The Monuments Men (15 page)

The next morning, Rorimer was approached by an air force military policeman. The officer demanded to see his papers. The papers seemed to confirm his suspicions, because the soldier smiled, nodded, and placed the Monuments Man under arrest. “No officer of such low rank would have the responsibilities you claim,” he said. “And no officer, of any rank, would travel without his own transportation.” Even at the local headquarters, the officers were convinced they had stumbled on a German spy. The MP was jubilant, no doubt envisioning promotions and commendations. The young man escorted the “spy” all the way back to Rorimer’s headquarters before receiving the crushing news: there really was an MFAA, and Second Lieutenant James Rorimer really was a member of it. The Monuments Men may have considered their first months in Europe a success, but clearly the mission had a long way to go.

Letter from George Stout To his wife, Margie

August 27, 1944

Dear Margie:

I found an air mail envelope and so can spread myself a little. It’s been a week since I’ve got to my headquarters and had a chance at any mail. With a break of luck I may reach it tomorrow and have some new word from you, darling.

Work has been pretty consuming this week but not at all depressing. For two days I’ve billeted in a city, quite a decent-sized city, and have enjoyed a good room with a nice family…. A charming household of people like many we know and I am impressed with the slightness of difference between nations, at least between civilized nations.

As the front rolls along and the evidence piles up, the score against the Germans grows heavier. They have behaved very badly, and in the last days of their occupation, savagely. From here, now, they do not look like a simple innocent people with criminal leaders. They look like criminals. And I wonder how long it will take to get them to live fairly with the rest of the world.

Being in a city I feel very slouchy and ill-kempt in my field clothes—a steel hat, no necktie, generally dirty from the dust of the road, and carrying a gun. Keeping clean is always a problem. Lately, I’ve not had time to do my own washing and, with short jumps, I can’t farm it out.

There is no end to the friendliness of the welcome we get. In another town today, I saw a jeep roll in covered with flowers. The corporal driving said, “Jeez, you’d think we’d won the war.” Yesterday in a village hardly damaged by war a girl brought up a little sister, about two, to give me an apple. She wouldn’t take it back, nor would a little boy in another village, who gave me a tomato. They all want to shake hands all around, at least twice.…

Do take care of yourself. By the time this reaches you, summer will be about over and you’ll be looking grimly at teachers’ meetings. Don’t try to carry anything else after school starts. I’ll try to get my pay straight one of these days and send you some money.

I suppose you hear much talk of fatalities. We hear none at all and seem not the worse.

I love you and think of you much.

Yours,

George

CHAPTER 12

Michelangelo’s Madonna

Bruges, Belgium

September 1944

B
y the last week of August 1944, the northern European campaign had turned into a rout. The Germans had thrown almost all their reserves into preserving the “Ring of Steel” around Normandy, and once the ring was broken a wide open field of advance lay before the Western Allies. Racing forward with almost no resistance, they found millions of pounds of abandoned food, hundreds of carloads of coal, countless abandoned vehicles and wounded German soldiers, and even traincars full of looted lingerie and perfume. The villages were decorated with flowers, the townspeople openly cheering and handing out food and wine to their liberators. The surviving Germans had essentially thrown down their arms and were racing for home.

By August 28, the front lines had advanced more than one hundred miles, liberating Paris and pushing past its eastern outskirts. By September 2, the Allies had reached Belgium, and a day later cut through more than half the country and liberated Brussels, Belgium’s capital and largest city. Four days later, very late in the night of September 7 or possibly in the early-morning hours of September 8, the sacristan of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in the Belgian city of Bruges was roused from sleep by a knock on his door. When the sacristan, tying on a robe, was slow to answer, the knock became louder and more urgent. By the time he reached the door, someone was pounding. “Patience, patience,” he muttered under his breath.

Two German officers were standing outside, one dressed in the blue uniform of the German navy, and one in field gray. Behind them, in the dark street, the sacristan could see armed German sailors from the local barracks, at least twenty but possibly more. They had come in two trucks marked with the insignia of the Red Cross.

“Open the cathedral,” one of the officers demanded.

The sacristan took the Germans to see the dean.

“We have orders,” the German said, holding up a piece of paper. “We’re taking the Michelangelo. To protect it from the Americans.”

“The Americans?” The dean laughed at the audacity. “The British are said to be outside the city. I haven’t heard anything about the Americans.”

“We have orders,” the German commander repeated, pushing into the doorway. A few sailors with guns stepped forward, too. There was no mistaking the message. The dean and sacristan accompanied the soldiers back to the cathedral, unlocking the massive doors with the old iron keys. Behind them, the street was quiet. Under the German occupation, nobody but partisans moved about at two in the morning, and they, of course, kept to the alleys. The blackout may have hindered Allied night bombings, but it was a great help to the Resistance as well.

“You’ll never get her out of Bruges,” the dean told the commander as he pushed opened the ancient doors. “The British are already in Antwerp.”

“Don’t believe everything you hear,” the German countered. “There is still a way.”

Once inside, the Germans moved quickly. Guards were posted on the door. Soldiers circled the sanctuary, shading the windows, while two more stood watch over the dean and sacristan. The rest proceeded directly to the north aisle of the church, where the sculpture sat in a sealed room specially constructed by Belgian authorities in 1940. The Germans tore open the doors. In the light of their pocket lamps, the only light, it seemed, in all of Bruges, the
Madonna
glowed. She was life-sized and radiant, the gentle face and robes of a young woman carved by the young master, Michelangelo, from the richest, whitest marble in Italy. In the glow of her enemy’s lamps, the
Madonna
seemed to look down with an almost serene look of sadness; the Christ Child, looking nothing like a helpless baby, seemed to step defiantly out of the alcove into the light.

“Get the mattresses,” the commander ordered. Four days before, Dr. Rosemann, the head of the Belgian section of the Kunstschutz, the German arts and monuments protection organization, had visited the cathedral. He needed to see the
Madonna
one last time, he said, before he left Belgium. “I have kept a picture of her on my desk all these years,” he told the dean. After viewing the sculpture, Dr. Rosemann ordered his men to place several mattresses in the room. “For protection,” he said, “from Allied bombs. The Americans are not like us; they are savages. How can they appreciate this?” The mattresses were protection, the dean realized now, but not from bombs. They were the quickest and safest way to carry the statue to the trucks.

“What about the paintings?” a sailor asked. Near the
Madonna
hung many of the cathedral’s most magnificent works.

The commander considered them for a moment. “You there,” he said to one of the soldiers near the door. “Go bring another truck.”

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

I
n 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.