The Monuments Men (14 page)

There was no use complaining. These were the parameters of their war, and in the scope of all the other duties in the combat zone, it wasn’t a bad war to fight. Rorimer had never been a complainer; he had always been a doer. That’s why he was here. And that’s what he expected to do from now until Hitler was dead in the ground and the German army was buried with him.

Nonetheless, despite everyone’s best intentions, the conversation soon turned to problems. There weren’t enough “Off Limits” signs, someone said, for all the damaged churches, much less the other buildings. Cameras had supposedly been ordered for Hammett and Posey, but they still hadn’t arrived. And nobody had a radio. Theirs was a solitary task. They weren’t a unit; they were individuals with individual territories and individual goals and methods. How were officers wandering the field alone supposed to communicate with headquarters, much less each other, if they didn’t have a radio?

Rorimer was just about to bring up the subject of permanently assigned transportation—or the lack thereof—when he noticed the dilapidated German Volkswagen bouncing across a nearby field. Behind the wheel, with his foot firmly pressed to the gas pedal, was an American in standard officer uniform: a metal helmet, woolen OD (officer dress) shirt, green OD trousers, and field boots beneath a pair of overshoes. Although it was warm, he wore a field jacket for protection against the rain, which had been rising at a moment’s notice all summer. The car had no windshield, so the officer wore rakish goggles, similar to those used by World War I pilots. Around his helmet was a blue stripe; on the front of his jacket were the large white letters “USN,” the unmistakable marks of a navy man. It was that more than anything that told Rorimer the man behind the wheel was their colleague George Stout.

Stout stepped out of the car, snapped off his goggles, and brushed the road dirt carefully from his face and clothes. When he took off his combat helmet, which came down almost over his eyes, they noticed his hair was crisply cut and carefully combed. His laundry folds were just as crisp. Tom Stout would later describe how his father, in his twilight years, would amble the country lanes near his Massachusetts home dressed in a sporting jacket, an ascot, and a beret, his walking stick in hand, stopping frequently to engage in conversation with acquaintances. He seemed to exude the same casual confidence at Saint-Lô, an air of gentility spoiled only by the Colt .45 on one hip and the dagger on the other. What was marvelous in civilian life, however, was magical on the battlefield. The dapper George Stout, unlike the rest of the Monuments Men, appeared no worse for wear.

The first thing everyone wanted to know was where he had acquired the car. “It has no horn, a sprung transmission, a weak brake, a loose steering column, and no top,” Stout told them, “but I am most grateful to the Germans for leaving it behind.”

“You requisitioned it, then?”

“I found it,” Stout said simply. Here was a man who had changed the field of conservation with an old library card catalogue; he wasn’t about to spend time complaining, not when there were plenty of supplies lying around.

“Stout was a leader,” Craig Hugh Smyth, a later arrival to the Monuments Men, once wrote of him, “quiet, unselfish, modest, yet very strong, very thoughtful and remarkably innovative. Whether speaking or writing, he was economical with words, precise, vivid. One believed what he said; one wanted to do what he proposed.”
6

It was George Stout who had called the meeting, and like any good leader (although he was not in the chain of command above any of these men) his intentions weren’t merely to swap notes. He had been one of the first Monuments Men ashore, arriving in Normandy on July 4, and in the last six weeks he had probably traveled more miles and salvaged more monuments than anyone. He had not come to Saint-Lô for congratulations or complaints. He had come to identify problems and find ways to solve them.

Not enough “Off Limits” signs? Rorimer would handle having five hundred printed immediately. There wasn’t much electricity in Normandy, but the army had a printing press in Cherbourg they turned on at night. In the meantime, the rest of the men could make them in the field.

Soldiers and civilians tended to ignore handwritten signs? Stout had the solution for that one, too: use white engineering tape around important locations. No soldier would scavenge in a site clearly marked “DANGER: MINES!”

The general MFAA directive called for the use of French civilians to hang signs when possible, to counter the impression that the Allies were invaders. Children, Rorimer suggested, were often the most useful. They were eager to please, and usually wanted nothing more than a stick of gum or piece of chocolate. “The local cultural authorities are good, too,” he said. “A little direction and encouragement, and they can handle all but the most complicated tasks.”

As for cameras, everyone agreed the job couldn’t be done without them, but for now they would try.

Communication was another issue. They were isolated in the field, with no way to contact headquarters and no way to share information among themselves. Their official reports took weeks to reach anyone, and by then they were not good for much but the files. Too many times, after hard and dangerous hours on the road, a Monuments Man had arrived to find the protected site already inspected, photographed, placed off-limits, and in the midst of emergency repairs. And what if a sudden German counterattack moved the front lines while a Monuments Man was out in the field?

“It’s worse with the British,” murmured Rorimer, who had become quite frustrated by the errant wandering of the British Monuments Man Lord Methuen. “They don’t stay in their zones. And there’s no communication.”

“The British are working on it,” Captain LaFarge said.

“As to the reports,” Stout suggested, “let’s start making additional copies for each other when we send them to Ad Sec.”

That brought up the subject of assistants. Every man needed at least one qualified enlisted assistant, Stout still thought, and preferably a pool of specialists at headquarters to select from, too.

The most pressing problem, though, was the lack of transportation. LaFarge had his beat-up car and Stout his topless VW, but everyone else was wasting precious hours hitching rides, and even more time stuck in the inefficient routes hitchhiking required.

“The army always has the same reply,” Rorimer grumbled. “The Roberts Commission in Washington should have arranged adequate tables of organization and equipment.”

“And the Roberts Commission says the army will brook no interference,” Stout replied, summing up the ad hoc, between-the-cracks situation of the whole mission. Still, always optimistic, Hammett and Stout had managed to arrange a meeting for August 16 with the duty officers of U.S. Twelfth Army Group, at which they would address all the issues discussed.

With the basics covered, the conversation drifted to more general observations. Everyone agreed that, despite the obvious problems, the mission had been a surprising success. They were lucky: The area to cover was small and Normandy, although beautiful, had relatively few monuments designated for protection. It was a perfect place to start. They would have to be much more efficient in the future, they knew, but for now they were satisfied. The French were valorous, stoic, and appreciative. The Allied soldiers were considerate of French culture and open to suggestions. There was a bottleneck one level up from the field; the army bureaucracy simply refused to support the mission. But the commanders on the ground were, despite the occasional pain in the ass, largely respectful of the work. Their experiences confirmed George Stout’s original belief that a man on the ground, talking face-to-face, was the only way for the mission to succeed.

Their real worry now was the Germans. The more the Monuments Men learned of their behavior, the more worried they became. The Germans had fortified churches. They had stockpiled weapons in areas inhabited by women and children. They had burned houses and destroyed infrastructure, sometimes for strategic purposes but often simply because they could. Their commanders, it was rumored, shot their own troops if they threatened to retreat. James Rorimer, after a moment of searching, produced a business card. On the front was a name: J. A. Agostini, a French cultural official in the town of Countances. On the back, the man had scrawled, “I certify that German military personnel used Red Cross trucks for pillaging and that sometimes they were accompanied by their officers.”
7

“An ominous warning,” George Stout said, putting voice to all their thoughts. No one even bothered to agree.

“You idiot,” James Rorimer’s new and much less understanding commanding officer replied a few days later when the Monuments Man requested permission to travel a hundred miles out of the way to inspect Mont Saint-Michel, a medieval fortress on a rocky tidal island off the coast of Brittany. “This is twentieth-century war. Who gives a damn about medieval walls and boiling pitch?”
8

This was another problem. The army was always shifting commanders, and Rorimer never knew who his CO would be when he returned to HQ—or their attitude toward cultural preservation. Still, the Monuments Men had the backing of General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, something the officer suddenly seemed to remember.

“All right,” he huffed. “Get going. But let me tell you, Rorimer, you’d better get there in a hurry and come back fast. If you get left behind… ”
9

Rorimer turned so the officer wouldn’t see his smile. He imagined the end of that sentence was
that would be no loss
, and he enjoyed the thought. He always took a bit of pleasure in tweaking the brass.

Unable to secure official transportation, but intrepid as always, Rorimer hired a civilian car—the French driver had hidden it in a haystack during the German occupation—to take him to the Brittany coast. A German counteroffensive had nearly cut through Patton’s lines outside the town of Avranches, but the battle for Normandy was now all but over and the countryside west of Avranches was quiet. As they drove, Rorimer thought of the Mont Saint-Michel he had visited in years past. “The Mount,” as the rocky island was known, was connected to mainland France only by a narrow, mile-long causeway. Around the edges of the island clung a small village; at the top sat the monastery of Mont Saint-Michel, the renowned medieval “City of Books.” Rorimer cringed at the thought of how many of those books were lost at Saint-Lô. If the monastery was gone too… He remembered the thirteenth-century cloister; the soaring abbey; the underground labyrinth of crypts and chapels; the Salle des Chevaliers, with its pointed vaulting supported by a triple row of columns. It was such an extraordinary building that Monuments Man Bancel LaFarge told him it had inspired him to become an architect. The Mount had withstood a thousand years of attacks and sieges, due in no small part to the protection afforded by the surrounding water and its rapid tide, but the power of modern warfare could bring it all down with a single bombing run.

He didn’t have to worry long. Mont Saint-Michel, he could see from a mile away, was still standing. At the entrance to the causeway, three “Off Limits” signs had already been posted by Captain Posey, the Monuments Man for Patton’s Third Army. Unfortunately, they hadn’t kept the island from being overrun. Troops were everywhere, fighting, shouting, and most of all drinking. Mont Saint-Michel, Rorimer soon realized, “was the one place on the continent which was unguarded, undamaged and open for business-as-usual…. Each day more than a thousand soldiers came [on junket leave], drank as hard and as fast as they could, and, feeling the effects, became boisterous beyond the power of local control.”
10
The restaurants were running low on food and, even worse, booze. The souvenir shops were empty. And despite the fact that a British brigadier general was supposedly shacked up at the local hotel with a female companion, James Rorimer couldn’t find a single officer to take charge of the situation.

That night, after searching the monastery and ancient building, rousting troops from historic areas and padlocking the doors, Rorimer had dinner with the mayor, whose souvenir shop had been stripped clean days before. The men decided that, although arguments to the contrary were abundant, Mont Saint-Michel should stay open for business. It had been a long three months, and more than 200,000 Allied soldiers were wounded, dead, or missing. The stench of death—civilians, soldiers, farm animals, horses—had saturated the air, the water, the food, and the clothes. But it was over, at least for now. The battle of Normandy was a brutal, decisive, hard-fought, hard-won Allied victory, and there wasn’t much one Monuments officer could do to keep the troops from celebrating. So when the weary mayor headed off to his wife, Rorimer went to a bar, propped his boots on a table, and considered the future between sips of beer.

Normandy was behind them, but the real work lay ahead. He thought of the German soldiers hauling away artwork in Red Cross ambulances. The Nazis had committed horrible crimes, he was sure of that, and if he was going to truly be a part of putting the art world right, he would need to find a way to get transferred from Comm Zone to the front. The evidence lay out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered. And he was the man to do it. The first step, though, was getting to Paris.