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It was at Monte Cassino that the saint wrote the Benedictine Rules, establishing the tradition of monasticism in the Western world. It was there he died and was buried. The abbey was sacred ground, an intellectual center and “a symbol of the preservation and cultivation of the things of the mind and the spirit through times of great stress.”
But was art worth a life, Taper wanted to know. Like all Monuments Men, it was a question that haunted him. “I had that choice,” Leonard said. “I chose to remove the bombs. It was worth the reward.” “What reward?” “When I finished, I got to sit in Chartres Cathedral, the cathedral I had helped save, for almost an hour. Alone.”
He was a man who believed in discretion; that those who do not speak of their actions are the ones who actually perform them.
To save the culture of your allies is a small thing. To cherish the culture of your enemy, to risk your life and the life of other men to save it, to give it all back to them as soon as the battle was won… it was unheard of, but that is exactly what Walker Hancock and the other Monuments Men intended to do.
We do not want to destroy unnecessarily what men spent so much time and care and skill in making… [for] these examples of craftsmanship tell us so much about our ancestors.… If these things are lost or broken or destroyed, we lose a valuable part of our knowledge about our forefathers. No age lives entirely alone; every civilisation is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past. If these things are destroyed, we have lost a part of our past, and we shall be the poorer for it. —British Monuments Man Ronald Balfour, draft lecture for soldiers, 1944
