The Monuments Men

  The dean held his breath as the men climbed onto the base of the precious statue. He couldn’t look away, for fear any moment might be her last. Beside him, the sacristan crossed himself and muttered prayers, not daring to look as the statue started to teeter off its pedestal. The sailors were holding the mattress as the four-foot-tall sculpture slid forward, the weight of the marble pushing them all to the floor. But she was safe, at least as far as the dean could tell. She was lying facedown on a mattress, but at least she was safe.

  As a dozen sailors moved the Madonna slowly toward a side door, others set up a ladder. The soldiers started removing paintings as the commanding officer paced and flicked spent cigarette butts onto the floor around him. Back and forth, back and forth.

  “This one is too high,” a sailor shouted. “We need a taller ladder.”

  “Keep your voice down,” the commander ordered. It was still pitch-black outside; there was plenty of time. “Try again.”

  The Madonna was nearing the door. The sailors took the second mattress, as they had clearly been instructed beforehand, and placed it over the sculpture. It wouldn’t offer much protection, but it might conceal the theft from prying eyes.

  “No good, Commander,” said one of the men on the ladder.

  “Just leave it,” the commander said, suddenly irritated by the whole operation. It was five in the morning; he hadn’t slept all night. All for a statue. “Leave the painting; it’s not important. Load the rest.”

  It took another half hour to heave the statue onto the back of one of the Red Cross trucks. The soldiers piled into the second truck. The paintings went into the third, the one the sailor had gone out an hour before to find. The first soft strip of daylight was just touching the horizon as the dean and the sacristan, standing in the side doorway in their night clothes, watched the Bruges Madonna, the only sculpture by Michelangelo to leave Italy during his lifetime, disappear.

  The dean stopped his story and took a sip of his tea. His hand still shook, slightly but noticeably. “It is believed she left Bruges by sea,” he concluded sadly, “although it is possible by air. Regardless, she is no longer here.”

  Across from him, Monuments Man Ronald Balfour, George Stout’s roommate from Shrivenham, adjusted his scholar’s glasses and recorded the information in his field journal. The dean’s study, with its rows of books, reminded him of his own library back at Cambridge.

  “Any idea when she left Belgium?”

  “No more than a few days ago, I would think,” the dean replied sadly. “Possibly yesterday, who knows?” It was September 16, eight days since the theft and just days after the British had triumphantly entered the town.

  Balfour closed his notebook. He had been so close. The Bruges Madonna had slipped through their grasp, through his grasp, somewhere between Bruges and the open sea.

  “Would you like a photograph?”

  “I don’t need a photograph,” Balfour said, preoccupied with his thoughts. He had been in the British army since 1940. Three years he spent recruiting infantrymen in rural England. Eight months training as a Monuments Man. He had thought he was ready. He was only three weeks on the continent, attached to First Canadian Army in the northernmost flank of the advance, and already the job seemed to be exploding out of his grasp. It was one thing to enter Rouen, France, and find the Palais de Justice destroyed. An errant Allied bomb had inadvertently started the destruction in April; the Germans completed it when they accidentally set the whole district on fire while trying to burn down the telephone exchange on August 26. Balfour had missed saving the Palais by less than a week.

  But this was different. This wasn’t war damage or an unfortunate decision made during a hasty retreat. The world had long known the Germans had looted artwork. The fact that they were still looting artwork, even in the face of a massive Allied advance, was beyond anything Balfour had imagined.

  “Take them,” the dean said, holding out a stack of postcards. “Distribute them. Please. You know the Madonna. But many of the soldiers do not. What if they find her in a barn? Or in some German officer’s home? Or”—he paused—“at the bottom of the harbor. Take these, so they will recognize her and know she is one of the wonders of the world.”

  The older man was right. Balfour took the cards. “We’ll find her,” he said.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Cathedral and the Masterpiece

  Northern France

  Late September 1944

  *

  Southern Belgium

  Early October

  In mid-September 1944, the last of the original MFAA field officer corps to arrive on the continent, the good-natured sculptor Captain Walker Hancock, flew directly from London to Paris. The plane was forced to fly low because of cloud cover, but the Luftwaffe had all but disappeared from the skies of France and there was little danger. Out the window Hancock could see Rouen, where a week or two before Ronald Balfour had discovered the burned-out hulk of the Palais de Justice. Even from the sky the destruction in the city was obvious, but beyond Rouen the countryside was quiet, the farmhouses, cows, and sheep clearly visible in their timeless array. The richly cultivated fields, with their craggy lines of hedgerows, made lovely patterns. The little villages, with their quiet lanes, seemed peaceful and prosperous—until you looked closer and saw the pockmarks of destruction. Every bridge, Hancock noticed, was smashed.

  Paris was battle-scarred, but to Walker Hancock more beautiful than ever. The Eiffel Tower dominated the horizon, of course, but it was the smaller boulevards that held the wonder of liberation. Thousands of French, British, and American flags flew from the windows, and except for the occasional convoy of military trucks the streets were empty of motorized traffic. “Everybody gets about on bicycles,” he wrote his wife, Saima, “the result being an abundance of handsome legs. It didn’t seem possible to imagine Paris without its taxis—but I’ve seen it. Lights are turned on at 10 p.m.—after a long evening in the dark—and of course there are no street lights. But the Metro is running and more crowded than the NY subways. Allied soldiers walk in without paying. The Germans demanded the privilege, so the French have extended the courtesy to the ‘Liberators.’… The first demonstrations of joy are over and so seem at first hardly to be noticed. But one soon finds what a friendly attitude is there. Very often a little boy with neat white gloves will come up and solemnly shake hands without saying a word. The poorer children all insist on giving us souvenirs—simple little things that they have collected, like pictures that (used to) come with chocolate bars or cigarette wrappers…. Today I bought some postcards in a village near the camp. The storekeeper refused to let me pay for them. ‘We owe everything to you’—he said—‘we can’t repay the American soldiers.’ ”

  Fall was in the air, and yet to Hancock the world seemed as fresh and bright as a Parisian summer. “I have been in Paris,” he continued, “and will never cease to be thankful that I got there a month after its liberation.” 1

  He stayed a night with James Rorimer, “Jimsie,” his fellow officers called him, who had gotten the assignment he most desired: Monuments Man for Seine Section, which meant, essentially, Paris. Rorimer was staying in his sister and brother-in-law’s apartment, which had not been used since before the war. For breakfast he served fresh eggs, the first Hancock had eaten in months, and the men talked about their experiences. Rorimer had arrived in the convoy of General Pleas B. Rogers, the first U.S. convoy to enter the City of Light. He had seen columns of smoke hovering over the city, framed by the Eiffel Tower. Bullets snapped from rooftops; the Chamber of Deputies smoldered. German prisoners were being led to the Comptoir National d’Escompte on the Place de l’Opera. In the Tuileries Garden, the muzzles of the abandoned German guns were still hot from firing. “I didn’t rest, between my nerves and my excitement,” Rorimer told Hancock, “until I was lying on my bed at the Hotel de Louvre. It was absurd, but here in the midst of destruction was this comfortable hotel with hot and cold running water and big, high-ceili
nged rooms, each with French doors, drapes and a balcony. Just for a moment, it was like pre-war Paris.” 2

  Walker Hancock wasn’t staying. In fact, he was eager to leave Paris. He had a duty, one he believed in so strongly that he had left behind a life of contentment to perform it. Unlike some of his fellow officers, who felt the pull of war at least partially for personal reasons, Hancock could have gone on with his life in America exactly as it was. He was a well-known sculptor of monumental works, including the great winged horse known as Sacrifice on the World War I soldiers’ memorial in his hometown of St. Louis. He owned two art studios, and although he was in debt (another reason not to pursue a low-paying army job), he had accumulated enough commissions and goodwill to sustain him for a lifetime. And a month before sailing to the continent at forty two years old, he had married Saima Natti, the love of his life.

  And yet no soldier had a better attitude about his service in the war than Walker Hancock. Filled with a sense of duty, but almost forty, he had applied for Army Air Forces Intelligence soon after Pearl Harbor. He failed his physical. So he joined Naval Intelligence, passing his physical with flying colors, only to be drafted by the army and sent to basic training. Not long after, the drill sergeant pulled him out of morning lineup and informed him he was being transferred. Hancock thought he was returning to Naval Intelligence; in actuality, he had won a competition to design the Air Medal, one of the army’s highest awards for bravery. After striking the medal, Hancock entered the Italian section of the War Department. Finally, he was recruited by the MFAA.

  “Doesn’t life do strange things to us mortals!” he wrote his fiancée Saima in October 1943. “Here, in the midst of all my happiness about you, I suddenly get news that I’m going to be sent overseas to do the work I most want to do in the Army.” 3 They were wed on December 4, 1943, in Washington, D.C. Two weeks later, Walker Hancock’s duty orders came through. “I can still vividly remember that as the taxi sped away to begin the first leg of my journey, I looked back and saw Saima standing in the doorway, weeping…. I had never experienced such a dark moment.” 4

  Hancock missed his battleship convoy in New York—again, they were unaware a Monuments Man was expected—so every day he was required to report for duty on the docks in case a ship had an open berth. He had to dress in his uniform and bring his bags, but there was nothing else for him to do. Sometimes it was positively depressing. “It’s like prison—this having to be ‘available’ every day,” he wrote Saima, “when I want only to be with you…. [But] in the meantime I’m walking on air—can’t even remember to wind my watch. A fine officer I’m making!” 5

  But he couldn’t contain his native enthusiasm and optimism. “Let’s try to look at the happy side of matters,” he wrote her, “the most wonderful thing of all—that we know how much we love each other, and that the joy of doing a useful service should be greater and not less because of that.” 6

  Saima traveled to New York to stay with her new husband in a soldier’s hotel, never knowing when he left in the morning whether her new husband would return from the docks. For two weeks, he came back to her, and then one evening, when he didn’t return, she knew he was gone. The army hadn’t even given him a chance to tell her goodbye.

  “The sun and the wind and the inspiring site of shipping,” he wrote Saima upon his arrival in England, “remind me of what a privilege it is to be a witness to some of the events of what will be the most dramatic year in many generations—instead of reading about them in the vaults of the Pentagon.” 7 At forty-two, he assured her, he was old enough to have his eyes open to the wonders, and worried that “most of the boys will wake up later on and realize what they missed.” 8

  Now, finally after eight months in England, he was in northern France. The breakout at Normandy had become a rout, and the Allies were racing toward the German border with almost no resistance from the retreating German army. General George C. Marshall, President Roosevelt’s most trusted military advisor, confidently predicted the battle for Europe would end “between September 1 and November 1, 1944,” and advised his officers to start considering transfers to the Pacific theater. 9 Almost as good, the bitterly wet summer of Normandy had finally faded to calm, clear weather, which made Walker Hancock’s first official assignment as Monuments Man for the U.S. First Army—traveling by jeep with his fellow Monuments Man Captain Everett “Bill” Lesley to inspect protected monuments near the rear of First Army territory—seem almost a sightseeing tour. Hancock wrote Saima, in his usual buoyant manner, that “every hour of each day has been a pleasure.” 10

  The damage he found was minimal. The Germans had steamrolled across northeastern France in 1940. Four years later, the Allies had quickly taken it back, leaving large swathes of country untouched by war. Most of the problems stemmed from the Nazi occupation force: local museums casually looted; fields strewn with mines or otherwise rendered unworkable; small objects like candlesticks and brass window handles stolen for souvenirs. Some paintings were missing, but the worst destruction was to the priceless Louis XIV furniture so common in the old, grand homes of France. Much of it was burned as firewood to make way for the overstuffed modern pieces German officers found more to their tastes. Every wine cellar, of course, had been emptied, with many of the most expensive vintages traded bottle-for-bottle for cheap apple wine, which the German soldiers preferred. The work proved idyllic, especially since most of the major sites had already been visited by the dapper conservator George Stout, who had covered an awful lot of ground for one man serving near the front.

  Sometimes it was nothing short of spectacular. Chartres Cathedral rose, as always, like a mountain from the fields of wheat. But the usually bustling town of Chartres was quiet, the famous cathedral standing defiantly alone. Hancock found himself, even more than he had on previous visits as an art student at the American Academy in Rome, inspired by its enormity and complexity, its extraordinary ambition. The great walls and towers, with their rich ornamentation, had taken centuries to build; there was no way, he thought, that four years of war could destroy such beauty.

  Would he have loved it more if he had known that wasn’t true, that the Wehrmacht had almost destroyed in an afternoon what had taken four generations to build? When the Allies arrived at Chartres, they found the cathedral at risk of being damaged and possibly destroyed by twenty-two sets of explosives placed on nearby bridges and other structures. Demolitions expert Stewart Leonard, who after the end of active hostilities would himself become a Monuments Man, helped defuse the bombs and save the cathedral. As he later explained to Monuments Man Bernie Taper over drinks in a Berlin apartment, “There’s one good thing about being in the bomb disposal unit: No superior officer is ever looking over your shoulder.”

  But was art worth a life, Taper wanted to know. Like all Monuments Men, it was a question that haunted him. “I had that choice,” Leonard said. “I chose to remove the bombs. It was worth the reward.”

  “What reward?”

  “When I finished, I got to sit in Chartres Cathedral, the cathedral I had helped save, for almost an hour. Alone.” 11

  Would future generations, Walker Hancock wondered, understand the power of witnessing this cathedral under the threat of war? Would they appreciate its wonder more if they could see it now, with its windows removed, sandbags piled seemingly thirty feet high, and artillery holes peppering the towers? On the floor lay the twisting path that pilgrims had for centuries traveled on their knees to salvation. Above him, the torn plastic coverings of the window openings fluttered defiantly in the breeze.

  “Here was an unexpected beauty,” Hancock wrote. “The windows were open to the sky… so that we saw simultaneously the interior and exterior of that wonderful building. To follow the great flying buttresses as they entered the roof and turned into the ribs of the vaults was a graphic lesson in Gothic engineering. But it was more. Seen from within, there was something invigorating in the appearance of those mighty wheel-like arches, so characteristic of
Chartres, seeming almost to turn in their pressure against the walls of the apse…. One could stand within the enclosure and see in a new, overhead light the figures of the kings and queens of Judah and the Christ of the Apocalypse.” 12 For a moment, the cathedral seemed both a monument to the Allied triumph and a structure out of time, beyond the war, something that would stand forever, even when the world was gone.

  But it was not to last. The sun was setting, its beams slipping through the great open window arches and rising up the walls. The battle lines lay in the opposite direction, in the east. His help, Hancock knew, was required there. He shouldered his kit and turned back to the war.

  A few weeks later, Walker Hancock was shaken awake from a too-brief sleep. Over his cot stood his fellow Monuments Man for U.S. First Army, George Stout, looking as well-groomed as ever despite the early-morning hour. “We’ve got work,” he said, snapping his driving goggles.

  Outside it was pouring rain. The mist was so fierce and the sky so overcast that Hancock could make out only the dark shape of the enormous army barracks where First Army was headquartered. He remembered with dejection that Stout’s vehicle—the dilapidated German Volkswagen he had been driving since Normandy—had no top, and therefore offered no shelter. He pulled his coat closer. It was October 10, 1944, and he could feel winter approaching.

  He ate breakfast with Stout in the mess hall. Hancock had arrived at First Army headquarters in Verviers, an eastern Belgian town about twenty miles from the German border, only a week before, and he was still unused to the routine of army life. He had parted with both Bill Lesley and the jeep outside Paris, and spent a week hitchhiking as best he could across northern France. Moving east toward southern Belgium, he had entered an area ransacked by the occupying Germans. Families were returning to find their homes destroyed or looted. Pillboxes and abandoned equipment dotted yards and gardens. The villagers, many short on food since the fields had gone untended, offered onions and tomatoes as thank-yous, and despite their circumstances asked for little in return. All told the same story: The Germans “were wonderfully disciplined and ‘correct’ while they had the upper hand—and went berserk when it was obvious that their visit was at an end.” 13