Ukkola’s water started to boil. He took the grease box for his gas mask and carefully emptied his packets of substitute coffee into it.
‘This here’s everything I have left. The supply guys have given their notice. We go whole days without seeing a scrap of food. Even the Good Lord Himself couldn’t save this ship from sinking.’
Ukkola stopped speaking as he focused his attention on the boiling coffee. Blowing on his cup, he continued, ‘I mean, once it goes, there’s no getting it up again any which way. So, well. Hey, congratulations by the way. Didn’t you get married or something?’
‘Indeed I did. Thanks very much. Here’s a couple of rye crackers. I haven’t got much left since I already shared some with the guys in the First Platoon.’
‘Thanks. There’s more coffee over there – if you’re interested, I mean. Couple of guys from the unit decided to make themselves scarce back at Pyhäjärvi.’
‘Thanks, I don’t have time right now. Yeah, Rajamäki doesn’t surprise me, but Kuusisto and above all Rauhala was something of a shock.’
‘Kuusisto lost it completely, and Rauhala, well, he was always a little braver than the rest of us, so I guess that’s why he dared run off a little further.’
‘At least there aren’t any more deserters, though, right?’
‘No, no more deserters. But as soon as those fellows ’cross the way start at it again, there’ll be another round.’
Kariluoto continued on his way. It went from bad to worse. His feeling of depression only deepened with each encounter. Ukkola had more of a will to fight than most of them, and he had given up hope entirely. Kariluoto got the same reception from his entire company. The men answered his greetings with whines and whimpers. His former platoon mates congratulated him at least, and showed some kind of happiness at his return, but all in all, the feeble line that he inspected was dismal indeed.
Chapter Fourteen
I
Vo … ooo … oooooo …
Ground-attack planes were flying over the front line toward the command posts and artillery positions. The sudden roar overhead rent the atmosphere of normality and sent the men scurrying instinctively to the shelter of their foxholes. The unusual moment of calm had lulled them into that self-deception hope can induce, in which a man can imagine that, for some unknown and mysterious reason, the fighting might cease for a while. A couple of days of the quiet life had soothed their minds, but their tension was still so close to the surface that they quickly descended into the panicky anxiety that had become characteristic of the retreating troops. When the planes had passed over, they began to rise up in their holes, but quickly ducked back down again when an unbroken stream of low booms started sounding from the enemy side.
They had a few seconds to hope the barrage might miss before the first explosions exposed the vanity of such hopes. The ground lurched and shook. Screeches and moans filled the air and the miserable men’s hearts pounded nearly to pieces in the midst of the grinding upheaval. They tried to hold themselves against the earth as tightly as they could. They dug their nails into the sand at the bottom of their pits, and somebody was even digging himself deeper into the ground with his shovel, like a child, one scoop at a time.
‘Stay down!’ a choked voice screamed somewhere, before being drowned out by the crashing explosions. Trees snapped like twigs as fire and columns of smoke rose up to the height of the treetops. Shrapnel, tree branches and clods of earth rained down in one flash flood, and somewhere a hot, whizzing shard struck a panicked man, who began screaming between cries of pain, ‘Medics! Medics! I’m hit!’
Hietanen was lying face-down in his pit. He clenched his eyes shut, his strained consciousness registering each nearby explosion as it landed: ‘And again … and again … and again … and again.’ It was some kind of method of protecting himself, a way of banishing all the horror that this crashing and trembling awakened in his mind. He began to make out a pitiful wail and cry for help a few yards from his hole, and after wrangling with his fear for a few moments, he lifted his head to look. A few yards away, one of the recruits who had just arrived was struggling to crawl forward, dragging himself and screaming for help with a crazed, desperate look of horror on his face.
Hietanen leapt up. He grabbed the man and started pulling him into his hole, his face blue with anger as he yelled, ‘I told you to stay in your fucking hole! And you got up!’
He had just given the boy a stern warning about not leaving his hole, because he knew from his own experience how hard it was to stay down in a barrage. As soon as terror got the upper hand on self-control, it brought about exactly this kind of stupid mishap in the middle of a onslaught. The heavy-handedness of Hietanen’s warning might even have been partially responsible for provoking the man’s action.
Hietanen pulled him along almost brutally, the fear in his mind having transformed itself into a blind rage directed at the boy. The whirr of shrapnel filled his ears, dirt rained down on them, and waves of pressure kept whooshing their clothes right up against their skin. Hietanen was on his knees, pulling the man by his hand and his belt. The man screamed ceaselessly, though more from the shock than from the pain, as his wound was not dangerous.
A hot wave of air struck Hietanen in the face at the same moment as a shard snapped the cartilage of his nose and tore open both of his eyes. He slumped over the recruit, who froze into a petrified silence as he saw these sliced, bloody eyes bulging out of their sockets.
The man tried to roll Hietanen off him, but he was so paralyzed with fear that he couldn’t muster up enough strength. He turned his head away so he wouldn’t have to look at the terrible, bloody face, and when he was finally able to get his vocal cords to function, he let out a long, horrible cry.
It startled the others. Koskela and Vanhala were closest and crawled over to help. They lifted Hietanen off the man and dragged them both into the nearest foxhole. Just then the barrage started moving further back. Koskela yelled to the recruits, ‘New guys! Bandage the wounded, and if an order comes to retreat, then carry them with you.’
The others hurried to their positions, as they could already hear the rumble of a tank somewhere behind the stream, accompanied by rapid firing. A charge call rang out just then as well, but it became clear fairly quickly that it was a bluff. The enemy didn’t attack, and both the yelling and the shooting gradually died down. The men wondered what the taunt was supposed to mean, but weren’t able to make much more of it than that the enemy wanted to scare them rather than launch a genuine attack. This type of thing had actually happened before, so they weren’t terribly concerned about it. Koskela ordered Rokka to keep an eye on the platoon and headed back to see Hietanen. In the previous moment’s rush he hadn’t actually had time to see what had happened to him. He had the impression that only one of the eyes was lost.
Hietanen had a bandage wound around his head, and he was just regaining consciousness as Koskela reached him. Hietanen moved his hand, touched the bandage, and murmured, ‘What’s the damage?’
Koskela took his hand from his face and said, ‘Don’t worry. Be still now.’
‘Koskela?’
‘Yup. Don’t move. Got you in the nose a bit.’
Koskela turned to the men and drew his fingernail in front of his eyes. The men nodded. Then he raised two fingers and they nodded once more. The blood on Hietanen’s shirt sleeve drew their attention to a small wound on the back of his elbow as well. They had bandaged it, trying to make it seem as important as possible so that Hietanen would direct his attention there. ‘It hurts,’ he grunted. ‘Say, why’s my fore
head wrapped?’
‘They got you in the nose. It’s not too bad …’
‘I know. I haven’t got eyes anymore.’ Hietanen’s consciousness was returning ever more fully, increasing his pain along with it. The blow had anaesthetized him against the wound, but as the shock wore off, Hietanen was realizing what had happened. He squeezed his hands into fists and then straightened out his fingers. He held in his cry for a long time, but then there came a long howl that forced the frightened new recruits to turn away.
Cautiously, Koskela lifted Hietanen’s head. ‘Can I get you some water? Stretchers’ll be here soon. I’ll come with you to the side of the road.’
‘No, I don’t want any. Where are the guys?’
‘At their positions.’
‘Are we still there? Same old spot?’
‘Yup.’
Hietanen lifted himself onto his side, letting out another howl. Then he went limp and fell onto his back. His breathing was quick and uneven.
‘Are there other guys here?’
‘The new guys.’
‘Gimme a pistol!’
‘Don’t worry. They’ll get you to the aid station soon.’
‘I’m not gonna make it. My head’s burning. Somethin’ awful. Somethin’ awful. I’m not gonna make it much longer … give it here … I’m gonna die anyway.’
‘I’m not going to give it to you, you can be sure of that. There’s no point. You’re not going to die. You’re totally fine otherwise. It just cut them open. Your nose’s broken, but nothing else.’
Hietanen began writhing again. Koskela ordered the new men to run over to the medics and urge them to hurry up. They had already carried a few of the wounded over to the roadside.
Seeing as the enemy appeared to have calmed down, Koskela allowed the men to come and say goodbye to Hietanen. Nobody could think of anything to say, as they all fully understood the enormity of Hietanen’s misfortune, and felt the inappropriateness of the niceties they usually mustered to boost one another’s spirits. Silently, they each passed through, touching the hand gripping the side bar of the stretcher. Between howls, Hietanen tried to make jokes, as even he could sense the paralysing tension of the situation. ‘No eyes. No crying, then!’
When nobody answered, Hietanen sensed their sympathy, and as if to fend it off, he started chattering on in his old way. ‘Well, it doesn’t make any difference to me. Jesus, I’m not worried! I’m just a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. Little thing like this doesn’t matter to me.’
The medics lifted the stretcher and started to carry it away. The last noise they heard was a long, pained howl. They knew quite well what it would take to get such a noise out of Hietanen, and so could guess what severe pain his torn eyes must have caused.
Koskela accompanied the stretcher to the roadside. The others who had been wounded in the barrage were already assembled there – six in all. Kariluoto had asked the aid station to send out an ambulance, and as it happened the vehicle was already there, having been just over at the supply post, where it had been sent to pick up the service guys wounded in the earlier ground attack. The doctor decided that the front line’s wounded should come in the same load, so the ambulance had come directly out.
A bus that had been converted into an ambulance teetered toward them, swerving down the terrible road. The wounded men watched in horror as the driver snaked his way around the rocks with seemingly reckless abandon. They were afraid the bus would break down and leave them without transportation, and every one of them had a burning desire to get out of there before the enemy attacked again. Their fears were unnecessary, however, as the driver knew what he was doing. Generally speaking, these ambulance drivers had, over the years, learned to navigate even this kind of terrain, which no normal person would have dared attempt with even a horse. They knew they were in a race against death, as a wounded man’s survival frequently hinged on his making it to the operating table in time.
The most seriously injured were placed in front. The vehicle’s shaking was worse in the rear and it made Hietanen’s head burn with pain, but he stayed in the back nonetheless, letting some guy wounded in his mid-section pass in front of him. The pain radiated from his brow straight through to the back of his head, burning into his back and down his arms as well. The medic even whispered to Koskela that Hietanen might die if the shard had cut deep enough.
Koskela refused to believe it, figuring that if Hietanen was conscious, his wound couldn’t be as dangerous as that. He grasped his friend’s arm and said, ‘Take it easy. Life doesn’t depend on eyes. If we make it through, we’ll meet up again for sure. I’ll come by sometime.’
Hietanen was in so much pain that he couldn’t really focus his attention on Koskela any more. Turning his head away, he muttered over the moans and the cries, ‘Keep in touch … Send my greetings to the guys! You take care of yourself …’
The driver ordered Koskela out of the ambulance and he stepped down to the ground. He stood there silently for a long time, even after the bus had disappeared around the bend in the road. Then he lit a cigarette and started slowly back to the platoon. The desolation that enveloped him now was deeper than it had been before. He’d been away from his platoon for a long time, but he hadn’t drifted away from the men for all that. With each man that went, the platoon lost something. To him, the old platoon maintained a certain spirit, connected with the early part of the war and their success and energy in it. Each man they lost took a piece of that spirit, leaving in its place nothing but hopelessness and the meaningless absurdity of fighting. And Hietanen had been the closest to him, of all the men. And of all of them, he seemed the very worst suited to blindness.
But Koskela knew what he had to do. He would keep his thoughts fixed on what he wanted and away from what he didn’t. Once again he shook off the discomfiting feeling that this senseless killing and suffering induced in him – the same one that had sparked his rage back when Lehto had shot the prisoner and the others had carried on about it like a pack of vultures. This was not the place for a human being. Koskela turned his thoughts toward the machine guns’ new positions.
II
Major Sarastie was sitting on a moss-covered rise, getting through one cigarette after another. Black bags sagged beneath his eyes, and the hand grasping his cigarette flinched nervously. His shirt was wrinkled and filthy. The swamps and the forests had rubbed the color off his boots. The bootlegs gleamed greenish-white. ‘Shitty horse leather,’ Sarastie thought in passing, as his eyes passed over them.
The command post was unremarkable. There was a phone and a campfire for making coffee. Messengers and signalmen huddled off to the side. There was no aide-de-camp, as the former one was now leading a Jaeger Platoon that had lost its leader. No replacement had arrived yet, and God only knew if one ever would.
Grenades whistled overhead. Ground-attack planes rumbled further back, harassing the supply train. Their own mortar choked out three coughs from somewhere nearby. The munitions shortage was affecting them as well. There were some transportation difficulties. The Sturmoviks were making sure of that.
Sarastie was worried about the exposed flanks. Encirclements were as established a part of this Russian advance as they had been of their own three years ago. But what could they do about it? They would have needed a proper reserve unit to take the wings, but where were they supposed to find one? There was the Jaeger Platoon, but they were carrying out the patrols, and there was one platoon from the First Company, but it was stationed out by the front line, just in case it should break. He couldn’t take any more men from the line along the brook itself, as it
was weak to begin with. And where was that going to land them – having guys everywhere, but spread too thin to do anything anywhere? Daring maneuvers had, of late, become a matter of necessity. He had been promised a sapper company as a reserve unit as soon as it finished laying some road, but as far as he knew, those guys were still over there. The combined combat unit’s commander demanded ‘iron-fithted operationth only’. As far as Sarastie was concerned, the Lieutenant Colonel was an idiot. Little love was lost between them, and in his irritation, the Major considered the Lieutenant Colonel’s inability to pronounce the letter S just one more instance of his idiocy. The quarrel between them was nothing more than a typical manager–subordinate squabble, in which one party demands more than the other thinks reasonable. Whenever Sarastie was unable to hold back the enemy with his worn-out battalion, the Commander saw only one possible cause: that they had not pushed vigorously enough. What difference did it make how vigorously he, Sarastie, steamrolled onward if his men had run out of steam? There was nothing a commander could do about that. He had done everything he could. He had tried to understand the men, he had stressed to the officers the importance of their attitudes toward them, and he had given Lammio a strongly worded talking-to. It was time to give up the lofty stance of an officer, grab a pistol and join the ranks. Sarastie had read a great deal of military history, and a quote from Napoleon now came into his mind: ‘I have been Emperor too long. It is time to be General Bonaparte once more.’ Sarastie had been a hard-liner when necessary, but exercising the right to shoot his own men was something he considered unreasonable – immoral, even.
Yes, indeed. If he could just rally the men’s spirits, then the line would stiffen up too. Everything hinged on that. There might even be some possibility of organizing operations once he could take stock of things. At the moment, everything was just resting on chance. The line might hold just as well as it might break. The men’s ability to hold it was a hazier variable than it had been previously. A staunch, shared will was missing. There were just little spurts that might be flattened at the slightest opposition.