The men told him what the situation was. A telegram had come from G-2 of the 28th Infantry Division, stationed in the Ardennes, reporting that a German truck, carrying art treasures from Paris at the time of the evacuation, had broken an axle; the Germans, being desperately short of transportation, were believed to have hidden the art works somewhere on a hunting estate in the forest. Would Monuments care to come and look for them? Monuments surely would, and a dozen volunteered for a job to which only two would be assigned. These happened to be admirers of the son of Budd-Erling and had asked his help.
VII
The expedition set out early next morning in a staff car, Lanny and the two younger art experts riding in the rear seat; a military chauffeur drove them, and another soldier who was to act as general handyman rode beside him. Their baggage was in the trunk, and they were told that further military protection would be assigned them by the unit to which they were traveling. Their route was eastward and somewhat north, through Reims and Sedan, a highway which Lanny had traveled often in times of peace.
In those days he had considered two hundred miles less than a morning’s drive, but now the military highway was full of traffic and getting ahead was difficult. They passed through the city with the magnificent cathedral, destroyed by Teutonic fury, restored by French devotion, and now, alas, destroyed again. They passed through the great bastion of the Maginot line, Sedan, with its many scattered forts, once believed to be impregnable. But the Germans had overwhelmed it in 1870 and in 1914 and yet again in 1940; they had turned it around, facing France, and believed that they had made it impregnable again. But the Americans had taken it in this year of 1944, and they hadn’t bothered to turn it again, because they subscribed to the well-worn maxim that the best form of defense is attack.
The Army was all over the place; not the show Army you had seen on parade, but the work Army, tired, soiled, and grim, doing its job because it had to and wishing it didn’t. There were roadblocks, and you stopped and showed your credentials; there was Army chow, and you were invited to have yours because nobody in uniform ever went hungry if the Army could help it. Officers and men ate much the same food, but they ate it separately. During the meal you gave and received news and opinions; ahead was a quiet sector, but there was a big show going on to the northeast and another to the southeast—you could hear the heavy guns when the wind was right.
The route of the car was northeast, and soon they heard the guns, but they weren’t going near enough for trouble. They were in the Ardennes Forest, a vast tract of hills and mountains, rough country with poor communications, easy to defend. Farther to the east of it, close to the Rhine, lay the Eifel hills, and they were one more reason that the Army had halted. The car climbed, and soon there was snow instead of rain, and the ground was frozen hard; a north wind was blowing, and it was colder than any place they had been in for a long time. Throughout the forest the snow was tracked by deer and pig. Lanny said they were wild pig; it was hunting country, and it was a safe guess that the Americans were not always respecting the game ordinances.
They passed through one village after another, most of the houses lined along the road. Presently they crossed the Belgian border, but there was nothing to mark it; the Nazis had made all countries one, wherever they came, and the Americans were leaving things as they found them. Farther on they were in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, supposed to be another independent country, but here too there were no customs officials to delay them. In this region Germans, French, Belgians, and Luxembourgers had mixed and mingled freely except when they were fighting one another. The names of the towns were German, French, or halfway between—Diekirch, Clervaux, Oudler, and Weiswampach.
VIII
The car’s destination was the town of Wiltz, headquarters of Major General Cota, known as “Dutch.” He commanded the 28th Division, which the Germans greatly feared and called the “Bloody Bucket”. Division. That was because of the shoulder patch the troops wore, a red keystone, it having been organized from units of the National Guard of Pennsylvania, the “Keystone State.” To the Germans the insigne looked like a bucket, and they called it “Blut-Eimer-Division” either because of the losses it had suffered or those it had inflicted.
All members of the division were proud of its record, and an aide of its commander occupied suppertime in telling the three visitors about it. At Mortain in Normandy the Germans had launched an offensive intended to take Avranches and cut the American Army in halves. The 28th had stood in their way and they had failed. The division had fought all the way across France, had been the only American division to parade through Paris, also the first to enter German territory in force. As part of the First Army it had helped to clear the Hürtgen Forest in some of the fiercest fighting of the war. This offensive was still going on, but the division’s losses had been so heavy that it had been sent to this quiet sector to recuperate; its replacements consisted of green troops who had never fired a shot except in practice.
“Forests appear to be bad luck for us,” said the young officer who told this story. “And now we are in another.” He knocked on the wooden table for luck as he said it. He was Lieutenant Seemann, a Pennsylvania Dutchman who had left college to enlist in the Army. He had never heard of Monuments, and was naïvely curious about it. The information had come from the 109th Regiment, which was stationed farther up the line.
The art experts were lodged for the night in the home of the town’s Bürgermeister, who gladly gave up his best bedroom for the distinguished gentlemen—“die Herrschaften” they were, a title about equivalent to the English “the quality.” “Was wünschen die Herrschaften?” The obsequiousness of the family was pitiful; they had expected the worst and were hardly yet used to the idea that it wouldn’t develop. Lanny slept near a window which could not be opened, half lost in a soft mattress and under one of those thick German feather quilts which cover the lower half of the body and leave the upper half to shift for itself.
IX
Before full daylight the expedition set out, the guest car preceded by a jeep with four soldiers, and followed by two more jeeploads. All the men carried battle equipment, for their destination was only about five miles behind the front, across a small stream and over another line of forest-clad hills. Both sides sent out scouting parties, and the 28th CP (Command Post) admitted anxiety because of reports of enemy concentrations in front of them. But the enemy was kept so occupied by hard fighting to the north and south of the Ardennes that it was difficult to imagine him making more than a feint through this rough country with few and poor roads.
The expedition came to the regimental headquarters, in another village, and there a guide car was added. This car was also equipped for combat—Bren guns, “burp” guns, bazookas, everything. The chauffeur of Lanny’s car remarked, “Enough to hold off a Kraut regiment.” The enemy troops in front of them, he had been told, were the last sweepings; the cripples, the graybeards, the tubercular, and those known as Magenbattalione, because they had stomach ulcers.
The cortege left the paved highway, and it was rough going, for the ground had frozen into deep ruts; Army men repairing a big bulldozer grinned and promised them better luck on the return trip. A mile or two more, and they halted while the guide made up his mind which of two forest tracks was the right one; the Germans had destroyed all road signs before evacuating the district. After a few kilometers the guide decided he was wrong, and they turned and retraced their steps. At last they came to a handsome group of rustic buildings which had been the hunting lodge of one of the lords of Ruhr steel, those gentry who had put up the campaign funds for Adolf Hitler at a time his fortunes had reached their lowest ebb.
There was a caretaker and his wife, the former so old that he could hardly get about, to say nothing of rendering military service. They were both frightened half out of their wits and took every opportunity to bow to each member of the expedition who approached them. Herrschaften was not enough for them—they said “die gnädigen Herre
n,” and would have said “Ihre Hoheiten” if that would have done any good. They were comically relieved to discover somebody who could speak fluent German and proceeded to pour out a flood of explanations and apologies. They had been sent here just before the German evacuation; they hardly knew the place, they knew nothing about any Kunstwerke, the place was at the command of the Hoheiten, they would be so good as to condescend to make a search and satisfy their honorable selves?
The search was made, from attic to cellars—the latter full of broken bottles. SS men had been quartered here, and everything had been looted; now the rooms had been scrubbed clean, that being the nature of elderly Germans. There were no concealed art works and nothing else of value. So then began a search of the grounds: the stables, converted to garage purposes, but with no tools and not a drop of gasoline; the storerooms with no stores, the smokehouse with nothing but black stains, the icehouse with nothing but sawdust.
“Must have buried the stuff,” said the sergeant who commanded the military group. But somebody discovered a woodroad, and then others leading out into the forest, and the jeeps sped away on these, and presently one of them came back, the driver shouting. One of the soldiers who was a woodsman had noticed a depression in the snow, suggestive of a path, and had followed it to a cabin on a hillside, well hidden by a thicket. There was a padlocked door, and they had jimmied it open, and reported the existence of “a lot of junk.”
The cars followed the leader, and the next couple of hours were spent examining the stuff with flashlights—it was packed in so closely that it was difficult to move anything, and they did not want to carry it outside on account of the weather. There were objects screwed up in wooden cases, and others in heavy leather. There were framed paintings tied in burlap, presumably a hasty job. There were rugs rolled up, doubtless old and valuable, but there was no way to tell without unrolling them, and that could not be done in snow-covered underbrush.
In the back part of the little structure were medieval saints, some carved in wood and some in stone, some plain and others multicolored. This obviously was ancient stuff and might have come out of a museum. One ancient saint might be worth thousands of dollars. The excitement of Monuments work lay in the fact that you could never tell when you might hit a jackpot. Among the treasures to be sought were the crown jewels of the Holy Roman Empire, the Ghent altarpiece, the stained glass from the Strasbourg Cathedral, and the treasures which had been taken from the Cathedral of Metz. You weren’t apt to find any of these on the outskirts of Germany, but you never could tell. Somebody might have been careless or overconfident.
X
The car was brought, and some of the lighter stuff loaded into it and taken to the shelter of the lodge. The first painting from which they took the wrappings was a Cranach Madonna, and Lanny said, “Maybe this shipment was for Göring. He had set himself the goal of owning every Cranach in Europe.” The next was one of the finest Watteaus that Lanny had ever seen, a lovers’ tryst in that same garden of Versailles where the P. A. had been walking only two days ago. Next came a heavy roll of unframed paintings, which, when unrolled, revealed one after another of modern French examples. It wasn’t necessary to investigate any further. The experts wrote a telegram to headquarters in Versailles, saying that this was the real thing and asking that a storage place be named and two covered trucks or vans sent. A courier took this to regimental headquarters, and meantime the expedition settled down to enjoy a cultural holiday.
It was a most agreeable place for a winter sojourn. When snow stopped falling the air was crisp and bracing. Firewood could be had for the asking, and the GIs didn’t wait to be asked. The elderly German couple, once convinced that they were not going to be led out behind the icehouse and shot, labored diligently to oblige their new masters. The country-born fellows among the troops needed no orders to go hunting and came back loaded down with hare and pheasants and presently a huge wild boar, riding in a jeep and ready to be cut up into chops and ham slices.
Meantime the main room of the hunting lodge blossomed forth, as if under a spell of enchantment, with the culture and charm, the history and religion, biography and topography, of every part of Europe for half a dozen centuries. Blazing color, magnificence of costume, beauty of person, elegance of surroundings—farm boys from Maine and the Carolinas, ranch boys from California and Texas, stood awe-stricken and whispered, “Jeepers, I never knew there were such things in the world!”
XI
In three days of this idyllic life all but the heavy stuff was sorted out and listed, repacked and marked. Word had come that transportation was under way and that the treasure trove was to be taken to a storeroom in Reims. The Monuments officers were pleased with themselves; it would be a story to tell their colleagues, and perhaps their grandchildren. Rain had started to fall, and a heavy fog came up out of the river valleys. The art experts, who had talked of taking more time to go hunting, discussed the chances of the weather’s clearing up.
The top sergeant who commanded their small squad was worried. There had been enemy planes overhead, and until these it had been a long time since he had seen any. “Didn’t think they had so many left,” he said. Before dawn everybody was awakened by heavy firing, not from the north, where it had been going on for weeks, but directly east, where it had been only scattered. “That’s not hunting,” said the sergeant. “That’s a barrage, and it covers the whole front.” It was an unceasing thunder, familiar to Lanny because he had listened to the same thing, exactly four months ago, from the hills above the French Riviera.
An elegant breakfast had been prepared of broiled hare and hot cakes with syrup, not to mention real coffee, the aroma of which made the old Germans almost weep with joy when they served it. But in the middle of the meal the sergeant came in and reported, “Sirs, there is an enemy offensive under way. I believe it is our duty to get back to our unit.”
“But, Sergeant,” said the senior officer, who was Lanny Budd, “we can’t leave all this stuff.”
“It won’t do any good, sir, to stay with the stuff if the enemy comes.”
“You really think he can penetrate our lines?”
“It depends on how badly he wants to. The line in front of us is thinly held. About half the 28th are green troops, fresh out of basic training, and you can’t count on them too much in action.”
The Monuments officers got up and went outside. It was a battle, no question about it; there was incessant firing all along the front. They couldn’t judge if it was approaching, but the sergeant who had been listening for hours declared that it clearly was.
Lanny suggested, “Surely we ought to leave a guard to watch this treasure. It is worth millions of dollars, maybe tens of millions.”
The reply was, “No guard can save it if the Jerries get here, and if they don’t, I doubt if this old couple has any way to steal the stuff.”
The sergeant was the man whose job it was to know about military matters. Being officers of assimilated rank, the Monuments people really had no right to give him orders; he was there to protect them. Lanny, the oldest and highest ranking of the art experts, could say nothing but, “OK, Sergeant.”
XII
It took but two or three minutes to shove their belongings into bags and throw them into the trunk of the car. They told the old German couple that they would be back soon, and to take the best of care of the treasures. This couple, of course, knew what was happening, and the gleam in their eyes told what their real thoughts were. The invincible German Army was coming back, and once more there would be real Hobeiten in the hunting lodge.
The noncom assembled his little squad and gave them orders. “We’re hightailing it out of here, as fast as the big car can stand it. Follow my jeep, and keep as close together as you can. Keep your eyes peeled and be ready to shoot first. Get it clear in your minds, Jerry isn’t wasting metal like this for nothing; it means he’s coming, and that means he has put down paras all over this district.” The sergeant stopped, then explai
ned, for the benefit of the civilians, “Parachute troops. And the worst of it is, some of them will be wearing our uniforms—that’s one of the Huns favorite tricks. Remember, we weren’t sent here to fight, but to take care of these gentlemen; we have to run away, no matter how little we like it. If we can’t make our own post, we’ll turn west, away from the enemy. If I raise my arm straight up, it means stop, and stop quick. That’s all.”
The sergeant rode beside the driver of the leading jeep. Then came a second jeep, then the car, and the third jeep brought up the rear. The cortege sped fast over the snow-covered track, which wound snakelike through the forest, avoiding rocks and large trees. They were heading north with a westward trend; that was about parallel to the enemy front, as well as Lanny could guess it. While everyone but the drivers peered anxiously into the thickets and through the forest vistas, Lanny was busy with the papers he had grabbed from his bag. Any one of those would have identified him to the Germans, and there were few persons near the front whom they would have been more pleased to capture. The P.A. worked at tearing them up into the smallest pieces and dropping half a dozen at a time from the speeding car. They were inconspicuous in the wet snow and would soon disintegrate. It hurt him to destroy the precious letter from his Boss, but he could get another—assuming that he got out of this trap alive.
They came to a small open space, and a track crossing their own. They came upon it suddenly, and the sergeant swung up his arm. The four vehicles ground to a halt, only a few feet apart. At the crossing of the tracks stood four infantrymen in American uniforms and carrying “burp” guns; they had been taken by surprise and stood staring. “Who are you?” shouted the sergeant, and the reply came promptly, “Second Battalion, 318th Infantry, 106th Division.”