Robert M. Edsel

Destiny is not one push, she thought as she waited to cross a quiet street on that cold Paris evening years later, but a thousand small moments that through insight and hard work you line up in the right direction, like the magnet does the metal shavings.

Here, Mortimer Wheeler thought, is power. And a reminder of our mortality.

The thought came back to him, as it often did: 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 was exactly what Walker Hancock and the other Monuments Men intended to do.