The Vault at Christmas

On December 16, 1944, three German armies struck through the Ardennes and drove the American line back in the worst winter in decades. Within days the 101st Airborne was surrounded at Bastogne, and across the salient men were fighting in villages, forests and the shells of churches.

Christmas came anyway. Chaplains said Mass in barns and cellars and in churches whose roofs were already gone. On Christmas Eve German bombers hit Bastogne itself; one bomb landed on an aid station and killed wounded men where they lay.

The weather had broken on December 23. Cargo aircraft dropped ammunition and plasma into the town, and on the 26th tanks of the 4th Armored Division opened the road from the south. The snow kept falling through the broken vaults.

The eye enters through the hole in the vault. Snow falls in the single shaft of daylight and settles on the pillars, the altar and the sleeping men. The nave is painted almost without color — stone, dust, wool — so the few candles read as the warmest thing in the picture. The chaplain stands small at the far end, the only figure upright. Everything in the composition points toward him, and past him, into the gray light of the choir.