Wires Down

Last week as war edged closer, silencing telephones and cables (see p. 30), in the sombre and silent halls of Europe's libraries and museums communication was at an end too: the wisdom of men long dead was being packed up and laid away in vaults, in cellars, to wait as it has waited before for the end of war or crisis.

In Paris, where it has become routine to guard the nation's art against the menace of German guns, the doors of the Louvre were locked and workmen began stolidly to remove its treasures. Some were stored behind steel walls in the Bank of France; others were carted off to hiding places in the country. Rare books and manuscripts were spirited away from shelves of the National Library; the Chateau de Versailles and the Trianons, stripped of their furnishings, lay empty and bare. Cathedral cities heard the tattoo on wood as scaffoldings went up. From Chartres' Cathedral (one mile distant from a great military airport), the stained-glass windows fired in the Thirteenth Century were lifted down to safety.

In London Westminster Abbey's caretakers crated the 600-year-old Coronation Chair in which George VI was crowned, and trundled it away. The British Museum closed; so did the National Gallery; and motor lorries filled with books and paintings rumbled out of London. Canterbury Cathedral's stained glass was buried in the surrounding countryside.

What the museums of Berlin and Vienna, Rome and Florence were doing, nobody troubled to inquire. But FORTUNE disclosed last week that Vatican City, Europe's smallest nation, had not forgotten war. Unprotected stood its lovely frescoes and its statuary; but the Vatican has bombproof shelters underground.

If war came, the custodians of Europe's civilization knew it would mean a long silence for man's communion with literature and art. But they were ready for it, sure that somehow knowledge would survive in the dark chambers and subterranean crypts where they had secreted it.

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