The Monuments Men (31 page)

“Well… ” Hancock started, as another chunk of ice slid from the roof and hit a few inches from the
notaire
’s foot.

“I propose that the statue be moved to the cellar of the house of Monsieur George,” the
notaire
said.
2

The mason was right, it was impossible to separate the statue from its base. So two broken roof beams were lashed to the stone pedestal, and a few of the men began to rock the statue back and forth to loosen it from the floor. Even though the base of the Madonna was only about four feet tall, it took eight of them to carry her out of the cathedral and down the slippery slope through the center of town. All were stooped by the weight, watching their feet and picking their way carefully through the ice. Hancock wore his combat uniform and helmet; the townspeople wore fedoras and berets, a few of the older men in suits and long coats. A young woman led the procession in a cape and hood. The Madonna rose a full head above them all, solemn and peaceful. It was the strangest parade La Gleize had ever seen.

After the Madonna was safe in the cellar, a young man invited Hancock and his driver to dinner. Accepting gratefully, Hancock was surprised to find himself once again sharing the hospitality of Monsieur Geneen, the farmer-innkeeper whose daughter had entertained and fed him on his first visit to town. Hancock wanted only his K-rations and some hot water to dissolve his coffee powder, but again the family insisted on a full meal. This despite the fact that the rear half of the house was gone, leaving the living area open to the cold. Through one gap, he could see a large pile of grenades, Panzerfauste (handheld antitank rockets), and other live ammunition the family had cleared from the grounds; through the other, nothing but darkness. Everything seemed wrong, unreal. And yet here were the same people, looking older and more tired, but alive and well and spreading before him nothing less than a feast. In all that destruction, freshly cooked meat and vegetables were the most wondrous and unexpected sights of all.

They talked about the failure of the German advance; the ingenuity of the American soldiers; their possible futures. Hancock ate heartily. He looked from face to face, from the gaps in the wall to the pile of explosives to the two small rooms, and finally to the wonderful plate of food before him. A realization hit him.

“This isn’t the house I visited before,” he said.
3

Monsieur Geneen put down his fork and folded his hands. “In the middle of the night,” he said, “I awoke and from my bed I saw the sky through a shell hole in the wall. And when I began to realize where I was and why I was there I thought to myself, ‘Isn’t this a hard thing to come to me at my age after a life of unbroken labor! Not even to have four solid walls around me and my family!’ Then I remembered that this was not even my house; that my friend who had owned it was dead; that of the house that I myself had built not a wall remained. And I was very sad. And then suddenly the truth came to me. We had come through the battle. During all that time we had enough to eat. We were all well and we could work.” He nodded toward his family, then at the two American soldiers seated across the table. “We,” he said, “were the lucky ones!”
4

The battle had passed. Hancock was certain now the fighting would not come back to La Gleize. But out to the east, in Germany, the war was grinding on.

CHAPTER 26

The New Monuments Man

Luxembourg and Western Germany

December 5, 1944–February 24, 1945

I
n early December 1944, George Stout received word that several new men would be assigned to the MFAA for U.S. Twelfth Army Group. They were all enlisted men intended as assistants to the Monuments officers in the field, but they were all accomplished cultural professionals. As usual, it would take weeks to get official assignments for them, but at least he knew more help was on the way.

Sheldon Keck, assigned by Stout to assist the newest U.S. Ninth Army Monuments officer, Walter “Hutch” Huchthausen, was an esteemed art conservator. He had served as a soldier in the army since 1943, but had only recently been assigned for monuments duty. Married with a young son—“Keckie” was only three weeks old when his father reported for duty—Keck was exactly the kind of professional man Stout had envisioned for the conservation effort.

Lamont Moore, a curator at the National Gallery who had helped evacuate its prized works to the Biltmore Estate in 1941, remained to help George Stout run the Twelfth Army Group MFAA office, an essential responsibility since he was so often away on trips to the front.

Walker Hancock was supposed to receive a ranked assistant, Corporal Lehman, but his transfer was tied up in army bureaucracy. For now, Hancock was going it alone—but with the frequent advice and assistance of George Stout.

The last new man was, without a doubt, the most impressive. Private First Class Lincoln Kirstein, thirty-seven years old, was a well-known and well-connected intellectual gadfly and cultural impresario. The son of a self-made businessman who had risen from obscurity to become an associate of President Roosevelt, Kirstein had shown extraordinary promise from a young age. As a Harvard undergraduate in the 1920s, he had started the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, a direct predecessor of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He also cofounded a literary review,
Hound and Horn
, which was so well respected that it published original pieces by world-renowned writers like the novelist Alan Tate and the poet e.e. cummings.
Hound and Horn
also published America’s first warning (written under an assumed name by Alfred Barr, the first director of the new Museum of Modern Art) about Hitler’s attitude toward art.

After graduation, Kirstein became a novelist and artist. But it was as a patron of the arts, not a creator of them, that he was to make his name. A highly respected critic, by his early thirties he was a leading figure in the New York City cultural scene, counting among his close friends the poet laureate of the United States Archibald MacLeish and the writer Christopher Isherwood, whose chronicle of Nazi Berlin,
I Am a Camera
, would catapult him to international fame (and eventually become the basis for the musical and movie
Cabaret
).

Kirstein’s major contribution to the art world, however, had occurred quietly and had, as of the outbreak of war, proved only moderately successful. In 1934, he had convinced the great Russian ballet choreographer George Balanchine to emigrate to the United States. The two men had founded the School of American Ballet, as well as several traveling ballet “caravans” and the American Ballet Company in New York City.

But like everyone else, Kirstein put his plans on hold in 1942. Chronically short of money to support his various projects, unsure of his future, and determined not to become a simple enlisted soldier, he had applied for the Naval Reserves. He was turned down because, like most Jews—as well as blacks, Asians, and southern Europeans—he didn’t meet the racially suspect requirement of being at least a third-generation American citizen.
1
He was rejected by the Coast Guard for faulty vision. So he joined the army as a private in February 1943. “At 36 I did with difficulty what wouldn’t have been so tough at 26, and fun at 16,” he wrote his good friend Archibald MacLeish, then Librarian of Congress, about his experiences in boot camp.
2
To another friend he confessed, “I am an old man and find the going very hard…. I am so tired I can’t sleep, but I believe they only care if you get 4½ hours…. I learned (almost) to shoot and disassemble a rifle, roll away from a not very big tank, do very slow an awful obstacle course and fall into assorted water hazards. I don’t think it’s fun—although most do.”
3
At least, he joked, he managed to lose forty-five pounds.

After completing basic training, Kirstein was rejected for the third, fourth, and fifth time: by the War Department division of counterespionage, Army Intelligence, and finally the Signal Corps. He ended up training to be a combat engineer at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where he wrote instruction manuals. Bored by the slow pace of the army, Kirstein began documenting artwork created by soldiers, first his fellow combat engineers at Fort Belvoir, then in all branches of the service. With the aid of his many friends and correspondents, the tireless Kirstein built the War Art Project into a full-fledged, army-supported operation. In the fall of 1943, nine paintings and sculptures by soldiers, selected by Lincoln Kirstein, were featured in
Life
magazine. He then organized those works and others into American Battle Art exhibitions to be held at the National Gallery of Art and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

By then, the Roberts Commission had offered Kirstein a position in the MFAA. He wasn’t an officer, but the commission had pressed his case because of his outstanding qualifications. Kirstein was torn by his love of the War Art Project and his respect for the importance of the MFAA mission, but in the end he chose conservation and preservation. He arrived in England in June 1944, along with the three other noncommissioned Monuments Men, eager to join an efficient, well-defined military operation.

He found nothing of the sort. The original fifteen Monuments Men were all either in Normandy or awaiting passage across the channel. The base at Shrivenham was filled with civilian experts and Civil Affairs officers, but there was no military structure in place for the MFAA. In fact, with the trained officers on active duty, there was no real MFAA organization at all. Arriving in London, Kirstein and his companions discovered no one had been informed they were coming, and no one they spoke to had ever heard of Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives. They were told to wait while their paperwork was straightened out. Preoccupied with the battle for Normandy, the army promptly forgot about them.

Kirstein managed to contact Monuments Man James Rorimer, who as a Metropolitan Museum curator mingled in the same New York social arena as Kirstein. Rorimer wrote his wife:
4

It’s strange to think of men like Lincoln, an author of 6 books and numerous articles, 6 years at Harvard, responsible for the original “Hound and Horn,” director of the Amer. Ballet School, etc. still doing fatigue as a private. “Screwy”—we calls it. But then Saroyan is a private. He will make war plays, though. One can hardly expect 10,000,000 or more men to be properly used to the last man. I hardly know what matters most—luck, direction, friends, pull, etc. Certainly ability isn’t apt to have a high premium placed on it per se.

Unfortunately for Kirstein, Rorimer was just reaching the end of his own months-long battle for an assignment with the MFAA, and he could do nothing for the brilliant but ignored private. The tireless, well-connected Kirstein managed to get himself transferred to France, and eventually on to Paris, but even there he had no assignment. With nothing else to do, he set up an office on packing crates and woke up early every morning to write letters, poetry, and magazine articles.

He was restless and increasingly depressed by the uselessness of his tasks. This was a common recurrence in his life: manic activity followed by a grinding sense of despair. His manic periods had resulted in astonishing cultural successes, but they usually ended in a gathering gloom and sense of wasted opportunity. These depressive states resulted in a persistent wandering of attention, a seeming inability to stick to things. He was a large, hulking man with deep, penetrating eyes and a hawk nose, the kind who could intimidate paint off a wall with his stare but who could also be a matchlessly charming dinner guest or friend. Beneath his intimidating exterior, Lincoln Kirstein was an insecure, sometimes bullying genius, constantly on the hunt for a creative outlet.

Trapped in the army bureaucracy, Kirstein’s mood blackened throughout the early fall of 1944, even as the Allied armies rushed across Europe. In October, in the depth of depression, he began a blistering series of correspondence with the Roberts Commission. Explaining that he had turned down a master sergeancy in the air force to work in the MFAA, he lamented the futility of being a thirty-seven-year-old private and that “Skilton, Moore, Keck and myself were quite simply either too much trouble for the Commission, or else were forgotten…. I for one think the behavior of the Commission has been, to put it mildly, callous and insulting.”
5
Unless an assignment was forthcoming, he wrote, he had “absolutely no desire to remain on [the personnel] lists.”

The letters were only moderately successful. The Roberts Commission wanted Lincoln Kirstein at the front, but had been shocked to discover that military rules didn’t allow privates to serve in the MFAA. This necessitated new procedures working their way up and down the chain of command, while the officers at the front ran themselves ragged and their assistants rotted away with nothing to do. Kirstein’s orders finally came through in December 1944, more than six months after his arrival in England, and he reported to U.S. Third Army on temporary duty on December 5. The long delay seemed even more frustrating when he discovered how badly the Monuments Men of Twelfth Army Group needed help.

George Stout, who had taught Kirstein at Harvard during his graduate years, was aware of the brilliance of the new private. He was also, probably, aware of his shortcomings: his easy frustration, his mood swings, and his distaste for army life. Whether by accident or design—and knowing Stout it was almost surely by design—Kirstein was assigned the perfect partner: Monuments Man Robert Posey of George Patton’s Third Army.