But now he’d begun to be afraid, and so he relied all the more upon the Führer to set him right, to help him see how in fact these conquests could still be accomplished. Without the Führer, it was hard to imagine that we would ever, for instance, take Moscow.
This time there was no 
escort; instead, they gave him a day pass, and a single S.D. man led him around the casino to make a right turn at Martin Bormann’s bunker (whose blinds writhed slightly as he passed; he saw an eye staring angrily at him out of darkness), but then it turned out that the S.D. man had made a mistake; our Führer expected him at the communications center. There’d just been a practice gas alert, which hadn’t gone well; the gong failed to ring on time.
They permitted him to freshen up in the bathhouse, where he met Field-Marshal von Manstein. With the water-pressure as loud upon the concrete as an artillery barrage, the other man whispered in his ear: Paulus, it’s hopeless here, unfortunately. Don’t expect to find any real discussion. He no longer shakes anyone’s hand…
Terrified, Paulus replied: And he won’t permit me to withdraw! If I’d at least receive the reserves I’ve been promised!
Ah, whispered Field-Marshal von Manstein with a compassionate smile, this policy of covering everything and surrendering nothing usually leads to the defeat of the weaker party.
But don’t most strategies lead to the defeat of the weaker party?
If that were true, strategy would be no science. There’s the soap.
Now for the bowing and the clicking of heels, the gaggle of generals waiting to see the Führer—first greetings, then lies.
All of us who survived the winter of ’41 learned the hard way that any caliber smaller than a hundred and fifty millimeters is ineffective, because snow will absorb all the shell fragments!
And then I made them stand at attention all night! I said to them, look me in the eye, you cowards! I told them that next time they’d better stand fast! I…
… in a ghetto now, at least in Warsaw. We’ll soon find it necessary to…
Fortunately, our V-weapons are nearly ready for deployment.
As he spoke with them about his own situation, Paulus found himself striving to imitate the grey dignity and half-shut eye of Field-Marshal von Manstein.
Let’s turn to the cardinal problem, gentlemen. After the USSR is defeated…
Halder had been replaced by Zeitzler, who was pontificating and puffing himself up: Once we’ve erased Leningrad and Moscow from the map, and seized all the oil reserves of the Caucasus, the Führer intends if possible to construct a gigantic line of defense and let the eastern campaign rest there.
Warlimont rolled his eyes. Taking Paulus aside, he murmured that he was very concerned about the way that the Führer had dispersed Sixth Army’s forces.
We must accept that risk to the full, said Lieutenant-General Paulus.
First Warlimont, then Bormann; first another identification check, then another conference with the Führer, whose eyes were now as sinister as the black crosses on our airplanes’ wings.
Paulus, I’ll never forget that time back in ’21 when the Communists tried to break up my speech at the Hofbräuhaus! I made it clear to my Brownshirts that today they’d have to show their loyalty to the bitter end. I said that not a man of us would leave that hall unless we got carried out dead! I warned them that if I saw anybody play the coward, I myself would rip off his armband…
Yes, my Führer.
The Russians are finished.
Paulus went whiter than a German tank.
Swiveling arrows on the military map led his aspirations this way and that. Sixth Army’s three assaults had failed to seal off the enemy forces; that was beyond a doubt. Meanwhile, trapped and concentrated in the ruined city, his troops continued to suffer terribly as a result of direct fire from massed enemy guns. The attrition shocked him. The enemy had now begun to challenge his Romanian flank troops; by 4.10.42, while he was still trying to crush Sixty-second Soviet Army once and for all, they’d already seized ground along the axis of the lakes Barmantsak-Tsatsa-Sarpa. Worse yet, those Romanians had permitted their artillery to be captured! As much as it humiliated him, there was nothing for it now but to ask the Führer for new operational and tactical reserves—an innovation for which we must credit Julius Caesar; so Paulus had learned at the General Staff Academy. But where were the reserves? Couldn’t he at least get a few -troops to stiffen the line? (He shared Field-Marshal von Manstein’s high regard for the march discipline of the Death’s Head Division.) Oh, the outcome now seemed as inky as the smoke from burning oil as his young Germans in their wide-flaring helmets peered ever more anxiously around the broken walls. The main thing was to press on. He really had to lean on Schmidt now to keep things rolling; nor did the other officers seem to appreciate how bad it was. Peering anxiously through his field-glasses, he spied a silhouetted swirl of Russian greatcoats and rifles as their infantry ran to the attack; and then, precisely at his signal, our machine-guns and flamethrowers obliterated them. First defense, then counterattack: Here we came, running low, crouching over ridges in the smoky ruins, aiming into the smoke at the half-obscured bones of the city where enemy vermin also waited; his son Ernst never knew that Lieutenant-General Paulus was following the progress of his tank through his field-glasses; a certain corporal whose hobby was committing Bach’s cantatas to memory had confided that Ernst was one of the bravest soldiers he’d ever seen.—For him it’s a question of honor, the corporal said.—That night he wrote down those words in a letter to Coca. Persons unafflicted with his knowledge of the finitude of the triangular flags still shiny and unworn in their boxes in the OKH reserves—and among those unafflicted persons he counted Major-General Schmidt—might well assume, on the basis of, say, the Nuremberg rally back in 11.9.38, when the Führer spoke to a hundred and twenty thousand Storm Troopers, whose tombstone shoulders and metal mushroom necks dwindled symmetrically and forever all the way to the concrete island on which our faraway Führer stood, with three titanic swastika banners at his back, towering much higher than the trees, that more men and more men could eternally be found; but so many men lay dead now! We needed the shaveheaded Cossacks on our side; we had some of them but we needed all the rest, and every Ukrainian male sixteen years and older; all the females had better dig ditches; we needed to take our reserves where we could find them, but unfortunately the Führer said… Paulus remembered how the medieval streets of Nuremberg had been literally paved with marching helmeted men for the rally of ’36; he’d been there; Coca had been at his side, dressed in velvet; he’d pride-fully heard the horns and watched the upraised rifles of that perfect column ten abreast whose steel-shod footfalls clinked as melodiously as Wagner’s Siegfried forging his sword; he remembered the grand cavalry parade of ’35, and where were those men now? First Warsaw, then Moscow; first the Black Sea, then the Caspian; first Rostov in the summer, then the snowy filth and lunar ice of Mamayev Hill; first mechanized columns in perfect order, then broken men and broken engines, tanks with red flags on them, snow-gushes of explosions; and Lieutenant-General Paulus sat gazing downward, his gloved hands folded in his lap.
A million Volga Germans had been deported last August by none other than Comrade Stalin, in order to prevent them from aiding us. If only they were here now! (Where were they? Siberia, he believed, and maybe Kazakhstan…)