The Monuments Men (27 page)

He was worn out, absolutely dead worn out. And the difficulties of the job—the ceaseless dead ends, the brutal bureacracy, the endless small disturbances, the isolation from family and friends—were building up. What finally pushed him over the line in late November was small: His beloved typewriter, which he had purchased on his crossing to France, was stolen. Seemingly minor, maybe, but there were no other typewriters available, and he couldn’t find one to buy, and he had to write home to ask his mother to send him one, which required special army permission. His mother wanted letters, letters, letters, and how was he to compose them without his typewriter?

Looking back on it weeks later (but still without a typewriter), he didn’t understand why he had exploded. He didn’t know it was a deeper, more fundamental issue. Despite the dinners with society figures, Paris’ glorious monuments, and his belief in the work, he had slowly come to realize that Paris wasn’t central to the monuments effort. The important work was not here, but in Germany, and Rorimer hated to be too far away from the important work. He would not have acknowledged it, because he probably did not yet know it himself, but he viewed the war as an opportunity to perform “what is called a service to humanity,” and he was eager to make his mark.
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That’s why the lack of material in the ERR storehouses didn’t faze him. As he stood there, looking at those empty rooms, he could see that they were merely entry points into another world. For the first time in months, he felt himself being drawn into something larger. Just seeing the warehouses the Nazis had filled with “confiscated” items brought home to him the size and complexity of their looting operation. This wasn’t accidental damage or angry retaliation, but an enormous web of deliberate deceit that stretched all over Paris and down all the roads back to the Fatherland and all the way to Hitler’s office in Berlin. Jaujard had pushed him into this web. He was the orchestra conductor, the man at the center of his own circle of intrigue, the one person who had the connections and foresight to effectively counter, as much as possible, the Nazi will to possess. He had protected the museums and state-owned collections, but by comparison he could do little to save the private artistic wealth of France—the invaluable cultural objects held by her citizens. Jaujard had opened a door into that lost world, but Rose Valland, James Rorimer realized, was going to be his guide.

The first nine locations Valland had identified were buildings. The tenth, and clearly the most important to her, was the art train. Thirty-six of the cases she had identified during the last harrowing days of the Nazi occupation had been returned to the Louvre for safekeeping in August, but by early October the other 112 cases were still believed to be on the train… somewhere. And despite Jaujard’s freqent requests, no one would tell the art community their status. Someone, somewhere, knew down which track the remaining cars of the art train had been shunted, but the information wasn’t being communicated through the bureaucracy. The mystery was finally solved on October 9, when the municipal police in Pantin contacted the Louvre. They had made frequent requests to the government, but nobody had done anything about the train parked near the Pantin railyard under the Edouard-Vaillant Bridge. The municipal police didn’t have enough men to guard the valuable art; and besides, the train was parked dangerously close to freight cars filled with ammunition. The museum community once again sprang into action.

On October 21, Rose Valland sent a memo to Jacques Jaujard telling him that, between October 17 and 19, the last 112 cases of “recovered paintings” had finally been transferred to the Jeu de Paume. Several had been opened and pillaged, she noted, and she feared that “most of the freight cars in this convoy transporting the expropriated goods of Jews have been similarly looted.”
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It was these forty-six railcar loads that she and James Rorimer were back to investigate.

“I’m Monsieur Malherbaud,” an older man said, stepping out of the door of the station. “I am the stationmaster.”

“Are you the man who routed the art train, the one carrying the Cézannes and Monets?”

The man looked warily at Rorimer’s uniform, then at the commonplace woman smoking a cigarette behind him. There were still plenty of German spies and saboteurs in Paris, and most were specialists in retaliation. It was wise to be cautious.

“Why do you ask?”

“I’m Second Lieutenant Rorimer of United States Army, Seine Section. This is Mademoiselle Valland, from the Musées Nationaux. She informed the Resistance of the shipment.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The artwork was cleared. There was nothing left.”

“We’re looking for the rest of the train.”

The man looked surprised. “Then follow me.”

The railcars had been unloaded into a nondescript warehouse. “Here goes nothing,” Rorimer said to Valland as the stationmaster pulled open the warehouse door. The previous nine Nazi storehouses Valland had identified had been mostly cleared by the time the two of them arrived; this one promised to be full. Rorimer was excited by the prospect of what they would find.

The sight that greeted him in the cold warehouse was not at all what he had expected. He didn’t know exactly what he had expected, but it certainly hadn’t been an enormous, jumbled pile of ordinary household items. For there before him, at least twice as tall as he was, rose an endless pile of sofas, chairs, mirrors, tables, pots, pans, picture frames, and children’s toys. The amount was staggering, although in reality it was nothing, only forty-six railcars full. M-Aktion, it was determined after the war, had shipped 29,436 railroad cars full of such ordinary household objects to Germany.

They delayed the art train for this?
Rorimer thought, his heart sinking inside him.
It’s all worthless. It’s all just junk.
Then he stopped himself. It wasn’t worthless; these objects were people’s belongings—the detritus that had made up their lives. The Nazis had gone into people’s homes and simply cleared them out, all the way down to the family photographs.

“It’s not what you were expecting, is it?” Valland said, shoving her hands into her pockets.

The hidden message in her simple statement struck him like a thunderbolt. She had known the boxcar numbers where the valuables were hidden; Rose Valland had known, or at least strongly suspected, there wasn’t anything else important on that train. But she had wanted to see for herself. Stopping the art train was a great personal triumph for her, but she had never been allowed to see it for herself. She was nothing more than a minor government bureaucrat, a woman. Valland had the information, but as a U.S. Army officer Rorimer had the access. He was her entry into places she had never been allowed before—places she had risked her life to discover.

He thought of the information she might possess. She was the key to understanding the whole Nazi looting operation; her cooperation provided the only real possibility of finding what had been stolen and bringing it back. But she was stuck at the bottom of an endless pyramid of functionaries, and she needed him as much as he needed her.

“You know where it is,” he said. “The stolen artwork.”

She turned and started to walk away.

“You know where it is, don’t you, Rose?” He jogged to catch up to her. “What are you waiting for? Someone you can trust?”

“You know enough,” she said with a smile.

Rorimer grabbed her by the arm. “Please share your information with me. You know I will use it only as you wish: for France.”

She pulled out of his grip, no longer smiling. “I’ll tell you where,” she said, “when the time is right.”
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CHAPTER 22

The Bulge

The Western Front

December 16–17, 1944

R
obert Posey couldn’t wait. He had intended to keep the last Christmas present in the shipment from his wife, Alice, the big one marked “With love from your family,” until Christmas Day.
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But he had waited six days, and it was only December 16. He simply couldn’t wait any longer. So he ripped open the box and dug eagerly down into the packing material. Eventually, his fingertips touched cold plastic. He lifted the present out of the box. It was a phonograph record.

“The greatest surprise of all,” he wrote Alice later that night, “was the record letter Christmas greeting. I immediately raced over to the Special Services company where the sergeant put on one of those radio-victrola hookups and I sat in another room and heard it come over the radio. It is the finest present one could have. Your voices were perfect; even the off-the-record instructions you gave Dennis to ‘say anything you want’ came over without a syllable dropped. It was the same as a re-broadcast over the radio with the two of you joining together in the program. By simply turning the knob I could make it louder or softer as the case required. The little song was delightful. It was very reassuring to hear the two of you together. I do not note any change. I had sort of expected to hear Dennis’ voice older than when I saw him last; but from the sound of it now he is still a little boy and the Kitten [Alice] is still a bit shy.”
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Later that night, he got another surprise. The Germans had launched an offensive, the interservice radio reported, and the Allies were falling back.

Walker Hancock heard of the Ardennes Offensive, more commonly known as the Battle of the Bulge, the next day, when he was stopped by an advanced unit and told the village he was planning to inspect, Waimes, was now in German hands. He spent the next night heading west in a blacked-out convoy, following for hours the small green “cat’s eye” light on the bumper of the jeep in front of him. They were strafed only once. He spent Christmas Eve in a cellar in Liège, Belgium; the next morning, Christmas Mass was interrupted by German bombs.

Ronald Balfour, the British scholar at the northern spear of the Allied trident in the First Canadian Army, spent the Bulge in the hospital. On November 29, four days after advancing into Holland, he had suffered a broken ankle in a serious truck accident. He would not report back to duty until mid-January.

George Stout, despite his best delaying tactics and Walker Hancock’s sincere hope for his mentor’s return to U.S. First Army, had been officially transferred to U.S. Twelfth Army Group in early December. This meant a prolonged assignment at headquarters in Versailles, outside Paris. He spent December 14, 1944, inspecting the palace’s medieval collection with James Rorimer, and the next few weeks in an office, writing summaries of the Monuments Men’s work for 1944 and reworking their official procedures. “Most of my time is spent indoors,” he wrote his wife, Margie, “working at a table. I don’t object, for the weather is severe.”
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It was the worst winter in modern history: icy, foggy, and so cold that gasoline was known to freeze. Even Paris was under a miserable blanket of snow.

With the infantry decimated by the sudden German advance, U.S. Third Army went looking for replacements. They found a ready volunteer in Robert Posey, the Alabama Monuments Man who, more than any of the others, wanted to be a soldier. Posey wasn’t trained for combat and his eyesight was so bad he couldn’t see an enemy soldier a hundred yards away, but his instructions were simple: “Keep firing until you can’t fire anymore.”
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And that’s what he did. He fired through the frosty, snow-covered Ardennes Forest until his ammunition was gone, then stopped to reload. Enemy bullets tore through the icy trees, but when his fellow soldiers began to fire and advance he followed, shooting across a clearing and into the foggy woods.

CHAPTER 23

Champagne

Paris, France

Just Before Christmas, 1944

I
n Paris, Rose Valland trudged her way through the snows that were blanketing Western Europe. A few days before, as the Germans swept down on Robert Posey and the faltering Western Allied lines in the Ardennes, she had sent James Rorimer a bottle of champagne. She feared she had been a bit abrupt at the art train, and she didn’t want to leave him with the wrong impression. She had been pleased with his clear desire to share her information, and with all the days she had spent with him inspecting the Nazis’ storerooms. They had the bond of museum professionals laboring out of a shared love for art, but she admired his personal qualities as well: diligent, opinionated, bullheaded, and insightful enough to grasp immediately the scope of the situation… and the potential. Above all, perhaps, he was respectful. He appreciated what she had achieved. She wanted him to know how much it meant to her that they were friends and peers. Thus the champagne. In return, he had invited her over to drink a toast. She couldn’t help but think, as she struggled through the snow, that she was walking toward some sort of decision. She just wasn’t sure what kind.

It had been a long road. She had come from a modest background, without the privilege of money or the arts. Having grown up in a small town, she studied fine arts in Lyon before making her way to Paris as a starving artist, a rather romantic notion until you discover just how hard the penniless existence can be. Reality drove her to obtain a degree in fine art from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and art history degrees from the Ecole du Louvre and Sorbonne. Valland was determined to be successful in the art capital of Europe. Her first opportunity came at the Jeu de Paume, where she began work as an unpaid volunteer just to be near the art. This was not uncommon; art people were very passionate about their subject and many were willing to work at museums—especially ones as prestigious as the Louvre—for free. Most of these volunteers came from wealthy or aristocratic families; they didn’t need the low salary the museum usually provided. Rose Valland, without money and not socially connected, was an exception. She supported herself as an independent teacher—a tutor. In her spare time, she made woodcuts, painted, and studied. She was never promoted at the Jeu de Paume. The French were very particular about the title of “curator”; it could only be used if it was officially bestowed. And Valland knew, after a decade in Paris, how difficult it would be for that honor to be granted her. Still, she was determined to contribute.