood-paneled entryway. She gave a tug on the inner wooden door, pulled aside the plum-purple curtain, and made contact with the cathedral’s sweeping, timeworn, almond-brown stone floor and felt the vastness of the nave. The darkness enveloped her. She mused in her letter that she was transported by the windows. They exerted an unforeseen sway on her, the beginning of what for Tiny was a four-hour visit to what must have seemed a new and contrasting space in the fresh old-world environment she was already loving so much after only a short first few weeks in France.
In the cathedral, she felt the cool, damp air brush against her face, in a hush of quiet, accompanied by the sliding of shoes on the stone and the echo of people’s murmurs, stirred by the rustling of wooden chairs being arranged for the upcoming late-afternoon Mass and the occasional drone of a biplane taking off from the air base a mile north.
The windows were like shoots of strangely dusky-yet-rich, gleaming, and colorful stalks of flowers rising upward. And there were no pews but instead a collection of hundreds of uniform wooden chairs. Men and boys in robes were arranging the chairs in rows facing the altar but parted them around a circular gap, leaving a space at the west end for a circular pattern of darker polished-stone channels inlaid in the lighter smoothly polished cathedral floor in what formed a labyrinth or maze forty feet in diameter.
Tiny lingered for four hours inside the cathedral with her husband and companions. She reported that she sat through the entire Sunday late-afternoon Mass, conducted in a language she could not understand.
The Mass began with the plaintive ring of a triangle, and small bells signaled the start and the transitions between portions of the service. Her eyes were drawn by the reds and clarets of the priests’ robes encrusted with gold trim, and in the hall the colored rays of sun penetrating the windows illuminated the believers. She noted the reverberation of the priests’ voices reading from scripture, the sway back and forth between the congregation’s responsive chants, the s
mell of fresh incense above the altar and in the aisles as priests passed, the congregation sitting, then standing, then kneeling.
Tiny’s description of her excursion to Chartres reflects her empathic, respectful enthusiasm for the French. She wrote, “Perhaps what has impressed me most about France is not the people, the ancient beautiful buildings, their artistic good taste in clothes, their fondness of children, their courteous treatment of foreigners, their universal happiness, nor their leisurely pace, but it is their gardens! . . . Ingenious use of every plot of ground to make something beautiful of it. . . . All this is what makes me love being alive and being here.” Tiny’s letter revealed the passion her visit to Charters Cathedral seems to have sparked.
That Sunday afternoon Mass would be the last at the cathedral for months.
Back stateside, Griff was finding that, despite his disenchantment with the US Army, his career achievements thus far had placed him in a select group of Regular Army captains, and in mid-1938 he was selected to attend the same Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, from which his former father-in-law had graduated. In September of that year, Griff moved into the base’s old “beehive” three-story red-brick barracks. Leavenworth was still a quiet, slow-paced post reflective of the “old” Army, with Griff’s barracks facing the polo field near shaded Pope Avenue arched by elm trees. Griff would later see Leavenworth in much busier times.
The school maintained a traditional aura for its students—who were a select group of Regular Army majors and captains with superior records—and like most, Griff probably felt a sense of fraternity with generations of graduates who over a century had come before him. The course would be a year of instruction on combat orders, field engineering, leadership and psychology, military history, “equitation” (horseback riding), methods of training strategy, tactics, planning, and troop leading—all designed to produce commanders and staff officers for general staff duty.
Saving the Light at Chartres Page 12