Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  The orderly brought a telegram from the Supreme Command. General von Küchler had been raised up to Field-Marshal for his role in breaking the enemy’s counteroffensive last winter.

  The next day, when von Manstein got advanced to Field-Marshal for taking Sebastopol, he felt the prickings of envy, whose stimulus was not entirely unpleasant: If Field-Marshalships were getting passed out so frequently, why shouldn’t he receive one? Coca would be so proud then. She knew how to make the most of their connections, and doubtless she was doing her best for him right now. What a loyal wife she was! (Von Manstein ought to help him, too; Paulus had lent him assault artillery last June, at the very beginning of Operation Barbarossa.) On more than one occasion since the beginning of this war he’d gazed upon the wide smiles of-men getting decorated at Wolf’s Lair, and although he mistrusted thefor their aloofness from the regular army, he couldn’t help but think that someday he’d be standing up front with them, receiving not another routine promotion, but the reward for valor in the field; even then he’d begun to dream about someday becoming a Field-Marshal. Strange to say, the first time that vision had become consciously manifest was at a musical performance. Shortly before the commencement of Case Yellow, he and Coca had been privileged to hear Furtwängler himself conduct the State Orchestra in Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, the sea of white sheet-music like unriven plates of luminescent armor, the music conquering everything; and all around him, myriads rapturously breathless, then standing to applaud, loosing strings of sound as deafening as machine-gun fire. Coca had worn her hair down like the teenaged film star Lisca Malbran, in a needless attempt to look younger. The truth was that she never had to worry about anything like that, at least not so far as he was concerned; she was so regal, so far above him that he felt fortunate merely to sit beside her, and he knew that she would still be just as beautiful to him when she had left middle age behind her. So now Furtwängler raised his baton, and the Fifth Symphony bewitched the hall with its “Fate” motif as lovely and sinister as a Ju-88 bomber about to leave its aerodrome at night, its propeller-shadows long black whirling stripes upon the runway’s glassy luminescence. He had been imagining that he was Furtwängler, the Führer of the music, whose melody now came streaming into everyone’s hearts; when suddenly he realized that after all he could be this; he too could own a baton encrusted with precious stones like Göring’s; and he began to see war somewhat as our Führer must, which is to say not as the implementation of preconsidered operations, but as music in and of itself, pulsations of godlike creativity whose patterns are their own harmonies. And when his tanks clanked down the tree-lined streets of Kharkov (a feat which triggered a message of congratulations from prominent Ukrainians), he felt as if he were truly at the conductor’s podium. What must it be like for the Führer on the reviewing stand at Nuremberg, when a hundred thousand Nazis chanted his name and antiaircraft beams swiveled across the night? And now von Manstein had been elevated almost to that plane—not that he didn’t deserve it. That made twelve already. How could he, Friedrich Paulus, become the thirteenth? After the reduction of Stalingrad, if the Führer did want that city, Sixth Army would press on to the Caspian Sea. Possibly, were his progress sufficiently rapid and his prisoners numerous enough, the Führer might remember him . . . Sitting down to his field-desk, he composed a message of congratulations to Field-Marshal von Manstein.

  4

  Running low and fast, with their guns pointed ahead like steel phalli, his men conquered more and more of Russia. That sullen land, raped by Cossacks Red and White, neighbor against neighbor, then scientifically starved by Comrade Stalin’s dekulakization program, wanted only to sleep and quietly grow its buckwheat, but now Sixth Army was here and the Reds kept sniping and dying behind every ruin; somebody kept talking about roast chicken. The interrogated civilians denied that anyone here had ever been a commissar but pointed out all the Jews; these were instructed to go home and wait for the Einsatzgruppen, who’d arrive soon. He and Coca agreed that the Jews needed to be excluded from our national life; he accepted her assurances that in Romania the situation might be somewhat different. Coca had a wonderful power of making one feel the complexities of everything; on their honeymoon her soul had grown and budded around them both until he’d felt as if he were in a cherry arbor in summer, a deliciously stifling sensation of being overwhelmed; he had always longed to let himself go, sinking and spinning into something greater than himself; and his mind quite naturally worked to consider every facet of every question; so when he was with Coca, who transformed twenty facets into twenty thousand, he could get dizzy if he weren’t careful; so he always avoided drawing her into his own perplexities; what he wasn’t too proud to name her superiority would only have multiplied them. He abstained; he went forward, just as he had done last summer in Zhitomir and Kiev; he absorbed more of Russia under his tank-treads, and the enemy radio transmissions said: Comrade Commander, I am asking for help! or Comrade General, what should we do now? Up until now, their weakness had been that they kept going over to a rigid defensive. Now they’d finally learned to run away.

  On 5.7.42 our forces began to enter Voronezh, while Paulus for his part rolled through Ostrogorzhsk. In effect, he’d smashed the Southern Front of General Timoshenko, whom he almost pitied. Phase I of Operation Blau had nearly been completed. The day before yesterday he’d taken another forty thousand prisoners. To the rear, a line of German soldiers lay dead and tumbled between their burning tanks. They would be buried, each one under a cross, and after the final victory our subject peoples could tend all the cemeteries. As for the dead Russians, the peasants would take care of them or not. A week from now there’d be crosses of lashed saplings, some of them even fashioned into spearheads, and kerchiefed old babushkas would come to pray over them, at least until the Einsatzgruppen detachments scared them off.

  They encircled and annihilated two more enemy armies—a gain for which more Germans died. Three old women sat watching from a ruined house. In the long run, he was well aware, our manpower problem must become insoluble, but for now, Sixth Army still had many soldiers to spend.—Somehow we’ll manage, Herr Lieutenant-General! That was what Major-General Schmidt always said. This Schmidt had been his chief of staff since June, and his energetic optimism made a favorable impression. Nonethless, how many more Soviet armies remained? On the eve of Operation Barbarossa, Fremde Heere Ost Gruppe I had calculated that there were no more than eleven of them in European Russia. The others—nine or ten, perhaps—wouldn’t ever be moved into the zone of engagement, because Stalin feared a Japanese attack. So how many armies did that work out to? Special formations: Numbers unknown, concluded Fremde Heere Ost. The clumsiness, schematism, the avoidance of decision and responsibility, these have not altered since the Finnish campaign.

  Stalin seemed to be withdrawing his forces. Perhaps he still imagined that Operation Blau was a feint. In any event, there was no decisive encounter, not yet, even as we launched Phase II.

  On 6.7.42 we crossed the Don. On 9.7.42 our forces finally crushed all resistance in Voronezh, which is a very important railroad junction, and more flatcars heaped with Russian prisoners rolled westward to the concentration camps, thereby wrapping up Operation Wilhelm; but since that battle took four days, the Führer, so Paulus heard, expressed vehement displeasure with Field-Marshal von Bock. He was watching the calendar as much as everyone. After the misery of the Moscow campaign, everyone had learned better than to squander Russia’s golden summer days. That was why Operation Blau needed to be completed by the end of October at the latest. Paulus could hardly contest that the Führer held every right to be exasperated. The enemy had used the delay to withdraw eastward in good order, so the capture of Voronezh, necessary as it surely had been, left a sour taste in Germany’s devouring mouth. Kalach might not fall easily, either. According to Fremde Heere Ost Gruppe I, Army Group South, the enemy still had twelve infantry divisions and five armored brigades there. Although he was alone in the staff car, an
embarrassed smile came to his lips. He did not want to be known as the man who couldn’t take Kalach. Major-General Schmidt had already volunteered that in his opinion the soldiers of Sixth Army stood ready for even greater exertions. Uncertain whether to approve the man’s zeal or rebuke an insinuation, Paulus replied, after a pause and perhaps a trifle drily: Sixth Army’s willingness to make efforts lies beyond a doubt. That will be all for now, Schmidt.—He began to visit the front line more often than before, although, not being a grandstander such as Field-Marshals von Manstein and von Reichenau, he tried not to let his soldiers see him. He remembered his father overwatching everything he did; he refused to distrust people in that fashion. His biographer Goerlitz describes him as frequently looking exhausted and dusty during this period. He was in the midst of preparing Operation Fredericus II, which would obliterate the enemy strongpoint of Kupiansk. Coca would have worried about him, although she ought to have known how it was; two of her brothers had been officers. Sometimes Sixth Army was fired on from one of those Russian peasant huts ringed with earth, and rather than accept more delay, Paulus adopted the extravagant solution of an antitank round, because in war as in any other endeavor one must spend something to get something; in this case one spends time, manpower or materiel. Of these, time, golden time, was currently most precious. The slave laborers of the Ostlands could always produce more tank shells, but summer was going, going.

  On 15.7.42, the Führer made an alteration in Operation Blau. He’d removed Field-Marshal von Bock from command of Army Group A on account of timidity and insubordination. (In my opinion, sir, said Major-General Schmidt, there was always something half-hearted about him.) But this was really a pro forma decision; von Bock’s disgrace had actually occurred, as Paulus remembered all too well, during that conference back in Poltava, on that hot creosote-scented day when everyone gathered around the snow-white map—and here Paulus suddenly recalled that his wife, who was really very well read, possessed a uniform edition, in similarly snow-white bindings, of the complete works of Pushkin; and one of these volumes (he could almost see it) was entitled Poltava. His memory for details approached the photographic: When he overgazed a map of, say, Stalingrad, various topographic features would recall to his mind the enemy troop concentrations at each strongpoint and the dispositions of Sixth Army which would be required to reduce them; in the case of Poltava, which remained literally a closed book to him (although he enjoyed it when Coca read to him, he’d never found much leisure for poetry, even in peacetime), his recollections had to do with mild German sunshine, whose bygone character invested it with more plenitude than it ever could have carried at the time; in that lost and now languorous-seeming epoch before our Führer came to power, those white volumes had spanned a bookshelf in their bedroom, and what he must be remembering, he supposed, was one of those summer mornings when Coca lay sleeping on his shoulder, and he with his far-sighted eyes picked out the title gilt-lettered on the spine of each white book, not in German; unlike most of us, he could sound out the Cyrillic alphabet, and although he didn’t know what the words meant it was surprising how often this capability of transliteration taught him something useful, particularly nowadays, of course, when he inspected captured enemy documents; very likely he’d been a trifle bored but hadn’t had the heart to wake Coca; where were the children? They must have been very little then. Ernst in particular always used to want to come into bed with them; the poor child suffered from nightmares. In fact, he’d once come in early one morning when he and Coca were making love; at first neither of them had noticed the slowly opening door; then the plump little face was looking up at them, woebegone and bewildered; thank God they’d had the sheet over them; that memory distressed him. And then another time he’d been making love with Coca and it had been a very rich time; he felt that her moans were a boat which was carrying them both slowly down some broad wide river of sunlight; then they were finished and Coca was kissing him, weeping with happiness; she was a very emotional woman; while he for his own part, gripped by the extreme clarity which often takes over a man in the very first instant after orgasm, lay fixing his eyes upon the bookshelf, where he saw the word ΠОΛТАВА, Poltava. How many times in those years had he read the lettering on that particular volume without ever once troubling to open it? Often books of that nature contained frontispieces of old wars and such; it would have been interesting, come to think of it, to learn more about the history of this region. First invasions, then rebellions; he knew that much from military college. While Coca lay with her long soft hair across them both, sleepily licking his nipple, he deciphered ΠОΛТАВА again. Just then the door slowly, silently opened: Ernst was peeking in. Why was he remembering that now? He hadn’t thought of those Pushkin volumes in years; where had Coca hidden them? It seemed as if so much had happened during that one instant when the strengthening sunshine happened to strike that particular book that the moment had been practically infinite; he almost supposed that he could see and feel every strand of Coca’s hair that had been so warmly caressing them when Ernst crept in; and now, although his mind ranged over these details with a voluptuous completeness which itself approached infinity, all of this happened in the time it took to light another cigarette; then the orderly brought in the tray, polished like a mirror, upon which the communications of the day had been arranged, first the enemy situation report, then the signals intelligence report, both of them courtesy of Gehlen at Fremde Heere Ost, Gruppe I, Army Group B; but before he got to either, the orderly carried in a decrypted announcement from OKW at Poltava: The Führer had decided to strip him of Fourth Panzer Army, whose support thus far had greatly facilitated his lightning advance. Apparently someone had convinced OKW (he hoped it wasn’t “the nodding ass”) that Fourth Panzer should participate in the vast pincer movement against Rostov. This decision troubled Paulus; he’d already been sorry enough to see First Panzer go; without their help it would have taken him much longer to tie off the Barvenko salient, and now, with less manpower at his disposal, everything would be still more protracted; but orders are orders. Some of his officers complained; even Major-General Schmidt looked glum; but he had made up his mind to treat them all as we treat our Romanian allies—namely, with tactful firmness. He broadened his bridgehead at Kalach, which fell easily. The Führer was pleased; so he gathered from General Warlimont’s signal. Now that he had a moment, he sent a message of friendship and commiseration to Field-Marshal von Bock, whose command had now been turned over to Colonel-General von Weichs; within two hours the Field-Marshal replied: My dear Paulus, the important thing is to keep calm. Evidently he would be assigned to Führer Reserve, God help him. Weary and dusty from another inspection of the front line, he wrote a quick note to Olga, enclosing greetings for his grandson and son-in-law; he advised her to get her Mercedes serviced sooner rather than later, in case there were problems in obtaining spare parts. Then he returned to the business of constructing and guiding his spearheads. On 23.7.42 we finally captured Rostov, after beating down vicious enemy resistance. (Kerchiefed old Russian women were struggling on either side of a bicycle to which buckets of water had been strapped; they staggered slowly through the volcanic dust between the ruins, then vanished. Why hadn’t their High Command evacuated them? This negligence on Premier Stalin’s part seemed contrary to the basic conduct of humanitarian operations.) Congratulating all of us on the successful fulfillment of Operation Blau, Phase II, the Führer canceled Phase III and commenced Operations Edelweiss and Heron. Operation Heron was a lightning attack on Stalingrad, and the man charged with that operation was Lieutenant-General Paulus. Operation Edelweiss was the continuation of our drive infinitely southeast-ward, for whose sake Paulus was now commanded to give up fifty percent of his ammunition and fifty percent of his fuel. No matter: Panzergruppen were on the way to help him! Whose would they be? Probably Colonel-General Hoth’s. He had full confidence in that man. Unfortunately, aerial reconnaissance indicated that the enemy was taking full advantage of the delay
(eighteen days) to regroup on the Volga, in that city called Stalingrad.

  5

  The Great Soviet Encyclopedia informs us that the city of Stalingrad, formerly Tsaritsyn, was founded on an island sometime in the sixteenth century, and this fairytale isolation and encirclement could not be more fitting. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we learn, Tsaritsyn was a major center of the struggle of the people against feudal exploitation. So far so good; and it gets better, for during the Civil War the defense of this place devolved on, among others, Comrade Stalin himself, and in the natural course of things his role there became retrospectively magnified, which is why it got named after him.—The forces of Adolf Hitler, having in the meantime destroyed two more Russian armies, now drew near the City of Stalin. Therefore, what was about to happen had to happen.