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some day recall
That some things are dearer than the finest city wall.
     
    By the end of the campaign’s third week, Polish resistance was broken. The capital remained unoccupied only because the Germans wished to destroy it before claiming the ruins; hour after hour and day after day, merciless bombardment continued. A nurse, Jadwiga Sosnkowska, described scenes at her hospital outside Warsaw on 25 September:
    The procession of wounded from the city was an unending march of death. The lights went out, and all of us, doctors and nurses, had to move about with candles in our hands. As both the operating theatres and the dressing stations were destroyed the work was done in the lecture rooms on ordinary deal tables, and owing to the lack of water the instruments could not be sterilised, but had to be cleansed with alcohol … As human wreckage was laid on the table the surgeon vainly attempted to save the lives that were slipping through his hands … Tragedy followed tragedy. At one time the victim was a girl of sixteen. She had a glorious mop of golden hair, her face was delicate as a flower, and her lovely sapphire-blue eyes were full of tears. Both her legs, up to the knees, were a mass of bleeding pulp, in which it was impossible to distinguish bone from flesh; both had to be amputated above the knee. Before the surgeon began I bent over this innocent child to kiss her pallid brow, to lay my helpless hand on her golden head. She died quietly in the course of the morning, like a flower plucked by a merciless hand.
     
    Professional soldiers can seldom afford to indulge in emotionalism about the horrors of war, but posterity must recoil from the complacency of Germany’s generals about both the character of their national leader, and the murderous adventure in which they had become his accomplices. Gen. Erich von Manstein is widely regarded as the finest German general of the war; afterwards, he took pride in pretensions to have done his part as an officer and gentleman. However, his writings during the Polish campaign, as well as later, reveal the insensitivity characteristic of his caste. He was delighted by the invasion: ‘It’s a grand decision of the Führer in view of the attitude of the Western Powers up till now. His offer to solve the Polish question was so obliging that England and France – if they really wanted peace – should have pushed Poland into accepting.’ Soon after the campaign began, Manstein visited a formation which he himself had recently commanded: ‘It was touching to see the staff so pleased when I suddenly appeared … Cranz [his successor] told me it was a pleasure to command such a well-trained division in war.’
    In a letter to his wife, Manstein described his personal routine during the campaign, in which he served as von Rundstedt’s chief of staff at Army Group South: ‘I get up at 6.30, plunge into the water [for a swim], into the office by 7.00. Morning reports, coffee, then work or trips with R[undstedt]. Midday, field kitchens here. Then half an hour break. In the evening after supper, which we eat together with the general staff officers as at lunch, the evening reports come in. And so it goes on to 11.30.’ The contrast is stark, between the serenity of army headquarters and the vast human tragedy its operations had precipitated. Manstein signed an order for the German forces encircling Warsaw to fire upon any refugees who attempted to leave: it was deemed easier to force a swift outcome of the campaign, and to avoid a battle in the streets, if the inhabitants were unable to escape the capital’s bombardment. Yet he was a man of such personal fastidiousness that he sometimes quit rooms in which von Rundstedt was speaking, because he recoiled from his chief’s obscene language. On 25 September, he basked in a congratulatory visit from Hitler, writing to his wife: ‘It was nice to see how the soldiers rejoiced everywhere as the Führer drove past.’ In 1939, the officer