The Monuments Men (30 page)

The bus entered the industrial section of Newark, where the factories hummed through the night. The bus was always full, even though this route had been mostly empty before the war. At the factory stops it would become completely jammed, not even standing room, with workers coming off the midnight shift at the war factories. He could see them waiting patiently on the sidewalks, mostly older men or women, exhausted but proud. In order to save fabric for tents and uniforms, women wore shorter dresses, and he could see their well-turned legs as they walked home or waited for the next bus. For the same reason, men weren’t allowed to wear pants cuffs. He wasn’t as impressed with this change.

What he really noticed, though, were the flags. Every factory, and almost every house, flew an American flag. In the residential areas, almost every window also displayed a white banner featuring a blue star and a red border. The banner meant someone in the household was in the service. If the banner featured a gold star and a yellow border, someone in that household had been killed in action.

When he graduated from high school, Harry knew his parents would post one of those blue-and-red banners; probably two, since his brother Klaus planned to join the navy as soon as he turned seventeen. Already, boys had started to drift out of his high school, including the valedictorian, Casimir Cwiakala, who would be shot down over the Pacific. Only a third of the boys in Harry’s class, in fact, were planning to attend their graduation ceremony. The rest were already in the army or the navy, training to be pilots, tankers, and infantrymen.

Harry had no desire to avoid the war, but he was also in no rush to enlist. The war wasn’t going away; it would always have room for him. Deep inside, that didn’t make him comfortable, but his duty to fight was never something he questioned. Like every other young man in the spring of 1944, Harry Ettlinger was going to join the army, be sent overseas, and become a proud, disciplined, terrified soldier. He couldn’t imagine his life unfolding any other way. Until then, he had responsibilities. In the morning, he went to high school. After school, he worked in a factory to help support his family. Before the war, Shiman Manufacturing had made jewelry; now it churned out disposable chisels for army dentists.

The draft notice arrived, as expected, soon after graduation, and on August 11, 1944, Harry Ettlinger shipped to basic training. The Allies had broken out at Normandy, and no doubt his mother watched the daily map in the newspaper, the front lines spreading north and east across Europe. Harry and his fellow recruits didn’t follow the army’s progress. It didn’t matter to them. They were going to Europe, they were going to fight, and some of them were going to die. Where exactly that happened wasn’t of any consequence.

For now, they were stuck in a place called Macon, Georgia, and their life was rise early, wash and dress, bunks spick and span, breakfast, march here, march there, take an M1 rifle apart and put it back to together, yes sir, no sir, march, eat, march, clean, back to sleep, and rise early and do it all over again. They lived every minute of every day in a ten-man unit, lined up from tallest to shortest (Harry was number four), and that unit seemed their whole world.

In mid-November, near the end of training, Harry Ettlinger was called out of the morning roll-call line. “Are you a United States citizen, Private Ettlinger?” an officer asked him.

“No sir.”

“You are a German, is that right, Private?”

“A German Jew, sir.”

“How long have you been in this country?”

“Five years, sir.”

“Then come with me.”

A few hours later, in front of a local Georgia judge, Harry Ettlinger was sworn in as a U.S. citizen. Six weeks later, he was in Givet, Belgium, only a few miles from his native country, awaiting the orders that would send his unit to the front.

Givet was a replacement depot, known to the men as a “repple depple,” a staging area for replacement troops being deployed to units that had suffered heavy casualties. At Givet, Harry Ettlinger and a thousand buddies lived in triple bunks in an enormous barn. It was the coldest January on record; the heat from the coal stoves fled straight up while the freezing wind blew freely through the gaps in the old wood facing of the barn. The snow was so thick that Harry never saw a single blade of Belgian grass. The sky didn’t clear for two weeks, and when it finally did he stepped outside to see airplanes from horizon to horizon, his first sight of the magnificent Western Allied war machine. The Battle of the Bulge had turned. The Germans had been beaten back at Bastogne and the Ardennes, and the Allies were once again on the advance. But nobody had any illusions. The Germans weren’t going to surrender, not until every one of their cities lay flattened and destroyed. Thousands of Allied soldiers were going to die fighting for every inch of soil, and thousands of German soldiers and civilians, too. Clear skies meant bombs, death, and, more important at the moment to the men at Givet, freezing temperatures. That night was one of the coldest of Harry’s life.

A few nights later, the orders arrived. The replacement soldiers were moving out. The next morning, more than a hundred trucks were lined up in the snow outside the barn. The officers called out unit numbers, and the men climbed onto the trucks with their bags, guns, and other gear. They had no idea where they were going, only that it was to join the 99th Infantry Division somewhere at the front. Harry was in the fifth truck with the other eight men in his unit (one had mysteriously dropped out), the men he had lived with now for more than five months. They didn’t say much to each other as the other trucks in the line were loaded, and they didn’t say much when they heard the truck in front of them shift into gear and begin to move out. This was it, they were on their way, together, and they were both excited and afraid.

And then, suddenly, a sergeant was running alongside the convoy, waving his arms for the lead truck to stop. When the trucks ground to a halt, the sergeant walked up and down the line, calling out again and again so that the thousands of men in the trucks could hear: “The following three men get your gear and come with me.” Harry was so shocked when he heard his name, he didn’t get off the truck.

“That’s you,” someone said, nudging him.

Harry climbed down and placed his gear on the ground at his feet. Down the line, he saw two more men, out of more than twenty-five hundred, climb off their trucks and throw down their gear. He looked back one last time at the eight men left in his squad, his brothers in arms. Within a month, three of them would be dead. Four others would be seriously wounded. Only one man would make it out of the war unscathed.

“Private Ettlinger, sir.” Harry saluted as the sergeant approached. The sergeant nodded, checked the name off his clipboard, then signaled for the convoy to move out. As the trucks rolled away, Harry hefted his bag and started back to the barn, unsure of where he was going or why, but sure that it wasn’t to the front. It was January 28, 1945, his nineteenth birthday. Harry Ettlinger would always consider it the best birthday of his life.

CHAPTER 25

Coming Through the Battle

La Gleize, Belgium

February 1, 1945

W
alker Hancock arrived in La Gleize, Belgium, on a deadly cold February afternoon. Before the Bulge, he had spent a delightful afternoon here in the company of a kindly hostess and a lovely, unknown sculpture of the Virgin Mary. During the Bulge, he had watched with dismay as the enemy lines advanced west across the map, engulfing Aachen, crossing the Siegfried Line, and finally bulging into Belgium, where they began to slow, then creep, and then finally grind to a halt in the Amblève Valley. Right at the point of stalemate, underneath the pin on the map, was the town of La Gleize. Every time he looked at that pin, he thought of the young woman and the extraordinary Madonna, only weeks earlier so far removed from the war.
Nothing is beyond this war
, he kept thinking, wondering if they had survived.
Nothing is immune.

Now that the Bulge was over, and the Allies had pushed back the German advance, Walker Hancock was anxious to see what had become of the peaceful little village. Bill Lesley, the first Monuments Man to tour the valley after the Battle of the Bulge, had reported La Gleize virtually destroyed, but nonetheless Hancock was surprised by the horrid conditions. The houses were all ruined, the stores burned out and abandoned, shattered equipment and spent bullet cartridges lined the streets. The cathedral, battered by heavy artillery, was little more than a shell. It appeared to teeter on the hillside, ready to fall and wipe out the last remnants of the town. Strangely, the door was locked; Hancock entered through a gaping hole in the wall. The roof had been blown apart, and the broken beams swayed in the vicious wind heavy with snow and ice. The pews had been turned over and piled up to form barricades, the chairs tossed. In the wreckage, he saw ammunition, bandages, ration cans, and shreds of uniforms. The Germans had used the cathedral as a fortress, then as a field hospital, and Hancock suspected bodies, perhaps both German and American, were frozen under the snow.
Nothing is beyond this war
, he thought again.

But one thing was: the Madonna. She stood just as he had seen her two months ago, in the middle of the nave, one hand on her heart, the other raised in benediction. She seemed hardly to notice her surroundings, focused as she was on the distant divine. But against that backdrop, she looked more miraculous and hopeful than ever, her beauty triumphant even in the midst of devastation and despair.

The town wasn’t abandoned, at least not entirely. As Hancock walked down the icy main road, he noticed a few stragglers, shell-shocked and worn, peeking out from the ruins of their homes. The
curé
of the cathedral was again missing, but a man named Monsieur George, the perfect picture of a war survivor right down to the bloody bandage around his head, offered his assistance.

“I’ve come for the Madonna,” Hancock said, sitting across the table from Monsieur George and his wife in their sparse kitchen. He produced a letter signed by the bishop of Liège, who held authority over this parish. “The bishop has offered the crypt in the seminary at Liège until the end of the war. The weather is bad, I know, but there’s no time to lose. I have a truck and a good driver. We can take her today.”

Monsieur George frowned. So did his wife. “The Madonna isn’t leaving La Gleize. Not today, not ever.” In fact, Monsieur George had no desire to even see her moved from the cathedral.

What about the snow, the cold, the wind, the unstable roof? Hancock argued as best he could, but the man would not be moved.

“I’ll call a meeting,” Monsieur George said eventually, ending the conversation. An hour later, a dozen frowning people—Hancock wondered if this was every living person in town—were crowded into Monsieur George’s house, listening to Hancock hopelessly argue his case.

“This house has a good cellar,” Monsieur George said finally. “The
curé
stayed with us here during the battle. Though some of us were wounded by bullets that came through the little window, that danger is now past. I propose we bring the Virgin to the cellar.”
1

Hancock wasn’t happy, but it seemed the best possible compromise. At least the house wasn’t in imminent danger of collapse. “She can’t be moved,” someone said. “The attachments between her irons and the stone pedestal are unbreakable. I should know. I cemented them together myself.”

“Then surely,” Hancock replied, “if you did such clever work to bond them, your cleverness can part them, too.”

The mason shook his head. “No power under heaven can break that bond. Not even me.”

“What about removing the pedestal from the floor?”

The mason thought for a moment. “It might be done.”

“She will not be moved,” another voice cried out. Hancock turned to see a short, square-jawed man rising from his seat.

“Be reasonable now… ” Monsieur George protested, but the man refused to back down. She had survived the battle, he said. She was all that remained of their old lives. She
was
the community now. She was God’s grace; their salvation. Who was this outsider, this… American, to tell them what to do? She should stand as she always had, in the cathedral. Even if most of the cathedral was gone.

“I agree with the
notaire
,” the mason said.

A few others squirmed. Hancock looked around the room at their gaunt faces and visible bandages. The Madonna wasn’t art to them, he realized; it represented their lives, their community, their collective soul. Why hide her in a cellar, they were thinking, when we need her now more than ever? She had triumphed. They couldn’t acknowledge, after all they had been through, that the danger could return.

But Hancock knew the danger was already there, at least for the sculpture, in the form of a splintered roof and badly damaged walls. “Let’s go to the cathedral,” he suggested. “Perhaps we can find a solution.”

The small procession trudged across the empty town, picking its way around snowdrifts, ice clumps, shattered artillery, and debris. Someone had the key so they entered the cathedral through the door, despite the fact that only a few feet away there was no wall. Snow was falling in large flakes and settling on the Madonna. The little party crowded around her, as if warmed by her glow. Hancock looked into her face. Sadness, peace, and maybe surprise.

He started to speak on her behalf, and that’s when the roof gave way. With a sudden sawing, a huge piece of wood came crashing to the floor, shattering the stillness. Snow and dust exploded upward in a cloud, and great chunks of ice rained down. As the air cleared and the debris settled, the
notaire
slowly came back into focus, his face as white as the snow. He was standing almost directly under the collapsed beam. It had been a very near miss.