Unknown Soldiers Read online

  ‘Where’s the second machine gun? I’m supposed to take that one now,’ Koskela said.

  ‘Määttä has it.’

  ‘So where’s Määttä?’

  ‘Määttäää!’

  ‘He was walking right there just a second ago.’

  ‘Keep moving … can’t search now.’

  ‘Of course Määttä’s lost! With all you guys avoiding him so you won’t have to carry his gun!’ Hietanen exploded.

  ‘Shove it. Every man here’s carried it,’ Sihvonen hissed irritably.

  Prrrrrrrr …

  A long, sharp string of submachine-gun fire cut the conversation short.

  They dropped to their knees. Bodies trembling and hearts pounding.

  ‘What’s over there?’

  ‘A Russki, of course.’

  ‘Bullet’s already nicked that tree.’

  ‘Get the machine guns into position.’

  They lugged the weapons down the line. The second machine gun was missing and Lahtinen was about to set off in search of Määttä. Being a fairly conscientious leader, he considered himself at fault for the fact that Määttä had gone missing from his team.

  But Koskela stopped him. ‘You won’t be able to find him searching in a dark forest like this. He’ll be able to find his way from the sound of the firing.’

  Enemy fire flew out of the darkness, striking here and there, and the men answered fire just as haphazardly.

  ‘As far as I know,’ Koskela whispered, ‘we’re supposed to be securing things from this side. We might be waiting here a while. Let’s rotate taking half-hour shifts on guard so the others can relax behind. It’ll be a little nicer that way.’

  It was a welcome suggestion. The guards were assigned and the others gathered further back at the base of a few large firs. Water dripped from the branches. Bracken and blueberry twigs dripped water onto their already soaking-wet boots. Pale splotches had already appeared in the sky, and the men could make out each other’s faces in the dim light. They weren’t pretty. Blank, expressionless eyes stared out of dirty, stubbly faces, quivering with anguished creases around the corners of their mouths. Was it really only the fourth day of war now dawning?

  They wrapped themselves in their overcoats, but the cold still kept them awake. Whenever the firing grew more intense, they would get to their feet with a start and look at one another inquisitively, but as soon as the fire died down they would sink back to the ground, the anxious look in their eyes extinguished.

  The rain let up and the sky grew brighter. A gust of wind shook droplets of water down from the branches. Their wet clothes collected debris from the decades of pine needles carpeting the base of the fir trees. A bird broke hesitatingly into song and artillery fire boomed somewhere further off.

  Rahikainen leaned against the trunk of a tree, staring at his sopping-wet boots and squirting the water around between his toes. He started crooning in his rich, gentle voice:

  Up in the sky there’s no dyin’

  no need for cryin’, no dark of night …

  Generally speaking, the men were not very tolerant of singing or whistling when they were worn out and ready to aim their ill will at any available target, but this time they let Rahikainen sing in peace. They were happy to listen, as his voice was easy on the ears. Lehto put a stop to Rahikainen’s singing, however, glancing at his watch, which he’d won in a card game. ‘Go relieve Salo and Vanhala.’

  ‘’Sit my turn already?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Well, hell’s bells. Whatta ya know? Without me this army’d never reach Moscow.’ Displeased, he threw his gun over his shoulder and headed toward the guard posts with Sihvonen. Their steps had hardly died out when a rustling came from the forest. The men grabbed their guns and listened.

  ‘Stop! Password?’

  ‘Can’t remember. But I got the day before yesterday’s if you want that one.’

  ‘You Määttä?’

  ‘That’s me. You the machine-gunners?’

  ‘That’s us. Yeah, that’s Määttä all right. And with the machine gun, too. Welcome to Camp Finland!’

  Everybody was glad to see Määttä back, though they hadn’t been overly concerned about his absence, as they knew he could look after himself. He arrived soaked to the bone, but just as calm as ever. He looked around, silently taking stock of the situation, as he tried to manage without asking questions. The questions came from the others.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Lost.’

  ‘How’d you find us?’

  ‘Guessed from the shooting.’ Määttä sat down at the base of a fir and started taking off his shoes. He wrung out his drenched boot flannels and said offhandedly to Koskela, as if in passing, ‘Seems to be some Russkis over there in that forest. Might be reason to send word upstream. We’d better keep an eye out, too.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Over that direction. Half-mile, mile maybe. Hard to say.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘I saw about a dozen or so.’

  Koskela dispatched a runner to send word, but the runner came right back, saying that the Second Company was supposed to scour the terrain in that direction. That calmed them a little, but they still kept their weapons close. As their anxiety eased, their hunger mounted, and the conversation slipped back into its old grooves.

  ‘Would you boys believe it? I’m hungry.’

  ‘Now, where could that hunger possibly be coming from? When we ate just yesterday morning! But would you guys believe it, I’m freezing and soaking wet?’

  ‘No, but would anybody believe that I’d happily go back to being a civilian?’

  ‘Civilian! All I’m asking for is a slice of bread. And we can’t even get that.’

  ‘How long do those stuffed shirts think a deep-forest warrior can last out here on these rations?’ Vanhala asked.

  Lahtinen was maybe the most wound up of all of them, and muttered with biting disdain, ‘Think? They don’t think. They know. They’ve counted the calories, or whatever the hell it is that’s supposed to be in the stuff you eat. Go complain about being hungry and they’ll go and wave some kind of form in front of you that proves you could not possibly be hungry. And besides, who’s gonna dare complain about it? Don’t you remember what they did to Isoaho?’

  Lahtinen was referring to a certain guy from the First Company who had stepped forward once at the main inspection to complain about the lack of food when the General asked if there were any concerns. It had gotten the man into such a stew that he nearly went out of his mind. They weighed him two, three times a day, dragged him from one medical exam to the next, and made such a laughing stock out of him that he deeply regretted ever having opened his mouth. He suffered the typical fate of the Messiah, in other words. For the complaint had not been personal – they had all put him up to it – he had merely been the bravest in taking up the common cause. They all remembered the ordeal, which had been designed to demonstrate to them all that a private has no rights whatsoever, and that even those he is theoretically granted can be easily disposed of.

  Hietanen tapped his palms on his wet knees and said, ‘I don’t know the first thing about calories. My gut’s just telling me that whatever they are, they’re pre-tty scarce.’

  ‘Hm … Yeah, maybe they’re telling you. But do you think those bourgeois gentlemen up there can understand your rumbling stomach? This nation’s guts have been rumbling so damn long those guys have forgotten what that sound even means. Especially since their own bellies are full.’

&
nbsp; Lahtinen was just a die-hard proletarian, but Hietanen burst out laughing and said, ‘Hey, I got it! Aren’t there some kinda actors who make it sound like their stomachs are talking? Let’s train ourselves, guys! Then every time we’re all out there in front of the officers, see, we’ll have all our bellies belch out, “Brehhhd!”’

  Vanhala was literally shaking with laughter. Lahtinen’s lesson for the day was drowned out once again, just as it had been thousands of times before. And right there a limit appeared – drawing a line between griping and any actual idea of rebellion. They were all ready to howl in protest and jeer at their country and its ‘stuffed shirts’ however they wanted – but if somebody tried to steer the sneering into something that smacked of an agenda, they would drown him out with roars of laughter. There was a degree of seriousness that remained off-limits, that lay behind a line the men would not transgress. It was the very same aversion that made them avoid that particular type of patriotism that bears even the tiniest glimmer of mania. ‘Fuckin’ fanatic’ was their preferred term for the welfare officer guilty of this particular sin.

  Vanhala was laughing so hard that he shook for a good while before gasping out, ‘Our deep-forest warriors’ bellies appear to be rumbling, heehee! What would the stuffed shirts say to that?’

  Lahtinen descended into the irritable funk these encounters inevitably left him in. But this time he was so annoyed that he picked it up again, rather than sulking in silence. ‘What would they say? They’d stick you in solitary confinement and give you the New Testament to read! If not The Tales of Ensign Stål! There’s a hell of a hunger story for you. I mean, it’s all this same glorification of hunger. It’s like our cultural heritage, hunger. And the bourgeois gentlemen up there would like this nation to believe it’s a very sacred thing. This army’s been fighting half-dead with hunger for six, seven hundred years straight, with all its bald asses peeking out between their rags. First I thought we had to make some sort of story for the Swedes, something to warm their spirits and all, and now I guess it’s our own upper crust that needs it. Wealthy old men and their wives need that kind of stuff. Gives ’em a reason to squeeze out a tear or two. They even like the fact that there are poor people! Otherwise, who would they help and cheer up out of their own goodness and decency? Same way that if we had bread and clothes, we couldn’t possibly be heroes! What kind of a hero is that?’

  ‘Starving to death in sub-zero climes is the path to victory, heeheehee. A Finnish warrior on the hunt and a Suomi submachine gun is a terrifying combination. Heeheehee!’

  The bantering stopped short as they turned to Lehto in astonishment. He had opened his emergency ration tin and was using his knife to lever the better part of its contents out of the can.

  ‘Don’t you know that’s not allowed?’ Hietanen said.

  A thin, dry smile flashed across Lehto’s lips. ‘So’s killing. Fifth Command, wasn’t it? Can of food’s a pretty minor offense when there’s skulls busting open all over the place.’

  The others turned to Koskela, as if waiting for him to take a stance that would resolve this dilemma so that they could follow suit. Koskela had been listening to the men in silence. They amused him greatly, though his amusement never revealed itself beyond the subtle crinkles at the corners of his eyes. His face remained stiff and expressionless, with just a trace of a smile hovering in and around his eyes. He felt a certain revulsion all of a sudden, when the men turned to him awaiting his judgement. In the first place, he had no desire to make other people’s decisions for them, generally speaking, and in the second place, he sort of despised the men for not being able to just take their rations and eat them. He diverted his gaze and said rather abruptly, ‘Far as I’m concerned it’s fine. We can’t get much hungrier than we are now. It’s after twenty-four hours that the edge wears off and you go kind of numb, right? So sure, this is the emergency the rations are meant for, anyway.’

  He realized that his reasoning was incoherent, and he knew the men were no less aware of it, but somehow it still sort of veiled the event in his shadow, making the rest of them feel less like they were going against orders.

  A general feeding frenzy began, and although he personally would have endured his hunger, Koskela joined in with the others for precisely this same reason. His action legitimated theirs.

  A broad smile spread across Hietanen’s face as he dug his fingers into the canned pork and shoveled it into his mouth. They all lit up with the familiar, mischievous joy that comes of breaking the rules, which in Hietanen overflowed into the grandiloquent declaration, ‘I’ve fought on a lot of battlefields, but I’ve never seen gluttony like this before!’

  They smoked the mahorka to top off their meal, and a feeling of contentment settled over them. Määttä picked at his teeth with a match. Somebody asked for more details about his adventure, and the feeling of well-being induced him to talk about it at greater length than he normally would have. He burped first, then, slowly, he started to speak. ‘Bastards nearly got me back there.’

  ‘How’d you get lost?’

  ‘I was just going around some bushes. Seemed to me the line was turning right, so I thought I’d just cut straight through, but then there I was standing all alone in the middle of a dark forest. Only way I can figure it out is that the company must have turned left. And I just went straight.’

  ‘And you saw Russkis.’

  ‘Well, I heard some rustling and decided to go see who was over there. ’Bout a dozen of their big shots were all crouching down, and I’d already yelled out ‘Hey guys!’ before I realized they all had helmets on. They asked something, but I can’t make head or tail of those foreign languages. Didn’t have much to say back to ’em, either. I just made a run for it. They fired after me, but I zigzagged and they missed.’

  ‘Shit, guys. We better keep it down. The bushes are crawling with Russkis.’

  ‘Bushkis! Heehee,’ Vanhala giggled, thus coining right there in their group the term that would become so widely used.

  II

  Määttä’s story set them on their guard and then, to crown it, Koskela whispered, ‘Get down!’

  He pulled his pistol from its holster and signaled to the men. ‘Somebody’s moving.’

  They loaded their guns and cautiously clicked the bolts shut. The guns turned in the direction Koskela had indicated. ‘Get in formation! Advance quietly!’

  They darted from tree to tree. Each twig that snapped underfoot felt like an explosion, and would prompt one’s neighbor to shake his head angrily. Then a shot rang out.

  Vanhala was firing. ‘Vanhala’s shooting!’ rippled down the line.

  ‘What’s over there?’

  ‘Somebody’s running.’

  A brown-clad man was making a dash for a tree. He tripped and fell to the ground, but recovered and kept running.

  ‘Rookee veer! Hands up!’

  The Russian emerged from behind the tree, his arms raised. He glanced from man to man and took a few steps toward them. His filthy face was exceedingly pale, and a dreadful trembling shook his body. His eyes darted from one man to the next as he scanned those closest to him, but you could tell from the expression in his eyes that he was too focused on some strenuous internal effort to actually see anything. His intense, anxious shaking and darting eyes laid bare his whole mental state. He was clearly terrified at the sight of the raised guns pointed in his direction. He awaited death with each step, but hoped, at the same time, that it would not come.

  ‘Check the bushes! Case he’s got friends with him.’

  There were no others to be found, however, so they gathere
d around the captive, who was growing discernibly calmer. He stood with his trembling arms raised, trying to force some kind of distorted smile. The smile intuitively sought the humans behind the soldiers. It was as if he wanted to say, ‘Don’t hurt me. Let’s smile and be friends. I’m smiling, see? Just as if we happened to be meeting in peacetime.’

  The man was maybe in his thirties. His face bore traces of long suffering and heavy exertion. He wore a moss-brown shirt and the same color trousers, the knees of which had been reinforced with triangular patches. Below them he wore black legwarmers and leather shoes.

  ‘His belt’s made out of cloth.’

  ‘Even the superpower’s gear is looking a little ragged.’

  ‘Got any comrades with you? Tovarisch?’

  The prisoner shook his head.

  ‘Tovarisch, tovarisch. Understand? Ponimai? Are there any others? No ponimai?’

  ‘Nyet tovarisch,’ the man mumbled indistinctly.

  ‘Got any weapons in your pockets? Vintovka plakkar? In here, in here, any vintovka?’

  ‘Don’t ask, check!’ Lehto started patting down the prisoner’s pockets. He found a hand grenade in his breast pocket. ‘Hey bud, what you doing with this little guy?’

  ‘He could have blown himself up and taken us with him.’

  ‘He’s not one of those guys. You can tell just by looking at his head,’ Koskela said. ‘The guys who pull those stunts are different. And of course he’s got a hand grenade on him – we all do.’

  ‘What do we do with him?’

  ‘Take him to the command post, I guess,’ Koskela said, looking around inquiringly at the men. ‘Who wants to go?’