Schmidt did not acknowledge this invitation with so much as a flicker of his eyelids. While Paulus bowed his head, looked at his folded hands and lapsed into silence and reverie, Schmidt’s compelling gaze spoke an altogether more unequivocal language. This look, which had a dangerous gleam about it, said clearly: ‘Look at me – I am the Sixth Army!’
General Schmidt began speaking. In terse sentences, laden with imperatives, he set forth the situation they were in once more – one that could not, for the time being, count on any outside assistance. The play of light in his strange blue eyes, which he somehow contrived to make flash in a constant variety of ways, held those attending the meeting in thrall. Even Unold, for whom this was nothing new, found himself – much to his annoyance – falling again for this deception. Adopting the cool and attentive expression of the professionally interested listener, he pretended to follow Schmidt’s address, but his thoughts wandered. He knew Schmidt from the days when he’d been an officer cadet, and he loathed the man with every fibre of his being. He hated everything about him: the exaggerated elegance of the pampered bachelor, his ostentatious fitness, and his whole paradoxical nature, in which an above-average intelligence was coupled with an utterly shameless deceitfulness, personable amiability could quite unexpectedly switch to cutting chilliness, and a self-indulgent capriciousness could co-exist with a pitiless severity towards others. ‘That smarmy fucker!’ Unold would spit in his bunker whenever the general, for the umpteenth time, had countermanded one of his orders. ‘Careerist poser! How that peacock loves to display his feathers!’ Among friends, he referred to Schmidt simply as ‘Lying Arthur’. Yet, time and time again, this loathing would collapse into impotent acquiescence whenever he came face to face with Schmidt. The simple truth was that Unold hated the man because he admired him. It was the hatred of unfulfilled love for an unattainable idol. In General Schmidt, fate’s spoilt golden boy, whose every move (at least on a personal level) met with success, Unold saw embodied something of the Nietzschean ‘superman’, such as he yearned to be. Hadn’t Schmidt told him only recently about a compensation claim of seventy-five thousand Reichsmarks that he’d submitted for a bombed-out bachelor pad he owned – and that he’d duly been granted it? ‘Bear in mind the wine cellar I had there!’ he’d said laughingly when he saw the stunned expression on Unold’s face.
Wait, what was that he just said? The lieutenant colonel was brought back to reality with a bump.
‘So you see,’ General Schmidt was saying, ‘we need infantry reserves. We requested that fresh forces be dispatched to us by air in good time. But by the middle of this month, High Command had already turned us down. Insufficient transport capacity. Even then we were forced to draw on reserves that we cobbled together from our logistics and staff units, and so on…’
Damn and blast, that didn’t sound like planning for a breakout! A ripple of unease passed through the room. Unold’s suddenly alert gaze lighted upon the divisional commander, who was sitting next to him. Colonel von Hermann had turned pale, and could feel the blood pulsing through his veins right to his fingertips. The news had hit him like an electric shock. So, the High Command had recommended the ‘combing out’ – for which read ‘winding up’ – of all the non-front-line occupations as early as mid-December, had it? At a time when Hoth’s rescue mission was still in full swing, then, they’d ordered a clearance sale of the entire army? Pure and simple, that was tantamount to saying, ‘We can’t help you, help yourselves as best you can…’ Had the top brass already written off the Sixth Army, in that case? Well then, if that was so, an immediate breakout using their own forces was the only thing that could save them! What were they waiting for?
‘So what about the “jellyfish”? The “Mobile Cauldron”?’ he asked, interrupting the general’s dazzling stream of verbiage and looking imploringly at the C-in-C for support. ‘I mean to say, a breakout was in planning, right?’
Shocked at this intemperate show of dissent, Schmidt stopped talking. Paulus looked up and blinked like he was looking into too bright a light. His hand lifted slightly from the table, as if by itself, before dropping back again.
‘The plan was turned down,’ he said quietly. General Schmidt, disregarding the interruption, immediately carried on with his presentation. ‘As long as we could entertain the possibility of breaking out under our own steam, we didn’t go along with the High Command’s suggestion. But as you will all now appreciate, the situation is different. Only the ruthless exploitation of our own manpower reserves at the front will afford us the possibility of holding out here for the duration.’
Holding out here for the duration… so that was the name of the game! Hungry and cold, stuck in this barbaric wilderness, where people dropped like flies in autumn. For the sake of this dubious attempt at ‘holding out’ they were going to forego the last opportunity to save the army? By implementing the planned ‘combing out’ exercise, the army would render itself permanently immobile, condemn itself to inaction, and throw itself, for better or worse, on the unreliable mercy of an external rescuer. When the general stopped speaking, the only sound in the room was the officers’ heavy breathing.
‘But this is all a load of nonsense!’ the old general with the face like a tiger blurted out at length. ‘We pressed rear-area troops into the front line ages ago. Anyone who can shoot a rifle’s already at the front. We don’t need the High Command’s orders for that!’
The grizzled old soldier was the only one present who didn’t fear the Sixth Army’s ‘evil spirit’. As an ensign, he’d been an effete and sickly young man, but almost forty years of service in the Prussian military had taught him what toughness meant. In the process, he had lost his heart. As president of the Imperial Military Court, he had also developed a cruel streak of misanthropy, and the whole package was rounded off by a splenetic, temperamental maliciousness born of old age and constant stomach complaints. He feared neither the Devil nor his acolytes. He was a match for them.
Schmidt’s eyes flashed like steel blades. ‘Oh yes, we know your “combing out” all right!’ he countered angrily. ‘Listen, if you had enough men spare to build grandiose bunkers like this—’
The tiger slammed his fist down on the table; the tips of his moustache trembled.
‘Utterly outrageous!’
Paulus raised his hands imploringly. ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, I beg you! The gravity of the current situation…,’ he began in pained tones. It was clear he found the whole affair embarrassing, deeply embarrassing. Did no one care what he thought?
‘The High Command has worked out for us,’ General Schmidt calmly continued, ‘that of the more than three hundred thousand men under our command, some two hundred and seventy thousand can be deployed on the front line. According to my calculations, there are still at least fifty thousand men here in the Cauldron who are hanging around to no useful purpose. That’s fifty thousand infantrymen!’
Infantrymen? Those drivers, ammunition-luggers, bakers and trench-diggers, all of them ailing and half-starved – infantrymen? What a joke! Was the top brass really that stupid, or just doing a very good impression of idiocy? Under the compelling glare of Schmidt the conjurer, with his incredible figure-juggling, no one dared give vent to their ridicule or indignation. For his part, Colonel von Hermann was only half listening. All this stuff no longer concerned him. He’d been summoned here only to learn that the breakout to the west, which he’d been hoping for all along and which he was to have spearheaded, had now been cancelled for good. He was a man of action, used to going on the offensive. Whatever might happen now was none of his business. He also felt paralysed by the stifling miasma of resignation emanating from the silent C-in-C over there, an aura that the breezy bumptiousness of the chief of staff could not dispel.