Saving the Light at Chartres

by Victor A. Pollak

  Later in September, Griff’s father died at age seventy-five in Temple, after a ten-year battle with Parkinson’s. Griff was likely unable to attend the funeral. His brother-in-law, Walter R. Humphrey, editor of the Temple Daily Telegram, wrote a tribute article about Welborn Sr. in his regular column, the “Home Towner.” In it, Walter praised Welborn Sr. for his lifetime of honorable dealings in business and all of his relationships.

  Two months after Griff’s arrival at Camp Young, he learned something that may have had a lasting effect: word reached him that Commander John S. Blue, the husband of his ex-wife, Alice, who had become stepfather to Griff’s eleven-year-old daughter, little Alice, had been killed in action in the Pacific. His ship, the USS Juneau, had sunk during the naval Battle of Guadalcanal. Blue had learned just prior to his death that Alice had borne him a daughter. So now Griff might have been feeling not only the conflict of separation from his own wife but also a new sense of conflict from this fresh reminder of the risk that his profession imposed on his family. Blue had spent the greater part of the short time between his marriage to Alice and his death deployed on ships in the Pacific. Griff could not then know when he would see Nell or little Alice again, if at all, before his own deployment to Europe, which could come at any time.

  Griff saw his first extended California maneuvers with the Fourth Armored Corps from October 1942 to March 1943, conducted under the simulated theater of operations for a period of thirteen weeks.

  The normal pattern would consist of first a week of individual, crew, and squad training, and then two weeks of company and battery training, followed by a week of battalion training, a week of regimental training, three weeks of divisional field exercises, and, finally, six weeks of corps maneuvers.

  While Griff was at Camp Young, a Hollywood production unit filmed battle and desert scenes of a movie, Sahara, starring Humphrey Bogart, at the camp, with cooperation of the US Army, employing many of the corps’ tanks (including “Lulabelle,” the featured tank in the film). Many soldiers, including Griff, performed as extras.

  By late March 1943, the desert war in North Africa had begun turning in favor of the Allies, and attention had turned to Hitler in Europe. Griff’s corps would be relocating to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, for maneuvers of a different kind: although tanks would be needed, that fight would require infantry for combat in mixed terrain of plains, mountains, cities, and forests.

  This time, Griff’s arrival on the scene was in plenty of time for him to perform his part. If he played his cards right, now—in a football frame of mind—with Griff as the G-3, his new unit could be both the offensive line and the running back. From the beachhead in France, the corps could bust loose and outrun the enemy through its own territory.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Stunned into Action: Chartres and Paris, September 1939–June 1940

  THE CURATE—A TALL, MIDDLE-AGED PRIEST WITH STRANDS OF SALT-and-pepper hair showing from the sides of his round black silk zucchetto skullcap—walked east into morning sunlight across the hilltop courtyard to Chartres Cathedral, and the rooftops of the town at the base of the hill shimmered as light reached them. Leaves of the courtyard’s trees rustled a hint of early fall color in the crisp air. The sun, with its mid-September slant, accentuated in silhouette a new structure now guarding the south portal on the right side of the cathedral ahead. Similar new structures secured the two other portals. In front of him on the cathedral’s west facade, a boxcarlike enclosure—fifty feet wide and thirty feet tall—shrouded the Royal Portal. A skin of fiberboard plates covered the enclosure’s framework, a giant sleeve of a boxlike winter coat built to guard the cathedral from the winter tide of war. The curate entered through its doorway into a dark interior vault that was lined floor-to-ceiling with sandbags like a regiment of stubby mythical warriors standing watch around its base on the front and sides of the passageway into the cathedral’s only remaining available west entrance: the portal door under the right-hand arch. The wall of sandbags inside the structure, packed tightly and bulging from behind its steel and wood framework, now protected the portal’s cherished and delicate ancient array of Old Testament and Last Judgment sculptured figures.

  As the priest walked through, he may have thought it a travesty that those sculptures had to be hidden now—especially under such a crude leviathan. But better they be secluded for a time under this behemoth than annihilated under German bombing and lost for eternity. Yet why was all of this happening?

  The curate opened the frayed door-sized hatch through the aged portal door of the cathedral into the wood-paneled entryway. He tugged on the small inner door, pulled aside the heavy plum-purple velvet light-blocking curtain, and made contact with the sweeping almond-brown, smooth stone floor of the nave, which he recognized had been cleared of all crates, tarps, and equipment. The clamor of workers and steel pipes and machines that had intruded into the sanctuary in August and September 1939 had now mostly been silenced.

  Now one could hear isolated sounds of caster wheels squeaking and foremen directing workmen to roll the wooden confessionals to positions away from aisle walls, which were now lined with sandbags from the floor to the sills of the window openings. Other workmen were bringing in some of the thousands of wooden chairs from storage across the courtyards.

  The curate would have been pleased that all the windows had been successfully removed and were in their crates and safely in the crypt, and he would have been gratified to see the cathedral being restored so quickly to religious use. But he may have felt a strange disappointment that the crude, massive new structures obscured the entrance and may well have felt an even greater blow from the abrupt change to the lighting and atmosphere inside the cathedral that removal of the stained-glass windows had caused. In the greater part of the nave, choir, and apse, the cathedral was now dark, as if a huge shroud had been placed over the building. Opaque vitrex panels inserted end-to-end into the jambs of the high lancet and rose windows now blocked most light, except for thin bands of faint white daylight. The rich-colored tones that had bathed those spaces for centuries were gone. But worse, in the aisles on the sides of the nave under the clerestory balconies, the vitrex panels now covered only the upper half of the window jambs. The lower third was now screened instead by plain canvas mounted on wooden frames to provide for temporary closure of the window openings into which a few rows of translucent plastic panels could be installed. As a result of this temporary measure, much more light was now penetrating the building through its side aisles. One of those absent lower windows had been the deeply colored Noah Window, in the north aisle, famous for its rich marine hues.

  Historically, one of the most striking impressions of the interior of the cathedral had been the concentrated, colorful, saturated light. It was as though the cathedral, with its stained-glass windows, was “full of picture books, with pages of colored glass,” as described by Philip Ball, in his book Universe of Stone. “In the Middle Ages,” Ball writes, “the ordinary man and woman, illiterate and never likely to set eyes on the parchment pages of a book, would have gazed in wonder at these stories of Christ and the Virgin, the saints and the Old Testament, glowing in miraculous visions in the dark stone. . . . One simply didn’t see colors like this in everyday life. Ruby reds, sapphire blues, emerald greens. . . . They evoke the Scriptures in a way that even the most eloquent priest could not rival.”

  Stained glass, and light that has passed through it, has been regarded as a metaphor for the divine. Nowhere was that more evident than in the cathedral, because of the way the stained-glass windows changed the light as its rays penetrated them. The curate and his priest colleagues were so familiar with the movement of the light passing through the stained glass—and the way the shafts of light touched the surfaces of wood and stone and the people within the building. The effect would trigger something exquisite in them and in almost everybody.

  Ball describes the reactions of those who would later visit the interior of the windowless Chartres Cathedr
al during World War II. They said it was bathed with a harsh, uncolored “natural light” and, as a result, was “a harsher space, its elegant lines no longer softened by the reddish violet effulgence of Gothic illumination.” In fact, they felt there was “something improper” about this untransformed light, “as though it [were] the Virgin herself who ha[d] been disrobed and exposed under the harsh glare of the noon sun. The space look[ed] crude and cold, the stones pale and exhausted.”

  In the following weeks in the autumn of 1939 after the curate’s tour, glass-workshop artists painted color-infused scenes onto the protective translucent plastic panels inserted into the lowest few rows of the window jambs, which had the effect of softening and coloring the light passing through them to shine on the congregants as they would sit in the nave.

  In the first few weeks following the September Anglo-French declaration of war, the people of Chartres did not feel much impact from the warfare under way to the east. But by the end of that year, they felt an abrupt influx of refugees from areas near the German border, which began to change life in Chartres. Prefect Jean Moulin noticed that tolerance for refugees was already declining. He made a series of visits to the railway station to secure food and shelter for refugees and made a point there of displaying an accepting posture, to pressure unwelcoming railway managers. Although Jean Chadel and his staff had been of help to the Fine Arts Administration, by arranging resources and clearances for removal of the Chartres windows, Moulin himself had not been much involved with the windows until the spring of 1940. He had been compelled to deal with wider issues stemming from the displacement of French workers and evacuees and from the influx of foreign castaways. All of that would change, however, when the war arrived in Chartres and the search for a more secure hiding place for the windows would, for Moulin—like so many other causes—become a passion and a matter of urgency.

  In late February 1940, Georges Huisman, director general of the Fine Arts Administration, convened a special meeting of the Historic Monuments Commission to enable Huisman’s staff to report on the overall evacuation of artworks and stained-glass windows from a multitude of churches and museums across France and from private collections at their owners’ request and report on protection of historic monuments in conflict zones. The meeting did not occur at the administration’s Palais-Royal offices on the Rue de Valois but instead in a ceremonial location: a large chamber in the recently constructed Palais de Chaillot, in Paris’s sixteenth arrondissement. It was a grandiose building designed for the World’s Fair of 1937 in a “classicizing ‘moderne’” style, located on the site of the former Trocadéro Palace—an iconic promontory rising above the Square of Freedom and Human Rights, overlooking the valley of the Seine, with a view down past the Place du Trocadéro, to the Eiffel Tower and beyond.

  Twenty-seven members of the Historic Monuments Commission attended the meeting called by Huisman, along with Jean Trouvelot and Fine Arts Administration staffers, who were there to answer questions about the just-completed operations at Chartres and across France and to be honored by the members of the commission for the operation’s success.

  One of the newest commission members present at the meeting was Jacques Jaujard, director of National Museums and the School of the Louvre. Jaujard would go on to try (unsuccessfully) to convince the Germans to maintain an inventory of artworks and the destinations to which they chose to relocate them. Instead, fortunately, the important task of recording the works taken by the Germans—and the locations to which they were taken—would be secretly carried out by a member of Jaujard’s staff, who would eventually be recognized for her valuable work. She was Rose Valland, a longtime unpaid volunteer and assistant in charge of the Jeu de Paume museum; she has been described by author Robert Edsel as a woman with a forgettable, bland style and manner who ingratiated herself with the Nazis and spied on their activities for the four years of the occupation. After the liberation of Paris, the extent and importance of her secret information, which she fiercely guarded, had a pivotal impact on the discovery of looted works of art from France. She would be recognized as a hero. Following the war, Jaujard would be honored and decorated for his own protecting and safeguarding of works of art stolen by the Germans and would be appointed to succeed Georges Huisman as director general of the Fine Arts Administration.

  But on this February day in 1940, Huisman opened the meeting and recognized Lucien Prieur, Ernest Herpe, and René Planchenault for their work to protect monuments in the militarized zones—which included the work at Chartres—as well as Jeanne Laurent, the young state secretary at the Fine Arts Administration, one of the small number of women in the government, who had taken charge of passive defense from the time of the declaration of war and, like Moulin and Zay, would later be active in the Resistance.

  As a result of this meeting, the Historic Monuments Commission authorized another five hundred thousand francs for Chartres Cathedral to install protections against threat of bomb damage to its choir fence and another twenty million francs to repair and relead the stained-glass windows over three years, to be completed before they could be reinstalled.

  The attendees at the meeting also did not foresee that France would suffer a swift, humiliating military defeat and surrender, much less that France would be divided into an occupied zone and the collaborationist Vichy zone. In addition, the Germans were already establishing a separate Gestapo organization that would be dedicated not to protecting the treasures of artwork embodying the French cultural heritage but to the systematic looting of artworks, which they intended to display in a grand “Führermuseum” that Hitler envisioned would be built in Linz, near his birthplace, Braunau.

  Various members of the Historic Monuments Commission recommended publicizing the Fine Arts Administration’s mass evacuation of artworks from museums, churches, and private collections. One senator urged that a report be published in the Bulletin des Monuments historiques and other journals. Another urged that a “luxurious” book be published that could be sold by subscription, and another spoke in support of work already under way to film removal of the windows of various of the most famous buildings, including Chartres. Had the members known that the Third Reich would sponsor its widespread theft of art from France and other countries of Western Europe, they would have sworn all to secrecy and insisted on burying all records. As it turned out, many of those records should probably have been burned in the last-minute escape from Paris before the arrival of the Germans.

  Still, the Chartres windows continued to lie in the crypt of the cathedral—exposed to bombardment of the airfield and rail yard. Even into April 1940, no action had been taken to move them to a different, less exposed location.

  It isn’t clear why that task was taking so long. Georges Huisman and his team at the Fine Arts Administration, including Jeanne Laurent, may have thought the war was going to be a short one. They had not yet identified a single hiding place that would be large enough for all of the Chartres crates and would meet all of the fire, security, and logistical standards required by the Historical Monuments Service. They likely worried about the shortages of trucks, petrol, and drivers and feared those resources would become even scarcer by the time the site could be identified and secured. And all over France, refugees were crowding onto trains.

  Why move the windows? Why not follow Achille Carlier’s recommendation that the windows stay in the crypt for the duration of the war? The answer may have been that the Fine Arts Administration staffers were discovering in real time that this was going to be a new kind of war, mechanized and aerial. Bombs being readied for use in the next war, Carlier contended, already had ten times the force of those used in World War I. Separate from the risk of fire in the cathedral, there was the danger that the cathedral might entirely collapse if bombed. A Gothic cathedral of the Chartres type is a stack of precision-cut-and-polished stones, held in place by balance between the internal pressures of the arches and external pressure of the flying buttresses. The stones are maste
rfully carved and fitted together. They are not bolted or stapled together. If a bomb with sufficient force were to hit, the cathedral might crash down to the floor and break through into the crypt, destroying the entire collection of the stored windows inside their wooden crates.

  Why not put them in the location used when the windows were removed during World War I? For one thing, it is not clear where the Chartres Cathedral windows were stored when removed in 1918. Considerable repair to the windows was required following the 1918 removal, so shipment to a distant location would not have been likely. The prospect of shipping such a large collection of stained glass to another location in 1918—especially a distant location across the country—seems more remote even than it would have been in 1940. In those early decades of the twentieth century, trucks were advancing, but roads were not yet widely developed—especially in isolated areas. The railroads were functioning, but the network of spurs to rural castles would have been less developed even than in 1940. It stands to reason that, in 1918, the windows were kept in the crypt of the cathedral.