The Monuments Men (22 page)

“Careful,” the colonel said from the passenger seat. “If I’m going to die out here, I want it to be from German shells, not a damned car accident.” In the backseat, Hancock noticed, George Stout hadn’t even blinked.

The danger of shells was real. The hole at the command center at Kornelimünster, made only two or three days before, proved that. Next to the hole, a poster read, “When you have entered these halls you may say you have been to the front.”
1
And as they arrived at Büsbach, Hancock calculated that Kornelimünster was three miles behind them. This was truly the front. Yesterday, on his first visit to the isolated command post, Hancock had found soldiers digging through smoldering rubble. The rubble was a little house they had turned into sleeping quarters; it had been destroyed less than half an hour before his arrival.

The damage reminded Hancock of the Suermondt Museum in Aachen, where he had spent a considerable portion of the last month. Except for minor provincial works, all the paintings in the museum had been evacuated before the fighting. As a Monuments Man, his job was to find out where they had gone. So he had pulled a dusty chair and begun searching through the battered files still standing in the bomb-cratered offices. There was no electricity, and the hulking piles of debris threw odd shadows in the beam of his flashlight. His lips were constantly blackened, the result of the dust still hanging in the stagnant air, and the water in his canteen never lasted long enough. But he hardly noticed his discomfort. His large sculptures took years to complete, sometimes decades; he had learned to be a patient, meticulous man. And despite the occasional glamour of the Dutch art repository at Maastricht or Chartres Cathedral, this was the real work of a Monuments Man: the careful sifting of information, the patient study, the watchful eye.

Hancock’s persistence paid off. First, he found a list of rural schools, houses, cafés, and churches where paintings and sculptures had been stored. He had checked several of the sites, yielding an impressive cache of paintings, but nothing world-class. Then, near the end of his searching, he had found the Suermondt’s Rosetta Stone buried in a stack of debris. It was a dusty catalogue of the museum’s collection, with each item marked in red or blue. A handwritten note on the cover explained that the items in red, which Hancock recognized immediately as the museum’s most important works, had been moved to Siegen, a city about one hundred miles east behind enemy lines.

Hancock thought about it now, as he eased the enclosed staff car—such luxury after all those days of hitching and nights without food!—along the road to the front. There must be a large repository in Siegen, a storehouse of some sort. Possibly located in a concrete tower or a church or, like the repository he had visited with George Stout in Holland, at the base of a hill. And if the best works of the Suermondt Museum were there, why not the treasures of Aachen Cathedral? The bust of Charlemagne; the cross of Lothar decorated with Caesar’s cameo; the shrine holding the robe of Mary. Were they in Siegen, too?

But if they were in Siegen… what then? Siegen was an entire city. There were hundreds of possible hiding places. And there was no guarantee the repository was even in the city itself. It could easily be five, ten, even twenty miles outside of town.

He had begun to search for human intelligence. Somebody knew more. He was sure of that. But who? With the help of an MFAA archivist, he had combed the roles of the Allied detention centers, where most of the citizens of Aachen were being held, cross-checking them against lists of the city’s cultural leaders. No matches. Eventually, he found an elderly painter, who led him to a museum caretaker, who suggested some architects, but nobody knew anything about Siegen.

“They’re all gone,” the young caretaker told him. “Only trusted Nazis knew the details of the operation, and they all went east with the troops.”

But the search for the treasures of Aachen Cathedral, and information on the mysterious repository at Siegen, was only part of his duties. Since hitting the combat zone, he had spent most of his time on errands like this one, examining liberated monuments and answering calls from combat commanders. It seemed the Americans couldn’t enter a house without finding a “Michelangelo” amid the paintings of forest nymphs and flowers.

But this call, this might be the one. That’s why he had brought George Stout back with him. If anyone could identify the proverbial needle in the haystack, it was Stout. Not that he didn’t trust his own judgment; it just seemed a little convenient. After all, the painting had turned up just when he had begun to wonder if the haystack even contained needles at all.

He thought back twenty-four hours, to his first sight of the painting. He had recognized the style immediately. Flemish. Sixteenth century. Was it by Peter Breughel the Elder, the great Belgian master, or someone who worked closely with him? He had seen works of comparable quality at Maastricht, but none had taken his breath away like this one. To see a painting of this quality leaning against the wall of a command post amid the bullets and the grime was to understand that great works of art were part of the world. They were objects. They were fragile. They were lonely, small, unprotected. A child on a playground looks strong, but a child wandering alone down Madison Avenue in New York City—that’s terrifying.

“Where did you find it, sir?” he had asked the commanding officer.

“Peasant cottage,” the CO had replied.

“Anything with it?”

“That’s all.”

Hancock’s mind had slipped through the facts. This was no peasant painting, but a museum-quality work. It was clearly stolen, then left behind as the Germans retreated. But it was only one painting, casually cast aside. Probably the result of individual looting, found by a passing officer in some country estate and abandoned when it became a life-threatening burden. It wasn’t the key to anything. But that didn’t make it any less valuable as a work of art.

He had stared at the painting, thinking about the muddy road back to Verviers, open for miles to German shelling. The uncovered jeep was protection enough for his own life, but he didn’t feel comfortable trusting it with a cultural treasure.

“Congratulations, Commander,” Hancock had said. “This is a real find.” An artillery shell detonated outside, shaking splinters from the roof. Hancock had jumped; the CO seemed not to even notice. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew it.”

“Unfortunately, sir, I don’t have a truck. I’ll have to leave it here for now, but I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“Are you going back to headquarters?”

“Yes sir, I am.”

“For God’s sake,” the officer said, “get them to send out a lamp. We haven’t got anything that will give light here—not even a candle—and this is a hell of a place to be after dark.”
2

At headquarters the following day, Hancock had picked up not only the lamps but the colonel, who had just arrived from SHAEF and was eager to witness actual combat, and George Stout, who had just returned from the field. The American presence in Western Europe had grown to more than a million soldiers, so Eisenhower had created an administrative division under the command of General Omar Bradley. Bradley’s U.S. Twelfth Army Group had jurisdiction over First Army, Third Army, Ninth Army, and the newly arrived Fifteenth Army. George Stout had just been assigned to the Twelfth as their Monuments Man. In short, his worst fear had come true: He’d been kicked upstairs to management. Hancock had noticed Stout was in no hurry to head back to Paris to assume that command.

The man was a true professional, a real working fellow, and the one qualified conservator in a world of curators, artists, and architects.
An expert and a precisionist first makes his analysis
, Hancock thought as he drove, recalling Stout’s advice on one of their first trips together,
then his decision
.
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Hancock was glad to have him along because George Stout always knew what to do. He would make the decisions and accept the responsibility. The colonel he could take or leave. He was nothing but back-office blowhard, the kind that infuriated the grunts, but at least agreeing to bring him along for a sightseeing tour of the front meant an enclosed staff car instead of a hazardous one-ton truck. After months in the field, Hancock felt like a chauffeur in a limousine.

“There she is,” the colonel said. “It’s about damn time.”

The command post looked precarious, a rickety wooden cottage in a muddy yard. Allied aircraft roared overhead as Hancock hit the brakes. The air was thick with smoke and dust. The fighting, Hancock noticed, seemed closer than it had been the previous day.
Maybe the fire’s just hotter
, he thought, as the big guns recoiled. He could hear shells exploding, but he couldn’t tell whether they were coming or going. This was clearly no place for artwork—or a Monuments Man. Hancock’s plan was simple: Grab the painting and go.

Stout had other ideas.

“You take the notes,” he told Hancock, kneeling before the painting after a wave of introductions all around.
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Gently, he ran his fingers over the surface like a blind man greeting an old friend. “Kermess,” he said firmly. “Sixteenth-century Flemish, workshop of Peter Breughel the Elder.”
5

I knew it
, Hancock thought. “Workshop” meant the master had advised on it, at least, if not worked on some of it himself.

Stout turned the painting over. “Support: oak panel.” He pulled out his tape measure. “0.84 meters by… 1.2 meters by… 0.004 meters. Three members of equal width, joined on the horizontal.”

The concussion of shells rattled the ceiling beams, knocking loose plaster dust and debris. Outside the window, Hancock noticed the colonel standing atop a pile of rubble, watching the battle through his binoculars.

“Cradle: low, seven longitudinal, oak, ten sliding transverse, pine. Multiple warp. Slightly worm-eaten. Broken lower corners, planed down at the time the cradle was applied.”

Stout again turned the frame over to examine the painting.
Analysis first
, Hancock thought,
then decision
. Stout never hurried. He never guessed. He never acted out of fear or ignorance, even if just this one time Walker Hancock wished he would.

“Ground: white, very thin. Broken and flaked, sparse, buckled: lower moderate, extensive upper.”

Hancock noticed men gathering out of the shadows. These were infantrymen, young soldiers drafted right out of school, the first into the fight. For months they had been shot at, mined, counterattacked, and shelled. They bathed out of their helmets, or not at all, and ate out of ration tins, wiping their spoons on their pants. Their billet had been destroyed, so they threw themselves down wherever they could find a comfortable spot. As always, Hancock wanted to say something to them, to thank them somehow, but Stout spoke first.

“Paint: oil, rich, and generally thin with translucent film in dark areas and monochrome drawing sparsely visible underneath.”

Outside, the colonel was cheering, delighted by his first encounter with warfare. Inside, two Monuments Men bent over a four-hundred-year-old painting in the faint light of a newly arrived lamp. The first was kneeling on the ground, studying its surface like an archeologist in an Egyptian tomb or a medic with a wounded man. The second hunched behind him, concentrating on his notes. The soldiers, tired and dirty, huddled around them like the shepherds at the manger, staring silently at a painting of expressive faces and peasant villagers and at the two adult men in soldiers’ garb fussing over every square centimeter of its surface.

Letter from George Stout To his colleague Langdon Warner

October 4, 1944

Dear Langdon:

The news about our directors’ resignation [from the Fogg Art Museum] did not come from them first or in fact at all. Margie told me…. I suppose I should write them but I’m mildly troubled as to what I should say. Hall’s “Social and Business Forms,” a sure guide to propriety in such matters and one that stood on my father’s bookshelf, had no example of a letter addressed to co-directors of an art museum in which the writer has worked, upon being indirectly apprised of their retirement from office.…

Koehler is quite right. The job ought to fall to somebody who will make the museum a working part—one working part—of the department…. I don’t believe I’ve ever been more certain than I am now that the development and understanding of man’s workmanship is the fundamental need of man’s spirit; or that we can never look for a healthy social body until that need, among others, is fed. I hope to put in the rest of my life really working at that job.

From my point of view, this [being a Monuments Man] is not a bad job. During the last three weeks I’ve been in harness with an Englishman who’s gone horribly sour and says we’re wasting our time. I don’t know what he expected. Some strange romantic adventure, personal glory, or great authority, perhaps. He doesn’t convince me. We can’t count the result but I’m satisfied, not with what I’ve done but with what the job stands for. One little thing that is neither here nor there and won’t stand on any record pleases me. That is the attitude of the men I run across. They don’t really care what’s been damaged but they seem to figure it’s part of the game and they want to know more about it. Men and officers, all down the line. Yesterday, a fellow I’d seen before, a sergeant I’d known back a ways and a fellow who couldn’t get out two consecutive words that would print in the Monitor, wanted to know if the monuments were much shot up around there. And I remember back in France, some weeks ago, a rough old colonel I had to make some parlay with. I told him what my office was. His eyes looked incredulous in a face that seemed to have been worked over with one of these hammers they use to pound steaks. He said, “What the hell’s that?” So we went into it a little. It was past lunch time. He stuck around with his executive while I ate some K rations off the fender of my jallopy and they kept on talking about it until I had a hard time to get away. These fellows are just naturally interested in a good piece of work and have no unnatural restrictions in looking it over. Perhaps, and may the sahibs of the Fogg forgive me for thinking it, this simple, curious outlook of healthy men is more important than some of the monuments themselves.