Saving the Light at Chartres

Built around 1200 and now a UNESCO World Heritage Site that draws more than a million visitors and pilgrims each year, Chartres Cathedral is one of the crown jewels of world art and architecture. The cathedral avoided looting and destruction during the anti-religion fervor of the French Revolution, and that the cathedral and its prized, priceless stained glass (now the world’s largest collection of medieval stained glass) survived World War II, which saw the destruction of too many cultural treasures, owes much to the actions of a few individuals who recognized the value of the cathedral and struggled to save it. The story begins half a decade before World War II, when a young French architect developed a plan to save the cathedral’s precious stained glass. As war engulfed Europe in the fall of 1939, the French were prepared, and a team of architects and future Resistance leaders (such as Jean Moulin) boxed up the panels in a thousand crates. They trained and trucked them to an underground quarry as the German invaders encroached in June 1940, securing the glass—with the help of refugees fleeing Paris—not long before the Germans completed their conquest. But this remarkable, close-call effort to save the stained glass is but prologue to the heart of this story: that of American colonel Welborn Griffith. By August 1944, the Americans had broken out of Normandy and were racing across France toward Paris and the Seine. Chartres, sixty miles southwest of Paris, became a key battleground. Allied bombing of Chartres airfield blew out the cathedral’s temporary window coverings, and when the American reached the town, they believed German artillery spotters or snipers occupied the cathedral’s spires. When Colonel Griffith—operations officer of the XX Corps in Patton’s Third Army—arrived, the corps’ artillery had orders to destroy the cathedral to neutralize the German threat. Griffith, a Texan and West Pointer in his early forties, was skeptical. He could have unthinkingly complied with the order from higher up, he could have sent a subordinate to investigate, but in one of those inexplicable moments of war when courage outs, he decided the cathedral should be spared and went himself, entering the old building, inspecting the two steeples, climbing the bell tower, ringing the bell, and hanging an...