The next morning I was up before six and had early breakfast. It was a wonderful day for the trip, brilliantly clear. The corporal in our office took me out to the airfield, the one near Hanau where Craig Smyth and I had landed weeks before. It was going to be fun to see Craig again and find out what he had been up to since we had parted that morning in Bad Homburg. The drive to the airfield took about forty-five minutes. There was a wait of half an hour at the field, and it was after ten when we took off in our big C-47. We flew over little villages with red roofs, occasionally a large town—but none that I could identify—and now and then a silvery lake.

Just before we reached Munich, someone said, “There’s Dachau.” Directly below us, on one side of a broad sweep of dark pine trees, we saw a group of low buildings and a series of fenced-in enclosures. On that sunny morning the place looked deserted and singularly peaceful. Yet only a few weeks before it had been filled with the miserable victims of Nazi brutality.

In another ten minutes we landed on the dusty field of the principal Munich airport. Most of the administration buildings had a slightly battered look but were in working order. It was a welcome relief to take refuge from the blazing sunshine in the cool hallway of the main building. The imposing yellow brick lobby was decorated with painted shields of the different German states or “Länder.” The arms of Bavaria, Saxony, Hesse-Nassau and the rest formed a colorful frieze around the walls.

A conveyance of some kind was scheduled to leave for town in a few minutes. Meanwhile there were sandwiches and coffee for the plane passengers. By the time we had finished, a weapons carrier had pulled up before the entrance. Several of us climbed into its dust-encrusted interior. It took me a little while to get my bearings as we drove toward Munich. I had spotted the familiar pepper-pot domes of the Frauenkirche from the air but had recognized no other landmark of the flat, sprawling city which I had known well before the war.

It was not until we turned into the broad Prinz Regenten-Strasse that I knew exactly where I was. As we drove down this handsome avenue, I got a good look at a long, colonnaded building of white stone. The roof was draped with what appeared to be an enormous, dark green fishnet. The billowing scallops of the net flapped about the gleaming cornice of the building. It was the Haus der Deutschen Kunst, the huge exhibition gallery dedicated by Hitler in the middle thirties to the kind of art of which he approved—an art in which there was no place for untrammeled freedom of expression, only the pictorial and plastic representation of all the Nazi regime stood for. The dangling fishnet was part of the elaborate camouflage. I judged from the condition of the building that the net had admirably served its purpose.

In a moment we rounded the corner by the Prinz Karl Palais. Despite the disfiguring coat of ugly olive paint which covered its classic façade, it had not escaped the bombs. The little palace, where Mussolini had stayed, had a hollow, battered look and the formal garden behind it was a waste of furrowed ground and straggling weeds. We turned left into the wide Ludwig-Strasse and came to a grinding halt beside a bleak gray building whose walls were pockmarked with artillery fire. I asked our driver if this were Lucky Rear headquarters and was told curtly that it wasn’t, but that it was the end of the line. It was MP headquarters and I’d have to see if they’d give me a car to take me to my destination, which the driver said was “’way the hell” on the other side of town.

Before going inside I looked down the street to the left. The familiar old buildings were still standing, but they were no longer the trim, cream-colored structures which had once given that part of the city such a clean, orderly air. Most of them were burned out. Farther along on the right, the Theatinerkirche was masked with scaffolding. At the end of the street the Feldherren-Halle, Ludwig I’s copy of the Loggia dei Lanzi, divested of its statuary, reared its columns in the midst of the desolation.

It was gray and cool in the rooms of the MP building, but the place was crowded. Soldiers were everywhere and things seemed to be at sixes and sevens. After making several inquiries and being passed from one desk to another, I finally got hold of a brisk young sergeant to whom I explained my troubles. At first he said there wasn’t a chance of getting a ride out to Lucky Rear. Every jeep was tied up and would be for hours. They had just moved into Munich and hadn’t got things organized yet. Then all at once he relented and with a grin said, “Oh, you’re Navy, aren’t you? In that case I’ll have to fix you up somehow. We can’t have the Navy saying the Army doesn’t co-operate.”

He walked over to a window that looked down on the courtyard below, shouted instructions to someone and then told me I’d find a jeep and driver outside. “Think nothing of it, Lieutenant,” he said in answer to my thanks. “Maybe I’ll be wanting a ship to take me home one of these days before long. Have to keep on the good side of the Navy.”

On my way out I gathered up my luggage from the landing below and climbed into the waiting jeep. We turned the corner and followed the Prinz Regenten-Strasse to the river. I noticed for the first time that a temporary track had been laid along one side. This had been done, the driver said, in order to cart away the rubble which had accumulated in the downtown section. We turned right and followed the Isar for several blocks, crossed to the left over the Ludwig bridge, then drove out the Rosenheimer-Strasse to the east for a distance of about three miles. Our destination was the enormous complex of buildings called the Reichszeugmeisterei, or Quartermaster Corps buildings, in which the rear echelon of General Patton’s Third Army had just established its headquarters.

Even in the baking sunlight of that June day, the place had a cold, unfriendly appearance. We halted for identification at the entrance, and there I was introduced to Third Army discipline. One of the guards gave me a black look and growled, “Put your cap on.” Startled by this burly order, I hastily complied and then experienced a feeling of extreme irritation at having been so easily cowed. I could at least have asked him to say “sir.”

The driver, sensing my discomfiture, remarked good-naturedly, “You’ll get used to that sort of thing around here, sir. They’re very, very fussy now that the shooting’s over. Seems like they don’t have anything else to worry about, except enforcing a lot of regulations.” This was my first sample of what I learned to call by its popular name, “chicken”—a prudent abbreviation for the exasperating rules and regulations one finds at an Army headquarters. Third Army had its share of them—perhaps a little more than its share. But I didn’t find that out all at once. It took me all of two days.

My driver let me out in front of the main building, over the central doorway of which the emblem of the Third Army was proudly displayed—a bold “A” inside a circle. The private at the information desk had never heard of the “Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section,” but said that if it was a part of G-5 it would be on the fifth floor. I found the office of the Assistant Chief of Staff and was directed to a room at the end of a corridor at least two blocks long. I was told that the officer I should see was Captain Robert Posey. I knew that name from the reports I had studied at Versailles, as well as from a magazine article describing his discovery, months before, of some early frescoes in the little Romanesque church of Mont St. Martin which had been damaged by bombing. The article had been written by an old friend of mine, Lincoln Kirstein, who was connected with the MFA&A work in Europe.

When I opened the door of the MFA&A office, George Stout was standing in the middle of the room. The expression of surprise on his face changed to relief after he had read the letter I handed him from Charlie Kuhn.

“You couldn’t have arrived at a more opportune time,” he said. “I came down from Alt Aussee today to see Posey, but I just missed him. He left this morning for a conference in Frankfurt. I wanted to find out what had happened to the armed escort he promised me for my convoys. We’re evacuating the mine and desperately shorthanded, so I’ve got to get back tonight. It’s a six-hour drive.”

“Charlie said you needed help. What do you want me to do?” I asked. I hoped he would take me along.

“I’d like to have you stay here until we get this escort problem straightened out. I was promised two half-tracks, but they didn’t show up this morning. I’ve got a call in about them right now. It’s three o’clock. I ought to make Salzburg by five-thirty. There’ll surely be some word about the escort by that time, and I’ll phone you from there.”

Before he left, George introduced me to Lieutenant Colonel William Hamilton, the Assistant Chief of Staff, and explained to him that I had come down on special orders from SHAEF to help with the evacuation work. George told the colonel that I would be joining him at the mine as soon as Captain Posey returned and provided me with the necessary clearance. After we had left Colonel Hamilton’s office, I asked George what he meant by “clearance.” He laughed and said that I would have to obtain a written permit from Posey before I could operate in Third Army territory. As Third Army’s Monuments Officer, Posey had absolute jurisdiction in all matters pertaining to the fine arts in the area occupied by his Army. At that time it included a portion of Austria which later came under General Mark Clark’s command.

“Don’t worry,” said George. “I’ll have you at the mine in a few days, and you’ll probably be sorry you ever laid eyes on the place.”

I went back to the MFA&A office and was about to settle down at Captain Posey’s vacant desk. I looked across to a corner of the room where a lanky enlisted man sat hunched up at a typewriter. It was Lincoln Kirstein, looking more than ever like a world-weary Rachmaninoff. Lincoln a private in the U. S. Army! What a far cry from the world of modern art and the ballet! He was thoroughly enjoying my astonishment.

“This is a surprise, but it explains a lot of things,” I said, dragging a chair over to his desk. “So you are the Svengali of the Fine Arts here at Third Army.”

“You mustn’t say things like that around this headquarters,” he said apprehensively.

During the next two hours we covered a lot of territory. First of all, I wanted to know why he was an enlisted man chained to a typewriter. With his extraordinary intelligence and wide knowledge of the Fine Arts, he could have been more useful as an officer. He said that he had applied for a commission and had been turned down. I was sorry I had brought up the subject, but knowing Lincoln’s fondness for the dramatic I thought it quite possible that he had wanted to be able to say in later years that he had gone through the war as an enlisted man. He agreed that he could have been of greater service to the Fine Arts project as an officer.

Then I asked him what his “boss”—he was to be mine too—was like. He said that Captain Posey, an architect in civilian life, had had a spectacular career during combat. In the face of almost insurmountable obstacles, such as lack of personnel and transportation and especially the lack of any real co-operation from the higher-ups, he had accomplished miracles. Now that the press was devoting more and more space to the work the Monuments officers were doing—the discovery of treasures in salt mines and so on—they were beginning to pay loving attention to Captain Posey around the headquarters.

I gathered from Lincoln that the present phase of our activities appealed to the captain less than the protection and repair of historic monuments under fire. If true, this was understandable enough. He was an architect. Why would he, except as a matter of general cultural interest, find work that lay essentially in the domain of a museum man particularly absorbing? It seemed reasonable to assume that Captain Posey would welcome museum men to shoulder a part of the burden. But I was to learn later that my assumption was not altogether correct.

Eventually I had to interrupt our conversation. It was getting late, and still no word about the escort vehicles. Lincoln told me where I would find the officer who was to have called George. He was Captain Blyth, a rough-and-ready kind of fellow, an ex-trooper from the state of Virginia. The outlook was not encouraging. No vehicles were as yet available. Finally, at six o’clock, he rang up to say that he wouldn’t know anything before morning.

Lincoln returned from chow, I gave him the message in case George called while I was out and went down to eat. It was after eight when George telephoned. The connection from Salzburg was bad, and so was his temper when I told him I had nothing to report.

Lincoln usually spent his evenings at the office. That night we stayed till after eleven. Here and there he had picked up some fascinating German art books and magazines, all of them Nazi publications lavishly illustrated. They bore eloquent testimony to Hitler’s patronage of the arts. The banality of the contemporary work in painting was stultifying—dozens of rosy-cheeked, buxom maidens and stalwart, brown-limbed youths reeking with “strength through joy,” and acres of idyllic landscapes. The sculpture was better, though too often the tendency toward the colossal was tiresomely in evidence. It was in recording the art of the past, notably in the monographs dealing with the great monuments of the Middle Ages and the Baroque, that admirable progress had been made. I asked Lincoln enviously how he had got hold of these things. He answered laconically that he had “liberated” them.

Captain Blyth had good news for me the next morning. Two armored vehicles had left Munich for the mine. I gave the message to George when he called just before noon.

“They’re a little late,” he said. “Thanks to the fine co-operation of the 11th Armored Division, I am being taken care of from this end of the line. I’ll try to catch your fellows in Salzburg and tell them to go back where they came from. I am sending you a letter by the next convoy. It’s about a repository which ought to be evacuated right away. I can’t give you any of the details over the phone without violating security regulations. As soon as Posey gets back, you ought to go to work on it. After that I want you to help me here.”

After George had hung up, I asked Lincoln if he had any idea what repository George had in mind. Lincoln said it might be the monastery at Hohenfurth. It was in Czechoslovakia, just over the border from Austria. While we were discussing this possibility, Craig Smyth walked in.

As soon as he had recovered from the surprise of finding me at Captain Posey’s desk, he explained the reason for his visit. Something had to be done right away about the building he was setting up as a collecting point. He had been promised a twenty-four-hour guard. He had been promised a barrier of barbed wire. So far, Third Army had failed to provide either one. A lot of valuable stuff had already been delivered to the building, and George was sending in more. He couldn’t wait any longer.

“Let’s have a talk with Colonel Hamilton,” I said. As we walked down to the Assistant Chief of Staff’s office, Craig told me that the buildings he had requisitioned were the ones Bancel La Farge had suggested when we saw him at Wiesbaden a month ago.

“Can’t this matter wait until Captain Posey returns?” the colonel asked.

“I am afraid it can’t, sir,” said Craig. “As you know, the two buildings were the headquarters of the Nazi party. The Nazis meant to destroy them before Munich fell. Having failed to do so, I think it quite possible that they may still attempt it. Both buildings are honeycombed with underground passageways. Only this morning we located the exit of one of them. It was half a block from the building. We hadn’t known of its existence before. The works of art stored in the building at present are worth millions of dollars. In the circumstances, I am not willing to accept the responsibility for what may happen to them. I must have guards or a barrier at once.”

The colonel reached for the telephone and gave orders that a cordon of guards was to be placed on the buildings immediately. He made a second call, this time about the barbed wire. When he had finished he told Craig that the guard detail would report that afternoon; the barbed wire would be strung around the building the next morning. We thanked the colonel and returned to Posey’s office.

We found two officers who had just come in from Dachau. They were waiting to see someone connected with Property Control. They had brought with them a flour sack filled with gold wedding rings; a large carton stuffed with gold teeth, bridgework, crowns and braces (in children’s sizes); a sack containing gold coins (for the most part Russian) and American greenbacks. As we looked at these mementos of the concentration camp, I thought of the atrocity film I had seen at Versailles and wondered how anyone could believe that those pictures had been an exaggeration.

I went back with Craig to his office at the Königsplatz. The damage to Munich was worse than I had realized. The great Deutsches Museum by the river was a hollow-eyed specter, but sufficiently intact to house DPs. Aside from its twin towers, little was left of the Frauenkirche. The buildings lining the Brienner-Strasse had been blasted and burned. Along the short block leading from the Carolinen Platz to the Königsplatz, the destruction was total: on the left stood the jagged remnants of the little villa Hitler had given D’Annunzio; on the right was a heap of rubble which had been the Braun Haus. But practically untouched were the two Ehrentempel—the memorials to the “martyrs” of the 1923 beer-hall “putsch.” The colonnades were draped with the same kind of green fishnet that had been used to camouflage the Haus der Deutschen Kunst. The classic façades of the museums on either side of the square—the Glyptothek and the Neue Staatsgalerie—were intact. The buildings themselves were a shambles.

I followed Craig up the broad flight of steps to the entrance of the Verwaltungsbau, or Administration Building. It was three stories high, built of stone, and occupied almost an entire block. True to the Nazi boast, it looked as though it had been built to “last a thousand years.” And it was so plain and massive that I didn’t see how it could change much in that time. There was nothing here that could “grow old gracefully.” The interior matched the exterior. There were two great central courts with marble stairs leading to the floor above.

Although the building had not been bombed, it had suffered severely from concussion. Craig said that when he had moved in two weeks ago the skylights over the courts had been open to the sky. On rainy days one could practically go boating on the first floor. There had been no glass in the windows. Now they had been boarded up or filled in with a translucent material as a substitute. All of the doors had been out of line and would not lock. But the repairs were already well under way and, according to Craig, the place would be shipshape in another month or six weeks. He said that his colleague, Hamilton Coulter, a former New York architect now a naval lieutenant, was directing the work and doing a magnificent job. Even under normal conditions it would have been a staggering task. With glass and lumber at a premium, to say nothing of the scarcity of skilled labor, a less resourceful man would have given up in despair.

Craig was rapidly building up a staff of German scholars and museum technicians to assist him in the administration of the establishment. It would soon rival a large American museum in complexity and scope. Storage rooms on the ground floor had been made weatherproof. Paintings and sculpture were already pouring in from the mine at Alt Aussee—six truckloads at a time. In accordance with standard museum practice, Craig had set up an efficient accessioning system. As each object came in, it was identified, marked and listed for future reference. Quarters had been set aside for a photographer. Racks were being built for pictures. A two-storied record room was being converted into a library.

Craig had also requisitioned the “twin” of this colossal building—the Führerbau, where Hitler had had his own offices. This was only a block away on the same street and also faced the Königsplatz. It was connected with the Verwaltungsbau by underground passageways. It was in the Führerbau that the Munich Pact of 1938—the pact that was to have guaranteed “peace in our time”—had been signed. Craig showed me the table at which Mr. Chamberlain had signed that document. Craig was using it now for a conference table.

Repairs were being concentrated on the Administration Building, since its “twin” was being held in reserve for later use. At the moment, however, a few of the rooms were occupied by a small guard detail. The truck drivers and armed guards who came each week with the convoys from the mine were also billeted there.

Just as Craig and I were finishing our inspection of the Führerbau, a convoy of six trucks, escorted by two half-tracks, pulled into the parking space behind the building. The convoy leader had a letter for me. It was the one George Stout had mentioned on the telephone. Lincoln was right. The repository George had in mind was the monastery at Hohenfurth. In his letter he stressed the fact that the evacuation should be undertaken at once. He suggested that I try to persuade Posey to send Lincoln along to help me.

Craig had a comfortable billet in the Kopernikus-Strasse, a four-room flat on the fourth floor of a modern apartment building. The back windows looked onto a garden. Over the tops of the poplar trees beyond, one could see the roof of the Prinz Regenten Theater where, back in the twenties, I had seen my first complete performance of Wagner’s Ring. Craig told me that the theater was undamaged except for the Speisesaal where, in prewar days, lavish refreshments were served during intermissions. That one room had caught a bomb.

I accepted Craig’s invitation to share the apartment with him while in Munich and made myself at home in the dining room. It had a couch, and there was a sideboard which I could use as a chest of drawers. The bathroom was across the hall and he said that the supply of hot water was inexhaustible. By comparison, the officers’ billets at Third Army Headquarters were tenements.

Ham Coulter had similar quarters on the ground floor. We stopped there for a drink on our way to supper at the Military Government Detachment. “Civilized” was the word that best described Ham. He was a tall, broad-shouldered fellow with sleek black hair, finely-chiseled features and keen, gray eyes. When he smiled, his mouth crinkled up at the corners, producing an agreeably sarcastic expression. Ham poured out the drinks with an elegance the ordinary German cognac didn’t deserve. They should have been dry martinis. I liked him at once that first evening, and when I came to know him better I found him the wittiest and most amiable of companions. He and Craig were a wonderful combination. They had the greatest admiration and respect for each other, and during the many months of their work together there was not the slightest disagreement between them.

The officers’ dining room that evening was a noisy place. The clatter of knives and forks and the babble of voices mingled with the rasping strains of popular American tunes pounded out by a Bavarian band. As we were about to sit down, the music stopped abruptly and a second later struck up the current favorite, “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time.” Colonel Charles Keegan, the commanding officer, had entered the dining hall. I was puzzled by this until Ham told me that it happened every night. This particular piece was the colonel’s favorite tune and he had ordered it to be played whenever he came in to dinner. The colonel was a colorful character—short and florid, with a shock of white hair. He had figured prominently in New York politics and would again, it was said. He had already helped Craig over a couple of rough spots and if some of his antics amused the MFA&A boys, they seemed to be genuinely fond of him.

While we were at dinner, three officers came and took their places at a near-by table. Craig identified one of them as Captain Posey. I had been told that he was in his middle thirties, but he looked younger than that. He had a boyish face and I noticed that he laughed a great deal as he talked with his two companions. When he wasn’t smiling, there was a stubborn expression about his mouth, and I remembered that Lincoln had said something about his “deceptively gentle manner.” On our way out I introduced myself to him. He was very affable and seemed pleased at my arrival. But he was tired after the long drive from Frankfurt, so, as soon as I had arranged to meet him at his office the next day, I joined Ham and Craig back at the apartment.

I got out to Third Army Headquarters early the following morning and found Captain Posey already at his desk, going through the papers which had accumulated during his absence. We discussed George’s letter at considerable length, and I was disappointed to find that he did not intend to act on it at once. Somehow it had never occurred to me that anyone would question a proposal of George’s.

For one thing, Captain Posey said, he couldn’t spare Lincoln; and for another, there was a very pressing job much nearer Munich which he wanted me to handle. He then proceeded to tell me of a small village on the road to Salzburg where I would find a house in which were stored some eighty cases of paintings and sculpture from the Budapest Museum. He showed me the place on the map and explained how I was to go about locating the exact house upon arrival. I was to see a certain officer at Third Army Headquarters without delay and make arrangements for trucks. He thought I would need about five. It shouldn’t take more than half a day to do the job if all went well. After this preliminary briefing, I was on my own.

My first move was to get hold of the officer about the trucks. How many did I need? When did I want them and where should he tell them to report? I said I’d like to have five trucks at the Königsplatz the following morning at eight-thirty. The officer explained that the drivers would be French, as Third Army was using a number of foreign trucking companies to relieve the existing shortage in transportation.

Later in the day I had a talk with Lincoln about my plans and he gave me a piece of advice which proved exceedingly valuable—that I should go myself to the trucking company which was to provide the vehicles, and personally confirm the arrangements. So, after lunch I struck out in a jeep for the west side of Munich, a distance of some seven or eight miles.

I found a lieutenant, who had charge of the outfit, and explained the purpose of my visit. He had not been notified of the order for five trucks. There was no telephone communication between his office and headquarters, so all messages had to come by courier, and the courier hadn’t come in that day. He was afraid he couldn’t let me have any trucks before the following afternoon. I insisted that the matter was urgent and couldn’t wait, and, after much deliberating and consulting of charts, he relented. I told him a little something about the expedition for which I wanted the trucks and he showed real interest. He suggested that I ought to have extremely careful drivers. I replied that I should indeed, as we would be hauling stuff of incalculable value.

Thereupon he gave me a harrowing description of the group under his supervision. All of them had been members of the French Resistance Movement—ex-terrorists he called them—and they weren’t afraid of God, man or the Devil. Well, I thought, isn’t that comforting! “Oh, yes,” he said, “these Frenchies drive like crazy men. But,” he continued, “one of the fellows has got some sense. I’ll see if I can get him for you.” He went over to the window that looked out on a parking ground littered with vehicles of various kinds. Here and there I saw a mechanic bent over an open hood or sprawled out beneath a truck. The lieutenant bellowed, “Leclancher, come up here to my office!”

A few seconds later a wiry, sandy-haired Frenchman of about forty-five appeared in the doorway. Leclancher understood some English, for he reacted with alert nods of the head as the lieutenant gave a brief description of the job ahead, and then turned and asked me if I spoke French. I told him I did, if he had enough patience. This struck him as inordinately funny, but I was being quite serious. What really pleased him was the fact that I was in the Navy. He said that he had been in the Navy during the first World War. Then and there a lasting bond was formed, though I didn’t appreciate the value of it at the time.

Eight-thirty the next morning found me pacing the Königsplatz. Not a truck in sight. Nine o’clock and still no trucks. At nine thirty, one truck rolled up. Leclancher leaped out and with profuse apologies explained that the other four were having carburetor trouble. There had been water in the gas, too, and that hadn’t helped. For an hour Leclancher and I idled about, whiling away the time with conversation of no consequence, other than that it served to limber up my French. At eleven o’clock Leclancher looked at his watch and said that it would soon be time for lunch. It was obvious that he understood the Army’s conception of a day as a brief span of time, in the course of which one eats three meals. If it is not possible to finish a given job during the short pauses between those meals, well, there’s always the next day. I told him to go to his lunch and to come back as soon as he could round up the other trucks. In the meantime I would get something to eat near by.

When I returned shortly after eleven thirty—having eaten a K ration under the portico of the Verwaltungsbau in lieu of a more formal lunch—my five trucks were lined up ready to go. I appointed Leclancher “chef de convoi”—a rather high-sounding title for such a modest caravan—and he assigned positions to the other drivers, taking the end truck himself. Since my jeep failed to arrive, I climbed into the lead truck. The driver was an amiable youngster whose name was Roger Roget. During the next few weeks he was the lead driver in all of my expeditions, and I took to calling him “Double Roger,” which I think he never quite understood.

To add to my anxiety over our belated start, a light rain began to fall as we pulled out of the Königsplatz and turned into the Brienner-Strasse. We threaded our way cautiously through the slippery streets choked with military traffic, crossed the bridge over the Isar and swung into the broad Rosenheimer-Strasse leading to the east.

Once on the Autobahn, Roger speeded up. The speedometer needle quivered up to thirty-five, forty and finally forty-five miles an hour. I pointed to it, shaking my head. “We must not exceed thirty-five, Roger.”

He promptly slowed down, and as we rolled along, I forgot the worries of the morning. I dozed comfortably. Suddenly we struck an unexpected hole in the road and I woke up. We were doing fifty. This time I spoke sharply, reminding Roger that the speed limit was thirty-five and that we were to stay within it; if we didn’t we’d be arrested, because the road was well patrolled. With a tolerant grin Roger said, “Oh, no, we never get arrested. The MPs, they stop us and get very angry, but—” with a shrug of the shoulders—“we do not understand. They throw the hands up in the air and say ‘dumb Frenchies’ and we go ahead.”

“That may work with you,” I said crossly, “but what about me? I’m not a ‘dumb Frenchy.’”

For the next hour I pretended to doze and at the same time kept an eye on the speedometer. This worked pretty well. Now and again I would look up, and each time, Roger would modify his speed.

Presently we came to a bad detour, where a bridge was out. We had to make a sharp turn to the left, leave the Autobahn and descend a steep and tortuous side road into a deep ravine. That day the narrow road was slippery from the rain, so we had to crawl along. The drop into the valley was a matter of two or three hundred feet and, as we reached the bottom, we could see the monstrous wreckage of the bridge hanging drunkenly in mid-air. The ascent was even more precarious, but our five trucks got through.

We had now left the level country around Munich and were in a region of rolling hills. Along the horizon, gray clouds half concealed the distant peaks. Soon the rain stopped and the sun came out. The mountains changed to misty blue against an even bluer sky. The road rose sharply, and when we reached the crest, I caught a glimpse of shimmering water. It was Chiemsee, largest of the Bavarian lakes.

In another ten minutes the road flattened out again and we came to the turnoff marked “Prien.” There we left the Autobahn for a narrow side road which took us across green meadows. Nothing could have looked more peaceful than this lush, summer countryside. Reports of SS troops still hiding out in the near-by forests seemed preposterous in the pastoral tranquillity. Yet only a few days before, our troops had rounded up a small band of these die-hards in this neighborhood. The SS men had come down from the foothills on a foraging expedition and had been captured while attempting to raid a farmhouse. It was because of just such incidents, as well as the ever-present fire hazard, that I had been sent down to remove the museum treasures to a place of safety.

The road was dwindling away to a cow path and I was beginning to wonder how much farther we could go with our two-and-a-half-ton trucks, when we came to a small cluster of houses. This was Grassau. I had been told that a small detachment of troops was billeted there, so I singled out the largest of the little white houses grouped around the only crossroads in the village. It had clouded over and begun to rain again. As I entered the gate and was crossing the yard, the door of the house was opened by a corporal.

He didn’t seem surprised to see me. Someone at Munich had sent down word to Prien that I was coming, and the message had reached him from there. I asked if he knew where the things I had come for were stored. He motioned to the back of the house and said there were two rooms full of big packing cases. He explained that he and one other man had been detailed to live in the house because of the “stuff” stored there. They had been instructed to keep an eye on the old man who claimed to be responsible for it. That would be Dr. Csanky, director of the Budapest Museum, who, according to my information, would probably raise unqualified hell when I came to cart away his precious cases. The corporal told me that the old man and his son occupied rooms on the second floor.

I was relieved to hear that they were not at home. It would make things much simpler if I could get my trucks loaded and be on my way before they returned. It was already well after two and I wanted to start back by five at the latest. I asked rather tentatively about the chances of getting local talent to help with the loading, and the corporal promptly offered to corral a gang of PWs who were working under guard near by.

While he went off to see about that, I marshaled my trucks. There was enough room to back one truck at a time to the door of the house. A few minutes later the motley “work party” arrived. There were eight of them in all and they ranged from a young fellow of sixteen, wearing a faded German uniform, to a reedy old man of sixty. By and large, they looked husky enough for the job.

I knew enough not to ask my drivers to help, but knew that the work would go much faster if they would lend a hand. Leclancher must have read my thoughts, for he immediately offered his services. As soon as the other four saw what Leclancher was doing, they followed suit.

There were eighty-one cases in all. They varied greatly in size, because some of them contained sculpture and, consequently, were both bulky and heavy. Others, built for big canvases, were very large and flat but relatively light. We had to “design” our loads in such a way as to keep cases of approximately the same type together. This was necessary for two reasons: first, the cases would ride better that way, and second, we hadn’t any too much space. As I roughly figured it, we should be able to get them all in the five trucks, but we couldn’t afford to be prodigal in our loading.

The work went along smoothly for an hour and we were just finishing the second truck when I saw two men approaching. They were Dr. Csanky and his son. This was what I had hoped to avoid. The doctor was a dapper little fellow with a white mustache and very black eyes. He was wearing a corduroy jacket and a flowing bow tie. The artistic effect was topped off by a beret set at a jaunty angle. His son was a callow string bean with objectionably soulful eyes magnified by horn-rimmed spectacles. They came over to the truck and began to jabber and wave their arms. We paid no attention whatever—just kept on methodically lifting one case after another out of the storage room.

The dapper doctor got squarely in my path and I had to stop. I checked his flow of words with a none too civil “Do you speak English?” That drew a blank, so I asked if he spoke German. No luck there either. Feeling like an ad for the Berlitz School, I inquired whether he spoke French. He said “Yes,” but the stream of Hungarian-French which rolled out from that white mustache was unintelligible. It was hopeless. At last I simply had to take him by the shoulders and gently but firmly set him aside. This was the ultimate indignity, but it worked. At that juncture he and the string bean took off. I didn’t know what they were up to and I didn’t care, so long as they left us alone.

Our respite was short-lived. By the time we had the third truck ready to move away, they were back. And they had come with reinforcements: two women were with them. One was a rather handsome dowager who looked out of place in this rural setting. Her gray hair, piled high, was held in place by a scarlet bandanna, and she was wearing a shabby dress of green silk. Despite this getup, there was something rather commanding about her. She introduced herself as the wife of General Ellenlittay and explained in perfect English that Dr. Csanky had come to her in great distress. Would I be so kind as to tell her what was happening so that she could inform him?

“I am removing these cases on the authority of the Commanding General of the Third United States Army,” I said. If she were going to throw generals’ names around, I could produce one too—and a better one at that.

Her response to my pompous pronouncement was delivered charmingly and with calculated deflationary effect. “Dear sir, forgive me if I seemed to question your authority. That was not my intention. It is quite apparent that you are removing the pictures, but where are you taking them?”

“I am sorry, but I am not at liberty to say,” I replied. That too sounded rather lordly, but I consoled myself by recalling that Posey had admonished me not to answer questions like that.

She relayed this information to Dr. Csanky and the effect was startling. He covered his face with his hands and I thought he was going to cry. Finally he pulled himself together and let forth a flood of unintelligible consonants. His interpreter tackled me again.

“Dr. Csanky is frantic. He says that he is responsible to his government for the safety of these treasures and since you are taking them away, there is nothing left for him to do but to blow his brains out.”

My patience was exhausted. I said savagely, “Tell Dr. Csanky for me that he can blow his brains out if he chooses, but I think it would be silly. If you must know, Madame, I am a museum director myself and you can assure him that no harm is going to come to his precious pictures.”

I should never have mentioned that I had even so much as been inside a museum, for, from that moment until we finished loading the last truck, the little doctor never left my side. I was his “cher collègue,” and he kept up a steady barrage of questions which the patient Madame Ellenlittay tried to pass along to me without interrupting our work.

As we lined the trucks up, preparatory to starting back to Munich, Dr. Csanky produced several long lists of what the cases contained. He asked me to sign them. This I refused to do but explained to him through the general’s wife that if he cared to have the lists translated from Hungarian and forwarded to Third Army Headquarters, they could be checked against the contents and eventually returned to him with a notation to that effect.

Our little convoy rolled out of Grassau at six o’clock, leaving the group of Hungarians waving forlornly from the corner. Just before we turned onto the Autobahn, Leclancher signaled from the rear truck for us to stop. He came panting up to the lead truck with a bottle in his hand. With a gallant wave of the arm he said that we must drink to the success of the expedition. It was a bottle of Calvados—fiery and wonderful. We each took a generous swig and then—with a rowdy “en voiture!”—we were on our way again. It was a nice gesture.

The trip back to Munich was uneventful except for the extraordinary beauty of the long summer evening. The sunset had all the extravagance of the tropics. The sky blazed with opalescent clouds. As we drove into Munich, the whole city was suffused with a coral light which produced a more authentic atmosphere of Götterdämmerung than the most ingenious stage Merlin could have contrived.

It was nearly nine when we rolled into the parking area behind the Führerbau—too late to think about unloading and also, I was afraid, too late to get any supper. We had pieced out with K rations and candy bars, but were still hungry. A mess sergeant, lolling on the steps of the building, reluctantly produced some lukewarm stew. After we had eaten, I prevailed on one of the building guards to take my five drivers out to their billets south of town. It was Saturday night. I told Leclancher we would probably be making a longer trip on Monday and that I would need ten drivers. He promised to select five more good men, and we arranged to meet in the square as we had that morning. But Monday, he promised, they would be on time.

After checking the tarpaulins on my five trucks, I sauntered over to the Central Collecting Point on the off-chance that Craig might be working late. I found him looking at some of the pictures which George had sent in that day from the mine. The German packers whom Craig had been able to hire from one of the old established firms in Munich—one which had worked exclusively for the museums there—had finished unloading the trucks only a couple of hours earlier. Most of the things in this shipment had been found at the mine, so now the pictures were stacked according to size in neat rows about the room. In one of them we found two brilliant portraits by Mme. Vigée-Lebrun. Labels on the front identified them as the likenesses of Prince Schuvalov and of the Princess Golowine. Marks on the back indicated that they were from the Lanckoroncki Collection in Vienna, one of the most famous art collections in Europe. Hitler was rumored to have acquired it en bloc—through forced sale, it was said—for the great museum he planned to build at Linz. In another stack we came upon a superb Rubens landscape, a fine portrait by Hals and two sparkling allegorical scenes by Tiepolo. These had no identifying labels other than the numbers which referred to lists we didn’t have at the moment. However, Craig said that the documentation on the pictures, as a whole, was surprisingly complete. Then we ran into a lot of nineteenth century German masters—Lenbach, Spitzweg, Thoma and the like. These Hitler had particularly admired, but they didn’t thrill me. I was getting sleepy and suggested that we had had enough art for one day. I still had a report of the day’s doings to write up for Captain Posey before I could turn in, so we padlocked the room and took off.

Even though the next day was Sunday, it was not a day of rest for me. The trek to Hohenfurth, scheduled for Monday, involved infinitely more complicated preliminary arrangements than the easy run of yesterday. Captain Posey got out maps of the area into which the convoy would be traveling; gave me the names of specific outfits from whom I would have to obtain clearance as well as escorts along the way; and, most important of all, supplied information concerning the material to be transported. None of it, I learned, was cased. He thought it consisted mainly of paintings, but there was probably also some furniture. This wasn’t too definite. Nor did we have a very clear idea as to the exact number of trucks we would need. I had spoken for ten on the theory that a larger number would make too cumbersome a convoy. At least I didn’t want to be responsible for more at that stage of the game, inexperienced as I was. In the circumstances, two seasoned packers might, I thought, come in handy, so I was to see if I could borrow a couple of Craig’s men. There was the problem of rations for the trip up and back. Posey procured a big supply of C rations, not so good as the K’s, but they would do. While at Hohenfurth we would be fed by the American outfit stationed there. It was a good thing that there was so much to be arranged, because it kept me from worrying about a lot of things that could and many that did happen on that amazing expedition.

In the afternoon I went out to make sure of my trucks and on the way back put in a bid for the two packers. My request wasn’t very popular, because Craig was shorthanded, but he thought he could spare two since it was to be only a three-day trip—one day to go up, one day at Hohenfurth, and then back the third day. Craig gloomily predicted that I’d never get ten trucks loaded in one day, but I airily tossed that off with the argument that we had loaded five trucks at Grassau in less than four hours. “But that stuff was all in cases,” he said. “You’ll find it slow going with loose pictures.” Of course he was right, but I didn’t believe it at the time.