The Storm Troops advanced.
IV
The First Battalion cut through the passing troops to meet up with their regiment, which was advancing down a different road. It felt strange to find the regiment out in front of them, at a fork in the road a few miles out. They’d been fighting for three days without the faintest idea what was going on beyond their immediate surroundings. Now they heard vague rumors that the enemy lines had been broken, and that the Jaegers and the division next to theirs had already penetrated far into enemy territory very early that morning. They were happy, as it seemed they might be allowed some time off the line as a reward for the relentless campaign of the past three days. When they glimpsed their own field kitchen coming toward them, their elation was almost as great as Kariluoto’s had been as he watched the Jaegers streaming by, ready to drive back the enemy.
‘What’ve we got?’
‘Pulp porridge.’
‘Fucking hell!’
‘Pulp porridge’ was a kind of mush made of whole-grain wheat pulp, which the men hated with particular fervor, but which unfortunately composed a solid portion of their diet. Once again, Mäkilä and the kitchen staff had to bear the brunt of the men’s anger at the poverty of their homeland and the inefficiency of its primitive provisions department. Their outcry was so obscene that Master Sergeant Korsumäki nearly lost his temper. He did understand their resentment, though, and so began consoling them that plans for organizing cigarette sales had finally gotten the go-ahead. And that they would be getting increased wages now, just like the reservists, starting from the date of mobilization.
‘Well, swell! So we’ll get to play cards,’ Hietanen said, sprinkling saccharine over his porridge. ‘I guess we’ll stay in reserve. They oughtta be able to manage with that endless stream of guys they’re sending out here.’
‘Humph. They’ll shove us out in front again soon as things heat up. You’ll see,’ Lahtinen replied. ‘That’s always why they keep the good units in reserve.’
‘Naw … so we really are a good unit then, huh? Well, I’ll be damned!’
‘Humph. Well, there aren’t actually any good units … what I mean is, we’re young and we’ll go wherever the hell some blockhead orders us. I mean, those reservists aren’t going to go just anywhere. And I have to say, if we’re in as desperate shape as it seems from the look of those fellows back there, I don’t think we have any business setting out to build some kind of superpower. They’ve rounded up every last man whose mouth can still melt butter.’
‘But look, pal, all you hafta do is choke down mush! Who needs to melt butter?’ Rahikainen exclaimed.
‘Well, there’s some prisoners over there. Why don’t you go take a look? Real live heroes. There, by the side of the road. Those guys aren’t looking so hot, either,’ Sihvonen said, gesturing toward the prisoners.
Salo went one better, pointing out, ‘Their belts look like they’re made of thresher straps. And they’ve got strips of torn-up black bags tied on as gaiters. Plus, they’re enlisted by force.’
Lahtinen stretched out on his back. ‘I don’t know about that. I mean, sure, so long as everything is going well. But you don’t fight with belts. What I mean is, they’re a tough lot, that’s all I’m sayin’. And judging from the way they kill, I wouldn’t be too sure anybody’s forcing them.’
‘Maybe you oughtta change sides, Yrjö-boy!’ said Hietanen, laughing mischievously. ‘If I took all this as hard as you do, why, I sure wouldn’t be here yapping about it. I’d go over to the other side and give us hell! But Lahtinen is a radical. He wants to give everybody land and money. So that nobody has to work, just keep his health. So much for the radical. But gee whiz, am I clever or what? I even know all about radicals!’
‘Yeah, or if Lahtinen is just fanatical! Heehee,’ Vanhala hesitated cautiously for a second, then burst into giggles. He won the day. The other men began to laugh, rolling their mahorka in newspaper as Lahtinen angrily turned his back on them.
Even with their ravenous hunger, the men were so disgusted by the porridge that they left plenty for the prisoners to eat. The latter were sitting huddled in a group, taking turns to eat since they didn’t have enough cutlery. The ones awaiting their turn looked on hungrily as the others ate. A group of curious onlookers had gathered around them.
‘Look at them down that porridge,’ somebody said.
‘They’ve been starved,’ explained Salo, who had also come over to gawk at the Russians.
One of the young, blond prisoners started to smile and suddenly said in Finnish, ‘Ah! Three days with no vood.’
‘Do you speak Finnish?’
‘Ah! Of course. Pure Vinnish. I’m Ingrian. From Rääpyvä, near Leningrad.’
‘How do you know Finnish?’
‘How could I not know Vinnish? My mother hardly spoke a word of Russian.’
The men barraged the prisoner with more questions than he could answer. He gestured wildly as he explained how his company had been split up, and how some sub-lieutenant had gathered together some of the men and assembled them into a unit, which he planned to lead through the forest to the road. But they had been drawn into some fighting during the night, and the sub-lieutenant had been killed, so they surrendered, having no idea where the rest of their units even were.
‘But weren’t the Ingrians sent to work camps in Siberia?’
‘What vor? We didn’t do anything.’
‘Is living in Russia better than living in Finland?’
‘Ah! How would I know? I have never lived in Vinland.’
‘Have you seen Stalin?’
The man stretched his arms wide. Then he said something in Russian to the others. The prisoners nodded, looking sly, and then one struck the ground with a stone and repeated, ‘Stalin, Stalin!’ pointing at the spot on the ground. The Ingrian exclaimed, ‘Go give it to them! We were vorced into the army.’
The prisoners’ clumsy ruse didn’t fool anybody, except maybe Salo. Somebody asked what names the Russians had for Finns, and the Ingrian hesitated for a moment before he laughed, ‘Tsuhna’, which made the other prisoners laugh too. Vanhala was shaking with laughter as well, shuffling his feet as if he couldn’t stand still he was so amused. He whispered the name to himself over and over, eyeing his companions as if trying to determine how it suited them: ‘Suhna, suhna, heeheeheehee …’
When the prisoners realized the name could be laughed at so easily, they went wild, gleefully pumping their heads and chanting, ‘Tsuhna, tsuhna!’
‘Russki, Russki,’ Rahikainen joined in, coming toward the group, pumping his head in time.
The men were so gratified at the idea of staying in reserve that they couldn’t bring themselves to go to bed straight away, no matter how exhausted they were. ‘We’ve got plenty of time for that.’
The blow was all the more devastating, then, when Mielonen appeared, walking through the camp and calling out, ‘Get rrready to head out! Make sure your feet are well wrapped! Gonna be a long march.’
‘Stop screeching, damn it!’
‘Somebody shoot that screaming son-of-a-bitch.’
‘To the road, double file!’
‘Route step, march!’
Chapter Five
I
They marched. A second, third, fourth day. They were glorious midsummer days. The gardens of the Karelian villages they passed through were overgrown with wild grass. The air shimmered with a bluish haze that occasionally vibrated with the faint sounds of cannon fire and plane engines somewhere to the south. An aerial battle was tak
ing place up there in the endless blue, though from the ground the dull chattering of machine guns sounded more like an army of croaking frogs.
‘Those are our boys,’ an officer said, watching the planes speed off into the horizon. ‘Shielding our army from attack … I bet our neighbors over there aren’t celebrating now the way they were in the Winter War.’
The men no longer cared about the Winter War, however – any more than they cared about this one. Their feet were covered in pus-filled blisters and they were exhausted and irritated, trudging on with little thought of anything going on around them. The first day they’d been buoyed up by some sort of delight in the fact of advancing. But the strain of the march had sapped their spirits quickly.
This army had a style all its own. It’s possible that other armies of the world resembled it while in flight or retreat, but certainly not at any other time. In this army, it was all the same – advance or retreat. They lumbered along in a disjointed herd. The companies would assemble in rows in the morning when they set out for the day’s march, but within the first hour they would drift into smaller groups, plodding along as they pleased, requesting no instructions and ignoring any that might be on offer. Rifles dangled and swung from side to side. One guy tiptoed barefoot through the grass beside the road, his boots slung over his shoulder and the hems of his long johns dragging through the dirt. Another guy was bare-chested, sunbathing as he walked, carrying all his gear bundled up under his arm. The first day, one fellow carried a mildewy suitcase over his shoulder, dangling from the end of a pole. The suitcase contained items scrounged from various houses: a glass jar and a worn-out pair of women’s shoes (never know when you might need ’em!).
By the second day, however, the suitcase had already flown, literally, by the wayside, which had become the receptacle of even essential belongings. The gas masks were rounded up, as too many of them would have been tossed aside otherwise. The men scrounged for food wherever they got so much as a whiff of it. One village had had a pig kolkhoz, whose livestock were now running free in the hills, the collective farm having been disbanded. A light machine gun, it turns out, is very effective in a pig-hunt, but only the companies marching in front had a chance to take advantage of the bounty, as the pigs were quickly rounded up and taken to safety.
Some of the villages had been inhabited. Arbors framed their alleyways, and ornaments made out of moss and stone popped up here and there.
‘What’s with all the decorations?’
‘They must have had some kind of harvest festival. I’ve heard folk dancing is really popular around here.’
‘All kinds of trumped-up shit out there in this world.’
Their bitterness let fly at every possible pretext. Trucks drove by transporting laughing officers and Lottas. A comet tail of staff, canteens, laundries, field hospitals, and everything else trailed after the troops. The men jeered at the vehicles as they passed, hurling such obscene expletives at Finland’s proud Lottas that the overexcited auntie Lottas back in the local parish would have died of a collective heart attack had they been within earshot. The passing general’s car provoked such a virulent spate of swearing that an onlooker would have thought the army only about a day away from all-out mutiny.
‘Sure, just spray that dust in the infantry’s eyes, asshole! Funny how the gas shortage doesn’t matter a shit when the boss feels like taking his field whore out for a spin. Who the hell is whistling over there? Shut up! We got our hands full enough over here without you hissing on top of everything else.’
Village after village slipped by. Columns of men cut across Karelia, streaming down every road to Lake Ladoga. Dust clouds rose underfoot, blending into the blue smoke of countless forest fires, and the sun glowed red and hot through the haze. Somewhere, further off, where shoe soles weren’t pocked with holes and collarbones weren’t chafed raw beneath carrying straps, exultation was at its height: Finland was marching forward.
II
Lehto, Määttä and Rahikainen did not march. They disappeared from the ranks each morning and reappeared at the camp each night from somewhere further down the convoy. They didn’t offer much of an explanation as to where they’d spent their time, but anybody could guess, even without an explanation. Each night they brought something to eat, however, and when they shared it with the others like good Christians, no one pressed the issue of their apparently effortless march.
One evening Rahikainen was more chipper than usual. ‘Lehto over there’s got butter and flour in his pack. Anybody for hotcakes?’
‘For real?’
‘Show ’em.’
‘Good Lord! Guys!’
‘Quick, boys, get the campfire going!’
Their exhaustion was forgotten. They fried up the pancakes in a mess tin and devoured them in the quiet, summer twilight. The sun was sinking in a red globe behind the forests of the Karelian borderlands and a dusky haze softened the contours of the landscape.
‘Don’t wolf them down all at once! Those didn’t come cheap. I had to trade eight times before I managed to get my hands on ’em. I had a bottle of booze at one point and I didn’t even drink it.’
‘You’d have drunk it if I’d have let you,’ Lehto said, establishing who was to thank for the outing’s results, which the whole platoon was now enjoying.
The march started up again.
‘OK. Better get going again, huh?’ Koskela rose and tossed his pack over his shoulder. Grunting and cursing, the men slowly got up out of the ditch where they’d been lying with their feet propped up on a muddy bank. Using their rifles as walking sticks, they hobbled along the first couple of steps until their legs could handle bolder strides.
Koskela seemed to be immune to fatigue. His shoulders swung steadily in front of his men, mile after mile. ‘Train yourself to walk properly,’ he had instructed them. ‘Don’t get all tense and rigid. You should have a kind of loose, easy step, like a tramp. That lax, sort of vagabond walk saves the most energy. Your leg has to move from the hip.’
Vanhala’s gait was stiff, but despite his stiffness and his chubbiness he withstood the marching and exhaustion pretty well. And his good spirits never flagged, not even for a moment, despite the prevailing atmosphere of annoyance. His eyes had a smile in them that was ready for anything. Once he looked as if he had suddenly remembered something. Then he gazed around for a long time, looking at all the men marching, and finally he burst into an explosion of giggles, shouting, ‘Suhnas on the March!’
A few angry glares silenced him, but he continued chuckling with pleasure at his own joke. He looked at the men shuffling along – faces grimy and covered in dust, expressions dour, caps and shirts dangling from gun barrels, trouser-legs hanging down over the tops of their boots.
‘Suhnas March off to War!’ he giggled to himself, tickled at the startling discrepancy between the high, overblown patriotism surrounding the Finnish soldier and his actual existence. The Information Bureau pamphlets, amongst other things, provided Vanhala with an endless source of amusement. By now he had amassed a stockpile of official terminology from whatever pamphlets had fallen into his hands: ‘our boys’, ‘our deep-forest warriors’, ‘our fearless fighters’, ‘the blazing will of the nation’s defense’. He would toss in these sayings now and again, whenever an opportunity presented itself, though he had to restrain himself somewhat during the marches, as there was a limit to what the men would tolerate.
Riitaoja marched at the very back of the group, silent but childishly happy that they weren’t under fire. He would gladly have marched from eternity to eternity and withstood the strain
of endless marching rather than hear those angry squeals whistling in his ears, announcing death in search of its prey.
On the fifth day of the march, toward evening, they noticed that the road began to look less trampled on. Before long it dwindled into nothing more than a path, and just about then a long swath hacked out of the forest opened up before them.
‘Guys, the old border.’
The event revived their spirits somewhat. Hietanen, standing in the middle of the clearing, took one big leap and said, ‘Aaand now! The Hietanen boy stands on foreign soil!’
‘We’re in Russia now, boys,’ Salo said.
Lahtinen hobbled over irritably, glaring at the others out of the corner of his eye and muttering, ‘So we are. And here our rights end. By which I mean, from this point on, we’re a pack of bandits. Just so you know.’
‘Bandits, bandits!’ Sihvonen snarled angrily. ‘So we’re bandits when we cross borders? And when other people move them, they’re just protecting their nation’s security …? Bandits, bandits … huh-huh.’ He gave a few bitter snorts, not so much because he was in a political passion as because he had sand in his shoe and couldn’t stop to get it out without falling too far behind.
Hietanen looked around and said congenially, ‘Doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot for a pack of bandits to steal around here. Even the road got a whole lot worse all of a sudden. Woods look the same, though … Hey … hey, guys. We’ve marched across Karelian song country! Isn’t it somewhere around here that those old boys and biddies sang all kinds of folk songs and dirges? I heard something like that somewhere or other. Though I wonder what in the world a dirge is anyway. Crying and singing at the same time? I watched some old biddies at a funeral once try to chant and cry at the same time, but nothing much came outta that. Nothing but some sorta whiny screeching.’