Unknown Soldiers Read online

  ‘You’d think that with a whole day they could have cooked it till it’s done,’ Rahikainen moaned, staring into his mess bowl. ‘I’ve got one little pea looking for a friend, but alas, his efforts are in vain.’

  Mäkilä, standing next to the field kitchen, coughed and said, ‘All the peas that are supposed to be in there are in there. And it’s a kind of pea that doesn’t get soft.’

  ‘Oh please, pea soup gets soft if you shove some firewood under it.’ Hietanen angrily snatched his bowl out from under the ladle.

  ‘It’s not worth mouthing off about it. Look, we’re all in the same boat here. The artillery and the mortars haven’t stopped pounding all day. And the First Company lost their cook.’ The fellow dishing out the soup defended himself staunchly, but his efforts only earned him more abuse.

  ‘Well, why the hell did they choose the First Company? They should have come to us!’

  Vanhala alone kept his mouth shut. Meekly, he requested just a little more: ‘Maybe just a little of the broth?’

  The cook appreciated Vanhala’s conciliatory attitude in the midst of the general fury and uproar, and so topped up his bowl, scraping the ladle against the bottom of the pot. Vanhala struggled to suppress his smile as he scuttled off to enjoy his bounty in solitude.

  Even Lammio’s arrival didn’t put a stop to the heckling until he announced, ‘Anyone who finds the provisions unsatisfactory is welcome to do without. Eating is not mandatory.’

  The chaos died down, but a low murmur rumbled on, asserting the general discontent. ‘If that guy turns up on the line, he’s dead. If they don’t get him from out front, I’m gettin’ him from behind.’

  ‘Now if you could just stretch your neck out for me …’

  ‘Little bastard crowing like he was somebody. Fuckin’ beanpole. That man’s like bait squirming on a hook and yet he goes mouthing off like a big shot.’

  A mysterious rustling was emanating from the Third Platoon. They had retreated into a dense clump of alder trees to divide up the sugar. Hietanen was counting out the lumps into piles.

  ‘Guys, let’s make a rule that if somebody gets knocked off before he has a chance to eat his sugar, then the group divides up equally whatever he’s got left. Then we won’t have to fight over it,’ Lahtinen suggested.

  Grunts of consent sounded above the quiet crunching and grinding of teeth.

  ‘They’re not gonna send us into any more scuffles for a long time. We’ve done that bit already,’ somebody said.

  ‘Don’t be so sure,’ Lahtinen said. ‘Nobody got off easy today. The whole world was shaking as far as my ear could hear. And I don’t know if you saw what kind of shape the guys from the Second Battalion were in.’

  Lahtinen was always ready to chip in with his sobering two cents lest the general happiness get out of hand. It wasn’t that he wanted to trivialize the men’s accomplishments exactly, it was just habit that made him feel obliged to take things down a notch.

  ‘If they don’t come out even, I get whatever’s left,’ Rahikainen said. ‘Since I’m the one who found the bag, see.’

  ‘Wasn’t there anything else there, where you found it?’

  ‘Couple of carcasses and a bag full of cabbages. But what’cha gonna do with cabbages? Take too long to cook.’

  ‘Man, if only there’d been some flour and butter, we could have made pancakes.’

  ‘Yeah. With jam.’

  ‘Lay off, lay off, wouldja? You guys are killin’ me.’

  Then they started rolling cigarettes with the mahorka they’d scrounged from the dead enemy soldiers’ pockets. They lay out on the grass and shot the breeze. It seemed as if the whole world was at peace, as if the war didn’t exist at all. The landscape around the village had been left to run wild, and it was beautiful. Several shades of wildflowers had sprung up in the uncultivated fields, and the smell of the coarse grass was pungent. The men drew in deep breaths of the crisp, evening air. Wide stretches of clouds spread across the sky as it faded into dusk. Rain was in the air.

  ‘Hey, guys! Lottas!’

  ‘And the Commander!’

  The Battalion Commander was coming down the road, accompanied by an aide and two Lottas. They had taken a tour of the battlefield, and the aide had taken some pictures of the Lottas posing beside the captured mortars. They had gone to see some fallen Russians, and the Lottas, shuddering at the corpses, had said, ‘Ugh, how dreadful!’

  ‘Oh, how terrible!’ they had exclaimed, seeing the fallen man whose brain had been partially torn out of his head by a piece of shrapnel.

  ‘Dear Lord, what pain those boys must be in!’ they had said to one another as they watched the ambulances drive the Second Battalion’s wounded off to the field hospital.

  ‘There was no time to take care of all of this beforehand,’ the Commander apologized. ‘The Second Battalion was encircled itself after cutting off the road.’

  ‘Oh, war is so terrible!’ Lotta Raili Kotilainen reminded herself that, as a woman, she was more or less obliged to make some such sympathetic remark. Truth be told, she was so happy that any feeling of pity on her part was quite superficial. For the duration of their tour, her interest had been directed toward the aide, who was a very handsome and upstanding officer indeed – quite cultivated. He even spoke four languages.

  Was he the one? This Raili Kotilainen had had a dream, which led her to join up as a front-line Lotta, a role that was connected to some image of the mythic Lotta heroine conjured up by the Winter War, some dim-witted foreign journalists, and the patriotism of a countryside telephone operator with five years of secondary education.

  ‘The German advance has been astoundingly swift,’ the aide said, remembering the news broadcast. ‘Even the most wishful thinkers hardly dared hope for so much.’

  ‘Wishful thinkers, no. But careful calculators, yes. German military leadership has one golden tradition: it does not hope, it calculates. Russia has just one crucial asset: the apathetic endurance of a donkey. But the value of plain stamina is decreasing as war is becoming increasingly technological in nature. And when it comes to technical prowess, no one can compete with the Germans.’ The Battalion Commander, Major Sarastie, enjoyed talking about war and war operations ‘scientifically’. He had read quite a bit of military literature, and his own sympathies aligned, quite traditionally, with the Germans. But this scientific orientation genuinely suited him, and you really could see a spark light up in him on occasions like this. He tended to make sense of things by taking small incidents and abstracting from them to formulate maxims.

  Major Sarastie was a very tall man. His stride bore the ungainly awkwardness typical of men of his stature. His neck was ruddy with health and vigor, as was his face. He carried a stripped willow branch that he was continually whacking against the leg of his boot.

  The machine-gunners were lying about by the roadside, averting their eyes so as to avoid having to salute. They hadn’t yet mastered the art of ignoring the obligation altogether.

  But the Major paused and asked, ‘Have you men had something to eat?’

  ‘Yes, we have, Major, sir,’ Salo responded, rising to attention.

  The Major knew perfectly well that the men had eaten, but a commander had to make some kind of affable inquiry on a night like this. He had spent the entire day in a state of nervous anxiety, receiving nothing from the battlefield but one piece of unpromising news after the next. The number of casualties had soared and the enemy line remained unbroken. All in all, the day had stripped the battalion’s ranks of over a hundred men, and it would have
been a formidable casualty count to report, were he not now striding down the main road of the village. But there he strode, and, somehow or other, could say he was in the best of spirits. He felt as if some life force had doubled within him, compounding all his capacities and making him downright impatient to set off on a new assignment. A good-natured benevolence rang in his voice as he addressed the men – ‘Strapping bundles of Finnish ferocity’.

  ‘Ah, good. And do you men have anything to smoke?’

  ‘Yes, we do, Major, sir,’ Salo responded again, but Hietanen cut in, ‘We’re rolling mahorka.’

  ‘Ah, I see. How’s it taste?’

  ‘Like home-grown tobacco, Major, sir. Tastes the same everywhere.’

  ‘Yes, indeed. Well, have a good rest. You’ll need all the strength you’ve got.’

  ‘Would you take a look at those hips?’ Rahikainen said. ‘Ah, the treasures stored up in those pistons … but what’s a private supposed to do about it, huh? Boys, there you see the sweetest goods in the world, packed up into five feet and three little inches. And yet Rahikainen here’s just left to eat his heart out. There’s another thing they’ve got divvied up all wrong. Some guys got more’n they need and others got nothin’ at all.’

  ‘Light field mattress, 1918 model,’ somebody said.

  ‘If I was a general, I’d set up a girly house for those little ladies,’ Rahikainen mused, ‘and pass out tickets on payday.’

  The idea caught Rahikainen’s interest, and he said almost seriously, ‘You could do good business with those tickets, actually.’

  ‘Ha, ha, ha, Rahikainen doing business with those tickets? You mean, buying ’em all up? Pretty sure you’d never see him selling those off.’

  Riitaoja had also turned up to eat, lugging his ammunition boxes. He blushed and smiled his childish smile. ‘There are bodies by the side of the road at the aid station. K-k-k-kaukonen’s there with the others. There are dozens from the Second C-c-c-company. The minister was breaking off the ID tags. Death tags. Some horses were killed in a blast. And lots of boys from the utilities staff. But one of the wounded guys k-k-k-kept screaming, over and over, “Forgive me … Forgive me.” He k-k-k-kept saying it again and again, muttering ugly things in between.’

  Lehto turned away from Riitaoja in disgust, but the others looked at him indulgently. His childishness was disarming.

  ‘What kinds of ugly things?’ Rahikainen asked.

  ‘I wouldn’t dare to say.’

  ‘If a dying guy can say it, why can’t you?’

  ‘Jesus fucking C-c-c-c-christ, go to fucking hell.’

  Riitaoja flushed with embarrassment as soon as the words left his mouth, but Rahikainen just shrugged nonchalantly, ‘Probably figured if he was headed south it’d be nice to have some company.’

  ‘You shouldn’t talk that way. The medics were almost c-c-c-crying.’

  ‘Crying’s not gonna help anybody round here. Better just man up and push on like hell. It’s pretty rough when horses are getting popped off, the ground’s shaking, and fences are all being torn down.’

  At that, Mielonen arrived, yelling, ‘Everybody rrready!’

  ‘Ready for what?’

  ‘To move out, to move out.’

  ‘Move out where? Where are we going?’

  ‘To attack, to attack. Where do you think? Back home?’

  ‘No, goddamn it! Is this the only battalion in the Finnish army?’

  ‘It’s not our turn.’

  ‘We’ve done our share. Let the other guys go. What about the reserve regiments, the ones that were all along the roadside?’

  ‘I don’t command the rrregiments. I’m just a miserable corporal. But these are the orders from up top.’

  ‘That Major must be looking for a promotion. Goddamn giraffe. I bet he asked if we could take the lead again.’

  Hietanen was as irritated as any of them, but his position as deputy platoon leader obliged him to try to help out one way or another. He hadn’t thought about what to say at all, but a keen instinct brought the words right to his lips. He turned the whole thing into a kind of game, knowing that would be the quickest way out. ‘Prepare to die on behalf of your home, your faith and your homeland! Packs on your backs, men! “Once more the Finnish bear lives on, he lifts his claw and strikes.”’

  ‘“When Lapua’s glorious day was done, von Döbeln rode to see the brave ranks had been sadly thinned,”’ Vanhala giggled, lifting his pack over his shoulder. Lehto’s group was silent, observing that their leader had tossed his rifle over his shoulder without saying a word. They could tell they had better keep their mouths shut. Hietanen caught sight of a fellow here and there smiling at his charade, so he continued, ‘Sure, just like Döbeln if that’s what you want! C’mon, what’s wrong with you guys? Your bread bags are full of sugar. We are Finland’s young heroes! They’ve promised to write songs about us for the generations to come! Yes, onwards we march – to eternity if necessary!’

  ‘You must want another stripe really badly.’

  ‘And why not? Every man here has been hankering after them for days now.’

  ‘To the road, double file!’

  The whole sky was hidden behind the clouds. Cannon fire boomed somewhere far off, and flames flared up along the horizon. The first drops of rain were already beginning to fall. The road crunched beneath hundreds of feet as the ranks filed off into the thickening darkness.

  Chapter Four

  I

  ‘Watch your intervals … Do we have contact on the left?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you have contact on the left?’

  ‘Yeah, they’re stumbling along over there all right.’

  Panting, puffing, cursing and tripping, the two extended lines advanced through the dark forest. The somber spruce grove and low-hanging rainclouds made the night even darker. Water sloshed in the men’s boots. Their wet, scratchy clothing clung to their skin, steaming with body heat. Dizzy with hunger and exhaustion, each man stared fixedly ahead at the gray ghost stumbling along in front of him. He thought neither of where he was coming from nor of where he was going. He had no information on the latter point, anyway. With each step, he concentrated all his efforts on surveying the terrain: step on that moss hump, there’s a pothole over there, keep clear of the shrubs.

  The noise of battle was rumbling somewhere further off, but he paid no attention. He just nurtured the hope that the submachine gun of the scout out in front of him would not start rattling. That the enemy was far away and heading even further. All the way to hell, ideally. Otherwise, he consoled himself with visions of a road opening up before them, with tents and a field kitchen assembled beside it, awaiting their arrival.

  Had it really only been twenty-four hours since they’d left the village?

  They had pushed the enemy out of its positions the night before. They didn’t have much information about the skirmish that had taken place under cover of darkness. Firing, whistling bullets, muzzle flashes. Somebody had called out for medics, but it wasn’t until the following morning that they learned it was Virtanen, a fellow from the neighboring platoon. ‘Oh, that Virtanen guy.’

  They had also come across a few dead enemy soldiers and stripped them of their badges, despite the darkness and the rain. They had advanced over the course of the day, stopping frequently, ignorant of the general situation. A few men were lost in an artillery and mortar barrage. Around mid-morning the day before, they finally received some food. Experience had already taught them that they could have absolutely no certainty whe
n the next opportunity to eat would be, so they broke their bread in half: this one I eat and this one I save.

  Then they would start picking at the piece they intended to save a little at a time, finally wondering, ‘Well, what’s the use in keepin’ that, anyway’ And then they would ask, ‘Does anybody have any bread? I’ll trade half a cigarette.’

  ‘Nope. Did yesterday, but it’s all eaten up.’

  ‘Haven’t got any bread left, but I haven’t got so much of that soul-crushing hunger, either!’

  It was one of their better jokes.

  They’d lost their sugar to the rain. They had scraped the wet, crumbling gunk from the bottoms of their bread bags and eaten it, but their hunger remained.

  In the evening, they had turned off the main road and pressed into the dark forest, trudging onwards with no idea where they were being taken or why.

  ‘Do we have contact?’

  ‘Rotate!’

  ‘But that shift was shorter than the one I just had carrying.’

  ‘That’s a lie.’

  ‘Who the hell can carry this thing?’

  ‘Quit whining all the time! You wimps! Here, give me the gun-stand.’

  It was Lehto.

  One guy used his shoulder to push a spruce branch out of his way. It whacked the guy behind him directly in the eyes.

  ‘Watch what you’re doing, asshole!’

  ‘Why don’t you look where you’re going and shut up?’

  ‘Oh, come off it!’

  The verbal jousting never led to any serious brawls, or even real rifts between the men. As soon as the cause of the spat disappeared, and the strain and nervous tension passed, it was as if nothing had ever happened.

  No one ever launched any of these invectives at Koskela. This was because he never took any rotations out, but carried one machine gun or other the whole time, to lighten the rotations for the others. Somebody had protested at the start, as a matter of formality, but they were all happy about it. Not to be outdone, Lehto insisted on carrying the whole time as well, just like Koskela.