The Monuments Men (24 page)

“But surely she can trust you.”

“Trust is only part of it, James. I am a creature of the French bureaucracy. When she has given me information in the past—and believe me, the information has been invaluable—I have done my duty and passed it to the proper government authorities. Unfortunately, the intended action was not always taken, or at least not taken as urgently as needed. It took the government two months—two months, James—to track down 112 cases of looted artwork Mademoiselle Valland had informed me about. During that time, the cases were lightedly guarded. By the time they were retrieved, several had been rifled.” Jaujard looked at Rorimer, but the Monuments Man didn’t respond. “It has to be an outsider, James,” he said. “Someone who can get things done. There’s no one else she will trust.”

“But she doesn’t even know me.”

“You may not know her, but she certainly knows you. She’s been watching. And she’s impressed with what you’ve done for France. She told you that herself, when you met her in my office.”

Jaujard held up his hand. “Don’t protest. You’ve done more than you think. And when you’ve had obstacles placed in your path… well, at least you’ve bashed your head against the bureaucratic wall. That counts for something.”

Jaujard rose from behind his desk. “But let’s not spend all evening talking about Rose Valland. Talk to my friend Albert Henraux. He heads the commission, and he is of the same mind. He will tell you everything.” He picked his hat off the stand by the door and started down the corridor. “I never tire of looking at the Bayeux Tapestry. Can you believe it is finally here, in the Louvre? Do you know the last time it was in Paris? 1804. Napoleon seized it from Bayeux and brought it here. He was planning to invade Britain, and he wanted to inspire his generals.”

Rorimer glanced at the walls, still empty in this part of the museum. Only a small portion of the collection had been returned; much less than the number of works stolen from the citizens of France. But it was still a hopeful sight.

“I hate to ask, Jacques, but… how do you know she wasn’t one of them? I mean, how do you know Rose Valland wasn’t working for the Nazis?”

“Because she spied for me. I ordered her to stay at the Jeu de Paume, and she did, willingly, despite the danger. She brought me information almost every week. Valuable information. Because of her, the Resistance managed to delay indefinitely the departure of the last German trains transporting priceless art stolen from France’s greatest private collections.”

Jaujard stopped. “I know her, James. Her loyalty to France and to the artwork is beyond question. When you get to know her, you will understand that, too.” He started walking again. “If you doubt her,” he said with a smile, “ask her about the details of the art train. Rose Valland probably saved more important paintings,” Jaujard added absently, “than most conservators will work with in a lifetime. Especially the ones who didn’t have to live through this damn war. Ah, here we are.”

They were entering the room where the Bayeux Tapestry was spread along the length of two walls. Rorimer walked slowly along its length, absorbed in the artistry. The effusion of detail, the extraordinary range of the storytelling and the scenes of medieval life flashed before his eyes in all their glory, a novel in picture form.

“I’ve been wondering about this since my visit two weeks ago,” Rorimer said from the far end of the room. One of the last scenes, which if he recalled correctly featured scattered soldiers, their arms and weapons held high in the air, was covered by a temporary wall. “Surely it wasn’t damaged? Not after all these centuries.”

Jaujard shook his head. “It wasn’t the condition of the tapestry,” he said. “It was the inscription:
In fuga verterunt Agli
—The English Turned in Flight.”

Rorimer remembered suddenly what the scattered soldiers represented: the English army retreating before the might of the French. He couldn’t help but laugh. “A little sensitive, aren’t we?”

Jaujard shrugged. “We are at war.”

CHAPTER 19

Christmas Wishes

Metz, France

December 1944

T
he winter of 1944 was perhaps the most brutal period of the war on the Western front. General Montgomery’s combined British and Canadian Twenty-first Army Group, pushed back at the Rhine by entrenched German forces, spent weeks slogging through the river’s hazardous delta to open the important port city of Antwerp, Belgium, for delivery of much-needed supplies.

U.S. First Army had entered the Hürtgen Forest, a perilous corridor of steep wooded valleys shot through with German fortifications, dug-in troops, and mines. By December, the snow was thick in the trees and in places the ground was frozen too hard to dig foxholes. Advancing was arduous. In one deeply forested section, the army gained only 3,000 yards in a month, and lost 4,500 men in the process. The Battle of Hürtgen Forest, destined to be the longest in U.S. military history, would last from September 1944 to February 1945. When it ended, First Army had conquered less than fifty square miles.

Farther south, General Patton and U.S. Third Army barreled into the heavily fortified city of Metz, on the eastern border of France. The city, surrounded by forts and observation posts connected by trenches and tunnels, had been a citadel since the time of the Romans, and was the last city in the region to surrender to the Germanic tribes. Since then, it had been a crucible of west-central Europe, a city fought over by everyone from the first Crusaders, who slaughtered Jews there in 1096, to Bourbon kings and English bandits. In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, it withstood a massive assault but fell to a Prussian siege and temporarily became part of the German state. The French won it back, but with diplomacy, not direct attack. In November 1944, Third Army became the next in a long line of armies to try to conquer Metz.

When aerial bombardment failed, Patton sent in the troops. The fighting lasted almost a month, with soldiers climbing sheer stone fortification walls and battling in underground tunnels laced with razor wire and iron bars. In the end, every German position fell but Fort Driant, their defensive pivot, which surrendered without being conquered. The advance from the Moselle River had cost more than 47,000 American casualties and gained less than thirty miles. General Patton, exasperated with both the German defenses and the seven inches of rain that had fallen during the advance, wrote the secretary of war, “I hope that in the final settlement of the war, you insist that the Germans retain Lorraine, because I can imagine no greater burden than to be the owner of this nasty country where it rains every day and where the whole wealth of the people consists in assorted manure piles.”
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December proved worse. On December 8, the day the last Germans officially surrendered at Metz, General Patton sent his troops a Christmas greeting containing the following prayer: “Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies, and establish Thy justice among men and nations. Amen.”
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The Weather Prayer didn’t work. The skies remained cloudy; the temperatures plunged. Snow piled up shoulder-high in wooded ravines and tumbled off branches in dangerous, icy clumps. The dense fog would roll in, plunging the world into shadow, only to suddenly roll out again and leave the dark-clad soldiers easy marks against the white snow. In the Ardennes Forest, the ground froze so hard the soldiers’ folding shovels and pickaxes could not break its surface. A few fortunate units were given dynamite sticks to create foxholes; others made do with line-strung pup tents and shared blankets. The stinging cold took off fingers, even through gloves. Trenchfoot, a rotting of the foot caused by prolonged exposure to dampness and subfreezing temperatures, was epidemic among weary soldiers too cold or swollen to remove their combat boots. Frostbite and hypothermia became an enemy to rival the German artillery positions, which seemed entrenched on every square inch of ground from the North Sea to the Swiss border. The Western armies, so recently racing forward, had entered a brutal war of attrition along both sides of the German border, one that would be measured in yards, not miles.

Monuments Man Robert Posey, the architect from Alabama, must have thought of his first posting, in the bleak reaches of northern Canada, and thanked his stars he was billeted in the French city of Nancy instead of his tent. In Metz, where he traveled frequently for inspection tours, the cultural damage was immense. The city’s famous collection of medieval manuscripts had been destroyed by fire. He had found most of the valuable artwork in repositories, but the city’s relics, including its most precious possession, the cloak of Charlemagne, had been shipped to Germany for “safekeeping” along with the cathedral treasury. But Nancy had suffered little damage, and since Third Army would be headquartered there for most of the winter, Posey decided to write a short letter of historical notes on its architectural and artistic history. After his experiences in the field, he had embraced the idea of an educated, interested army.

The letter would prove immensely popular with the men, giving some context to the ground they were fighting over, but that didn’t make it easy to write. Nancy was a commercial and artistic hub, but the history Posey kept thinking back to on those cold December days was that of the military. The troops were out there fighting and dying in the cold, and he could never for a moment forget it. He was as much a military man, he had begun to realize, as an architect; he had written his wife, Alice, that “the army is better than college for meeting people you enjoy knowing. There seems to be a closer common bond.”
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And he hadn’t been referring to his fellow Monuments Men.

Posey wasn’t a privileged man. He had been raised on a dirt farm outside the small town of Morris, Alabama, where architecture meant slapping new pieces of plywood on the side of the house and art was only the reflection of the sky in a muddy puddle after the rain. But what the Posey family lacked in social standing and material comfort, they compensated for with history. Every member of the family—every male member, at least—could recite the roll call of honor from which he was descended: Frances Posey, who fought in the colonial wars against French and Indian troops; Hezekiah Posey, a minuteman in the South Carolina militia during the Revolutionary War, wounded by Tories in 1780; Joseph Harrison Posey, who fought the Creek Indians in the War of 1812; Carnot Posey—Robert’s son Dennis’s first name was Carnot after this ancestor—who survived Gettysburg but died from a battle wound four months later; Carnot’s brother, John Wesley Posey, who fought with the 15th Mounted Mississippi Infantry—they would ride horses to the battle, then fight on foot—and was the only one of the eight fighting Posey brothers to survive the Civil War.

In the eastern French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, a similar history of honor and sacrifice was all around him. As the cemeteries attested, hardly a generation had lived here in peace since Attila plunged the Roman Empire into darkness. Earlier, he had passed near the French city of Verdun, the site of the bloodiest battle of World War I, where a million men had been wounded and 250,000 had died. He had inspected the military cemeteries at Meuse-Argonne and Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, filled with the dead of that war. “The Great War,” they called it. “The War to End All Wars.” But at Montsec the memorial to the fallen heroes of World War I had been chipped to hell by the bullets of this war. And at St. Mihiel, an American military cemetery, German soldiers had destroyed all the headstones featuring the Star of David.

He thought about Christmas. Would Woogie miss him? Would they have presents and stockings, turkey and stuffing, or was that lost to rationing, too? Over here, there would be little celebration. Christmas was just another workday, just as it had been growing up in Alabama. In a good year back then, little Robert got a handkerchief and an orange. One year his father fashioned a little cart—although come to think of it that was in the spring, not at Christmastime—and the children took turns being pulled around the yard by the family goat. Then he died. His father and the goat. And eleven-year-old Robert, having seen his little sister given away to his aunt because she simply couldn’t be fed, had started working two jobs, one at the grocery store and the other at the soda fountain.

The military rescued him. He had joined army ROTC as soon as he was old enough. It provided him with food, money, a future. It paid his way to Auburn University. He was supposed to go one year, then switch with his younger brother, since even with ROTC funding the family couldn’t afford two tuitions. Robert proved such a good student that his brother insisted he go straight through. That’s when Robert discovered his second love: architecture. And that’s the way it had been ever since: the army and architecture, mingled together in his mind and his heart.

He put down his pencil and reached for his preserved figs and peanuts, a Christmas present from Alice. Figs and peanuts: It was more than he could ever have imagined as a child. And there were still several boxes of presents to open, some even wrapped with paper. He was saving those for Christmas morning.

He thought of the moment he had realized there was a world out there. He was eight years old, and he saw a picture of a mountain. There was snow on top, but in the valley below there were flowers. He didn’t have a way to find out why that was, so he started trying to figure it all out in his mind. The more he thought, the more complicated and wonderful life became. There were so many questions, he realized, that he would be busy trying to answer them for the rest of his life.
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