That night we held a conference in George’s room. He was to go to Munich the next morning with the convoy to supervise the unloading of the Madonna and the “Lamb” at the depot. He expected to come back directly, but might have to go on up to Frankfurt. He mapped out the work he wanted us to do while he was away. In addition to the job at the mine, there was a special one down at Bad Ischl. A series of famous panels by Albrecht Altdorfer, one of the greatest German painters of the fifteenth century, was stored on the second floor of a highly combustible old inn. These panels were among his finest works and belonged to the monastery of St. Florian outside Linz. Fifty or sixty pieces of sculpture—mostly polychromed wood figures, fifteenth century Gothic—also the property of the monastery, were stored there too. George thought we’d better figure on two trucks. We were to pick up the stuff, bring it back to the mine and then send it to Munich with the next convoy.

We made notations of what he had told us, and then Steve produced drinks—something of an occasion, for liquor was hard to come by at the mine. Somehow he had got hold of a bottle of cognac and insisted on making “Alpine Specials.” This was a drink consisting of a jigger of cognac and an equal amount of a pink syrupy liquid resembling grenadine. Steve prized the syrup. Eder, the chemical engineer at the mine, had concocted it especially for him. The mixture made a drink of dubious merit. We drank to the success of George’s trip to Munich.

The convoy got off early the next morning. Lamont and I went down with George as far as the village. Two half-tracks were waiting to escort the trucks to Munich. They were equipped with radios for intercommunication, in case of delays along the way. Between Alt Aussee and Salzburg, the road led through isolated country. Conditions were as yet far from settled. Small bands of SS troops still lurked in the mountains. The half-tracks weren’t just going along for the ride.

When we returned to the mine, we found Steve and Shrady in conversation. They were planning an excursion and asked us to join them. We expressed pious disapproval of letting up on the job the minute George’s back was turned. Steve’s answer was, “That’s a crock. I haven’t taken a day off in two weeks. You can do as you like, me lads; I’m off to see the wizard.” The two of them climbed into the sporty Mercedes-Benz convertible which Shrady had recently acquired, and drove off down the mountain.

“I have an idea,” said Lamont. “They can have their fun today. We’ll have ours tomorrow, while they pick up the Altdorfer panels at Bad Ischl.”

Lamont turned to the loading of trucks, while I went down to the Kammergrafen with Sieber. In the course of the morning I selected approximately two hundred pictures. We concentrated on those of small size, which were stored on the top racks, and the work went rapidly. Among the paintings we chose was one which had a typewritten label on the back. I read the words “Von dem Führer noch nicht entschieden”—not yet decided upon by the Führer. I asked Sieber what this signified. He explained that every picture intended for the Linz Museum—and this was one of them—had to be personally approved by Hitler before it could be officially included in the prospective collection. I could easily understand that the Führer would have wanted to examine the more important acquisitions, but that each canvas had to receive his personal approval struck me as preposterous. Hitler had entrusted the formation of his collections first to Dr. Hans Posse, a noted scholar, and, after his death, to Dr. Hermann Voss, director of the Dresden Gallery. This meticulous procedure, involving the submission of all pictures to the Führer in Munich, must have been trying to those two luminaries of the German art world.

When I came up from the mine for lunch I found that Lamont had completed the loading of two trucks. As the stock of pictures in the packing room at the mine entrance was almost exhausted, he said that he would join Sieber and me in making further selections. We returned to the Kammergrafen and continued with the smaller pictures.

On one of the top shelves we found a cardboard carton bearing the name of Dr. Helmut von Hümmel, who had been connected with the formation of the Linz collections. The label indicated that the contents had been destined for the museum. On the carton appeared the word “Sittenbilder.” Lamont and I knew the word “Bilder” meant pictures, but the other two syllables conveyed nothing. Sieber knew very little English but tried to explain. He thought perhaps the word meant “customs,” or something like that. I thought that I understood him. He probably meant that they were little scenes from everyday life.

We opened the carton. On top were three small watercolors, with beautiful gray-blue mounts and carved, gilt frames. If they were not by François Boucher, they were by a close pupil. The workmanship was exquisite and they were highly pornographic. So these were “Sittenbilder.” In our limited German we tried to tell Sieber that they might be called “scenes from life,” but hardly everyday life.

The rest of the things in the carton were of the same order, some of them contemporary, all of them licentious. None approached the first three watercolors in sheer virtuosity of technique. We wondered just which department of the Linz Museum would have harbored them.

Later we showed them to Steve. When he looked at the three watercolors he asked, “Who did those?”

“They look very much like Boucher,” I said without thinking.

“Boucher?” asked Steve incredulously. “Not the fellow who painted that ‘Holy Family’ I saw this afternoon?”

Lamont said quickly, “Tom means a pupil of Boucher, not Boucher himself.”

“Well, that’s more like it,” said Steve. “I didn’t see how an artist who painted anything so beautiful as that big picture could paint smutty things like these.”

The Holy Family to which he referred was a sensitive and tender representation. Steve’s point was well taken. The fact that he had not seen much eighteenth century French painting didn’t alter the validity of his argument.

On our way up from the Kammergrafen that afternoon we stopped at the Kapelle. This was one of the mine chambers which I had visited only long enough to take out some of the cases used in packing the Bruges Madonna. In addition to the Münz Kabinett collections, the Kapelle contained the magnificent collection of Spanish armor—casques, breastplates, full suits of armor, and a great number of firearms—which had been gathered together at Schloss Konopischt by the late Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Most of it was of sixteenth century workmanship, exquisitely inlaid with gold and silver. Formerly Austrian, it had been the property of the Czech government since the last World War. Nonetheless, the Germans had carried it off, using some flimsy nationalistic argument to justify their action. While the atmosphere of the mine was excellent for paintings, it was not satisfactory for metal objects. Consequently, every piece in the Konopischt collection had been heavily coated with grease to keep it from oxidizing.

Their storage room, the Kapelle, was—as the name indicates—a chapel, dedicated to the memory of Dollfuss, the Austrian Chancellor. It had an electrically illuminated altar, hewn from a block of translucent salt crystal, which was one of the sights of the mine.

That night when Steve and Shrady returned from their outing we all had hot chocolate and cheese and crackers in the comfortable kitchen on the ground floor of the main building. They had had a wonderful day. Maria, Shrady’s interpreter-secretary, had been with them. They had gone first to St. Wolfgang. There a sentry had tried to prevent them from driving up the road leading to the little church. Leopold, the Belgian king, was living near there with his wife, and motorists were not allowed on that road. But they had got around the sentry and gone into the church to see the wonderful carved altarpiece by Michael Pacher. Steve had brought us some colored photographs of it. Afterward they had had a swim in the lake and a picnic lunch. And in the afternoon—this had been the high spot of the day—they had gone over to Bad Ischl and called on Franz Léhar. The old fellow had been delighted to see them, had played the Merry Widow waltz for them and given them autographed photographs. It sounded like fun. Our day at the mine had been very prosaic in comparison. Mention of Bad Ischl reminded Lamont of his scheme for the next day. He proposed to Steve and Shrady that they should call for the Altdorfer panels. They fell in with the suggestion at once, and before we could explain that we thought we’d take the day off, Steve was telling us about some of the things we should see in the neighborhood.

We slept late and when we got up the sky was gray and threatening. It was no day for an outing. In fact it was so cold that we decided we’d be warmer down in the mine. There was still one series of chambers which we had not explored. This was the Mondsberg, and it took us almost three-quarters of an hour to reach it. The pictures were arranged on racks as in the Kammergrafen and the Springerwerke, only in the Mondsberg there were a great many contemporary paintings. It didn’t take us long to run through them. They were all obviously German-owned and, judging from the labels, the great majority of the canvases had been included in the annual exhibitions at the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich.

Ranged along one side of the main chamber was a row of old pictures. These were of high quality, and we went through them carefully. I came to a canvas which looked vaguely familiar. It was the portrait of a young woman dressed in a gown of cherry brocade. I guessed it to be sixteenth century Venetian, perhaps by Paris Bordone. I said to Lamont, “I’m sure I’ve seen that picture somewhere, but I can’t place it.”

“Let’s see if there’s any mark on the back that might give you a lead,” said Lamont.

He found a label and started reading aloud, “California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco....”

I thought he was joking. But not at all. There was the printed label of my museum. And there too in my own handwriting appeared the words “Portrait of a Young Woman, by Paris Bordone”! No wonder the portrait had looked familiar. I had borrowed it from a New York art dealer for a special loan exhibition of Venetian painting in the summer of 1938. I learned from the mine records that the dealer had subsequently sold the picture to a Jewish private collector in Paris. The Nazis had confiscated it with the rest of his collection. It was a weird business finding it seven years later in an Austrian salt mine.

After supper that evening Shrady asked us to go down to Alt Aussee with him. Some Viennese friends of his were having an evening of music. The weather had cleared and the snow on the mountains was pink in the afterglow as we drove down the winding road from the mine. The house, a small chalet, stood on the outskirts of the village. Our host, his wife and their two daughters, had taken refuge there just before the Russians reached Vienna.

He introduced us to Dr. Victor Luithlen, one of the curators of the Vienna Museum, who had driven over from Laufen. Many of the finest things from the museum were stored in the salt mine there. Dr. Luithlen was the custodian.

Both he and Shrady played the piano well. Luithlen played some Brahms and Shrady followed with the music he had composed for a ballet based on Poe’s “Raven.” Shrady said that it had been produced by the Russian Ballet in New York. It was a very flamboyant piece and Shrady performed it with terrific virtuosity.

Afterward coffee and strudel were served. The atmosphere of the household was casual and friendly. I was reminded of what an Austrian friend of mine had once told me: “In other countries, conditions are often serious, but not desperate; in Austria they are often desperate but never serious.”

Thinking that George Stout might have returned from Munich, Lamont and I went back up to the mine that night before the others. George had just come in. He brought exciting but disturbing news. We were to continue the work at Alt Aussee for another ten days. Then we were to transfer our base of operations to Berchtesgaden. Our job there would be the evacuation of the Göring collection! On our way through Salzburg we were to pick up the pictures and tapestries from the Vienna Museum. These were the paintings by Velásquez, Titian and Breughel which had been highjacked by the Nazis two months ago and later retrieved by our officers. The disturbing part of what George had to tell was that he was going to leave us to carry on alone at the mine. He would try to join us at Berchtesgaden. But there was a possibility that he might not be able to make it.

Months ago George had put in a request for transfer to the Pacific. He felt that things were shaping up on the European scene and that others could carry on the work. There would be a big job protecting and salvaging works of art in Japan. He didn’t think that a program had been planned. He had offered his services. He had already told us that he had asked for this assignment, but we had never considered it as a possibility of the present or even of the immediate future. Now it looked as though it might materialize at once. In any case he was going up to Frankfurt the day after tomorrow to find out.

“As senior officer, Tom,” George said, “you will take over as headman of the team. I’ll take you down to see Colonel Davitt before I go. He is responsible for the security guard here at the mine and has been extremely co-operative. You should go to him if you have any complaints about the arrangements after I am gone.”

Back in our rooms that night Lamont said, “I have a hunch that this is the last we’ll see of George. It’s not like him to talk the way he did tonight if he hasn’t a pretty good idea that he won’t be coming back.”

Together we mapped out a tentative division of the work ahead. Steve, who had come into the room in time to hear George’s news, joined our discussion. It was after midnight when the first meeting of the “three powers” broke up.

While George was in Munich he had been informed of the imminent withdrawal of Third Army from the part of Austria in which we were working. No one could, or would, tell him the exact date, but it appeared likely that it would take place within two weeks. It was difficult for me to understand why the arrival of another American army—General Mark Clark’s Fifth from Italy—should cause the cessation of our operations. But of course the Army had its own way of doing things. We were attached to Third Army and if they were getting out, we would have to get out with them. All along we had known that this might happen before we could empty the mine. It was quite probable that Fifth Army would want to resume the work, but it would take time. Such a delay would impede the processes of restitution, and we had therefore been giving first attention to the finest things.

Having taken stock of the paintings, sculpture and furniture on which we were going to concentrate in the time we had left, we spent George’s last day working as usual. The loading went well and we finished four more trucks. Another convoy would be ready to take off in the morning.

George had his own jeep and driver and could make better time than the convoy, so after early breakfast we went down to Colonel Davitt’s office. George explained the change in his own plans and said that I would be taking over at the mine. Then he thanked the colonel for his co-operation. It was a long speech for George.

When he had finished, Colonel Davitt said, “In all the time you’ve been here, you haven’t made a single unreasonable demand. If Lieutenant Howe can come anywhere near that record, we’ll get along all right.”

Compliments embarrassed George, so he said good-by as quickly as possible and climbed into his jeep. He wished me luck and drove off. I waited for Lamont to come down with the convoy and give me a lift back up the mountain.