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 the for 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.
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.