Word: bockings
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Eventually, the Germans took the hill. Upon a map at Bock's headquarters, many miles from the fighting, a pin moved. The Field Marshal's green eyes glowed. The forward dance of the pins on the map meant to him, too, that men were dying. It was a meaning that, for him and his Prussian kind, was as real as it was for all the Kochetkovs on the hills. And too much death, Bock knew, can stop the movement of the pins-it stopped them last fall when he threw his armies in costly assaults upon Moscow...
...Bock, the Prussian, born in a Prussian fortress 61 years ago, required men to die for the Fatherland, for the glory of arms, for themselves ("Our profession should always be crowned by heroic death in battle"). Once he had commanded men to die for the Emperor. Now, with impersonal fervor, he said: "For the Führer." He expected them to die only when necessary, and then to die coldly ("The ideal soldier thinks only when ordered to do so"). His role was not to lead them into battle, or to die with them, but to see that they...
...lean rigor of his face, the green blaze in his eyes, many German women have found something fearful and attractive. Common soldiers, and even his fellow Prussians, sometimes saw in him a quality which they shunned and derided. They called him der Sterber ("the Dier"). They called themselves "Bock's own dying heroes." But, at his command, they fought well, and by the thousands they died. With the abundance of guns, tanks and planes which Bock gave them, they drove the men of the Red Army from the hills, the valleys and the villages before Stalingrad...
...isolated, weakened; German hordes and German planes free for battle in western Europe or in the Middle East; a disaster possibly worse than all the other disasters of World War II. With these possibilities only too imminent, it was easy, now, to believe that the cold, harsh face of Bock could turn into the face of victory for Hitler and the Germans. That face was everywhere in Russia. It was the face of Dietl on the Finnish front, where the Russians fought to keep their access to the North Atlantic. It was the face of Leeb on the northern front...
...Face. Yet there was hope on the Russian battlefields. It was not solely the fact that Bock and his Germans had yet to win Stalingrad, the lower Volga and the Caucasus. It was not the hope, almost the certainty, that if all was lost in the south, if the Red Army was no longer the saving bulwark of the U.S. and Great Britain, Russia would still survive for the Russians. It was not the hope, which even the hard-minded Russians seized and fondled last week, that the German losses in south Russia was irreparably weakening the German armies...