The Monuments Men (17 page)

“I can see that letters are going to be few and far between from this end,” Hancock wrote Saima. “My life is suddenly one of very great activity. It makes my head swim even to think of where I have been and what I’ve done in the last two days. But I’m so happy and interested in what I’m doing that it makes the months of waiting, planning, theorizing, and lecturing others very dull by comparison.”
14

Now he was passing through another region, the hilly, wooded areas of eastern Belgium. In the rain the hills looked dull, and he passed through them without the wonder of his early tour. Stout drove steadily, his eyes glued to the road. At least they were out of the rain, for Stout had sent his captured Volkswagen for repairs and been loaned a better vehicle, a situation that would prove far too temporary. Still, Hancock thanked his good fortune on this of all days as the rain hissed down so hard he could barely see the road. He wasn’t even aware they’d crossed the border into Holland, in fact, until they stopped at the foot of yet another of the steep, scrub-covered hills. There were concrete walls at its base, holding back the mountain. At first Hancock thought it was a train tunnel, but the opening was locked tight by two enormous, bolted metal doors.

“What is this place?”

“Art repository,” Stout said, as the doors opened and he drove the jeep inside.

The cavern, created in the 1600s to protect Dutch treasures from French invaders, had all the modern conveniences. The storerooms were well lit, the temperature and humidity controlled. And yet, as he passed deeper into the eerie silence of the mountain, Hancock felt it an unworldly place. The two civilians in charge of the repository led them back past walls of chiseled stone illuminated by long rows of buzzing lights. Near the back were several revolving screens that turned on swivels, like display racks of postcards in tourist shops. But instead of two-cent postcards these screens held paintings from the Netherlands’ greatest museum, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. As a curator turned the crank, the masterpieces by Dutch painters—still lifes of food on tables, exquisite landscapes full of rich skies dotted with sweeping grayish clouds, portraits of smiling, black-clad burghers—passed slowly by, the squeaking of the axle echoing in the empty vault.

“Amazing,” Hancock muttered. He wished he could write Saima about it, but the censors would never let through information this specific because of the ever-present fear of interception or spies.

Turning away, he noticed a large painting rolled on a spindle like a carpet. There was a metal crank on the end, and a wooden case had been built around it. The packing material rolled up with the painting stuck out like the torn, ragged ends of butcher paper.

“
The Night Watch
,” one of the curators commented, tapping the wooden housing. Hancock’s mouth dropped. He was looking at the rolled end of one of Rembrandt’s most famous paintings, the great, wall-sized masterpiece of the militia company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq, painted in 1642.

Stout pulled back the ragged packing material, examined the edge of the painting, and frowned. It was never a good idea to store oil works in prolonged darkness. Parasitic microorganisms tended to grow on the surfaces of the oils. And the resins used to varnish the paintings would yellow in the darkness, muting the colors and obscuring the contrasts. As early as March 1941, Stout had heard from Dutch experts that
The Night Watch
appeared to be yellowing; Stout could see now, as he had feared, the intervening three and a half years had not been kind. If it sat here too long, the painting might have to be stripped and revarnished, a potentially harsh procedure for a centuries-old work. But he was most concerned with the fact that the painting was off its stretcher and had been rolled for an extended period of time, making it vulnerable to cracking, or even flaking or tearing… types of structural damage that were irreversible. Great masterworks were not made to be rolled up and buried inside mountain hideaways. But at the moment, there was nothing that could be done. In a world at war,
The Night Watch
was getting the best treatment possible. He wondered how other masterpieces—like Jan Vermeer’s
The Astronomer
, which had been stolen off the walls of the Rothschilds’ Paris mansion by the Nazis in 1940 and hadn’t been seen since—were faring.

“Where are the guards?” Stout asked.

One of the curators pointed across the room at two policemen.

“Is that all?”

The curator nodded. These were lean years, and only a few guards were available, even for a nation’s treasure. Besides, there hadn’t been a need. The Germans had long known about this repository at St. Pietersberg, near Maastricht, and others like it. In fact, Nazi officials and soldiers had supervised a previous move of
The Night Watch
, which had been “hidden” in several locations before arriving in Maastricht, conveniently close to the German border, in 1942. Perhaps because of this, the Dutch curators seemed surprisingly unconcerned with the lack of protection. Cut off from the rest of the world in their hillside lair, they hadn’t heard about the recent theft of Michelangelo’s
Bruges Madonna
. They didn’t understand, as George Stout had grasped, that the greatest danger wasn’t when the Germans were in complete control, but now, when they were losing control and realizing this was their last opportunity to act. What had Dr. Rosemann told the dean of the church in Bruges?
I have kept a picture of her on my desk all these years
. What had the French peasants told Hancock?
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.

“We’ll get more guards,” Stout said. “At least ten until normal conditions are restored to the area.”

The phone lines were broken; the request for guards would have to wait until they arrived back at headquarters. Stout was clearly displeased by the inefficiency and lack of planning, not to mention the danger inherent in a delay, but only for a moment. Then he was, once again, practical and unflappable. “The additional guards may be here tomorrow,” he said, heading for the borrowed car. “But this is the army. I can offer no guarantees. Thank you, my friends, for a most unusual tour.”

My God
, Hancock thought, as he climbed in beside the conservator and took one last glance backward at Rembrandt’s masterpiece, looking for all the world like a carpet about to be installed on a living room floor.
War is strange
.

CHAPTER 14

Van Eyck’s Mystic Lamb

Eastern France

Late September 1944

C
aptain Robert Posey, Alabama farmboy and Monuments Man for General George Patton’s U.S. Third Army, hung his towel on the peg and headed back to his pup tent. It was September 23, 1944, and he had just taken his first hot shower since landing at Normandy more than two months before. He ran his hand over his warm, freshly shaved face. For years he had worn a mustache, and he still wasn’t used to its absence. Without hair on his lip, he looked like a kid, not a forty-year-old architect, husband, father, and soldier. And besides, the mustache was a statement. When called to active duty, he had shaved both ends, imitating Hitler’s well-known style. It was his little jab at the Third Reich, but it hadn’t gone over too well with the general.

“Dammit, Bobby, shave that dirt off your lip,” Patton exploded upon seeing the patch of hair.
1

Not that Posey minded his commander’s occasional explosions. It was an honor to serve in Patton’s Third, the finest fighting force on the European continent. The truth is that Robert Posey felt much closer to the men of the Third than he ever had to his fellow Monuments Men, and he had quickly adopted their pride, brotherhood, and private exasperation that the other Allied armies had yet to admit their obvious superiority. They were the army that broke the “Ring of Steel” in Normandy. They were the army that had closed the Falaise Pocket, cutting off the last German retreat from western France. They were the army leading the charge on the southern flank, while the other armies straggled somewhere behind them to the north. If Eisenhower had just turned Third Army loose sooner, when Patton first suggested turning east to head off the Germans, they might have already ended the war. There wasn’t a man in Third Army who doubted that. They were confident, and it was all because of the man in the big tent, General George S. Patton Jr. Sure, he was belligerent, arrogant, and at times damn near crazy, but Posey would do anything for the man. It was the general’s dog, Willie, a bull terrier named after William the Conqueror, that Posey couldn’t stand.

He sat down hard on his cot, slipped on his shirt, and picked up the recent letter from his wife, Alice. He read it again, for the fourth or fifth time, and felt once more the instant softening of the hard shell of the soldier. It was that old familiar pull of home. Alice was in South Carolina living with relatives for the duration of the war, but Posey thought of the home they had shared together. The little patch of yard. The “zoo,” as he always called the scene inside. The crooked smile of his young son; the elegant confusion of his soft-spoken wife. He suddenly wanted to hold her, but since the censors had recently lifted the ban on specific details in letters home—at least for the territory already conquered—he wrote her a letter about his travels instead.

“Now that the campaign in France is about over,” he wrote, “we are allowed to tell of the cities we have seen. I have visited the great cathedrals of Coutances, Dol, Rennes, Laval, Le Mans, Orleans, Paris, Reims, Chalons-Sur-Marne, Chartres, and Troyes. Chartres is the greatest of all. I have also seen many fine churches in villages and many chateaux. The famous Mont-Saint-Michel and Fontainebleau are also included. The little village whose description I gave [in a previous letter] is Les Iffs, about halfway between Rennes and Saint Malo on the Brittany peninsula. I have lots of souvenir cards with autographs.”
2

He shuffled through the cards, all intended for his five-year-old son Dennis, whom he called “Woogie.” He loved to send the boy trinkets—postcards, buttons, and recently a swastika belt buckle and a towel with “
Kriegsmarine
” stitched on it that he had found at a German submarine base. They were soldiers’ souvenirs, much like those sent back by the enlisted men of Third Army with whom he felt such kinship. They were his way of staying connected with his son, and of documenting his journey through Europe, which he was keenly aware could be ended by a mine or a bullet any day.

Thinking back on the journey now, fresh from his shower, he couldn’t believe how far he had come. He had grown up in love with the military, having spent his school years in army ROTC. He had become an architect, but he was still enlisted in the Army Reserve when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. He wanted to leave for the Pacific the next day, but in the confusion of that terrible time it was almost six months before he was called to active duty. He was sent to base camp in Louisiana in the middle of the summer, the hottest, most humid place he had ever been—and he had grown up in central Alabama. From there, he was flown straight to Churchill, Manitoba, Canada’s only major port on the Arctic Ocean, and by far the coldest experience of his life. He spent most of his time in the Arctic Circle designing and building runways against a possible German invasion via the North Pole.

The North Pole! What general had looked at a globe and suddenly broken out in the hot sweats thinking about that? Posey never met any Germans in the Arctic Circle, but he did have regular contact with another enemy: polar bears. As the poor Alabama boy discovered, Churchill, Manitoba, was the polar bear capital of the world.

Now here he was in a captured German barracks in eastern France. Within a few weeks, maybe even days at the rate Third Army was moving, he would be in Germany, and not long after Berlin… at least if Papa Patton had anything to say about it.

He finished the letter to Alice—adding a PS about the luxury of a hot shower—and then picked up the packet that had arrived a few days before from SHAEF. Inside were photographs, descriptions, and background information on missing Belgian cultural treasures. Two of them were clearly the most important. One was Michelangelo’s
Bruges Madonna
, whose theft had been documented by Ronald Balfour exactly one week ago. The other was the Ghent Altarpiece.

The
Adoration of the Mystic Lamb
, more commonly referred to as the Ghent Altarpiece, was Belgium’s most important and beloved artistic treasure. Almost twelve feet high and sixteen feet wide, it consisted of two rows of hinged wood panels: four in the center, and four on each wing, with the wings painted on both sides. The twenty-four individual but thematically linked works were arranged to show a different view when the altarpiece was opened or closed. The central panel, and the one from which the piece derived its name, depicted the Lamb of God on an altar, with the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove shining above it and crowds gathered around. The altarpiece was commissioned from Hubert van Eyck, known as
maior quo nemo repertus
(“greater than anyone”), but upon his death in 1426 was taken over by his younger brother Jan van Eyck, the self-described
arte secondus
(“second best in art”) and completed in 1432.

The altarpiece, when unveiled at St. Bavo’s Cathedral in the city of Ghent, shocked the Dutch world. It was painted in a realistic manner based on direct observation, not the idealized forms of antiquity or the flattened images of the Middle Ages. The images on each panel, even the minor ones, were rendered with extraordinary attention to every detail, from the faces of the human figures, which were based on real fifteenth-century Flemish people, to the buildings, landscape, vegetation, fabrics, jewels, robes, and materials as well. This detailed realism, based on the skilled use of oil paint, was like nothing the art world had ever seen. It would transform painting and usher in the Northern Renaissance, a golden age of Dutch culture that rivaled the Italian Renaissance farther south.