The Jaeger Platoon had just returned from a patrol off to the right, in an area that backed up to a broad stretch of swampland. Sarastie didn’t trust the swamp, however, as he himself had carried out encirclements through tougher terrain than that, and experience had already made it clear that the Russians were just as capable. The returning patrol reported that all was quiet, but how much could one trust those kinds of reports these days? That slight uncertainty in the reporter’s voice was a tell-tale sign that the men hadn’t gone out quite as far as they were supposed to.
The defeat had increased Sarastie’s tendency toward the philosophical. He had striven to take everything ‘scientifically’, even being a bit proud about it.
The Major took a swat at the mosquito that had just been buzzing in his ear, trying to smack it against his neck; but it slipped easily out of danger into the gust of air beneath his hand. His stomach gave a spiteful growl and a bead of sweat pearled on his brow as a momentary faintness washed over him. Diarrhea was endemic.
A guard suddenly emerged from the forest, gasping, ‘Major, sir! The enemy!’
‘Where?’
‘Over there! In formation. With submachine guns under their arms.’
Sarastie ordered the messengers and signalmen into positions and set off himself in the direction the guard had indicated. He understood everything the moment he saw the enemy line advancing through the forest with men carrying machine guns behind them. They must be up against an encirclement, as a normal patrol wouldn’t transport machine guns.
Sarastie ran back and ordered the hesitating men into position.
A couple of shots announced the fighting.
‘I’ll notify the front line and ask for back-up,’ he yelled. The messengers and signalmen had taken to their heels and Sarastie spotted an enemy soldier behind a spruce. He pulled out his pistol and emptied the magazine. His hand had just reached the telephone handle when the first Russian shot off a long string of bullets. Sarastie was dead.
III
The ambulance swayed with its moaning cargo down the potholed road. The driver watched the road carefully and turned the steering wheel, trying to gauge which potholes were the worst. The medic checked some wounded man’s pulse. He got up and whispered to the driver, ‘He’s not going to make it to the aid station.’
The driver didn’t respond, as the road demanded his undivided attention, and in any case there was nothing he could do with such information, seeing as he was already driving as fast as he possibly could.
Hietanen was lying at the back of the bus. He devoted all of his strength to keeping his body still, as every jolt sent sharp pains burning through his head. The pain shut out any possibility of pondering his unfortunate fate, and anyway his future life lay well beyond the reach of his concerns. He hoped merely that the drive would end soon, or else that he would die – just so long as he could escape this excruciating pain. Frequently, when the pain and misery became unbearable, his long, despairing howl would rise amidst the moans of the others.
As they neared the rise that led to the command post, they began to hear shooting over the roar of the engine, but it no longer aroused their interest. There was a bend in the road at the bottom of the hill, and just as the vehicle turned round it, the windshield shattered. The driver slumped down against the steering wheel, then rolled on top of the medic, who had fallen beside the gear shift. The ambulance hit a ditch and came to a halt. Bullets clinked through the body of the bus and flames began to flutter up from beneath the hood.
When Hietanen recovered from the stupor brought on by the vehicle’s sudden halt, he got up. Screaming and moaning surrounded him. He groped about with his hands against the back door and pushed it open. The movement brought a new round of bullets sailing into the side of the ambulance. Someone was crawling by his feet and yelling, ‘The ambulance is on fire! It’s on fire! Help me out of here!’
‘Where’s the driver and the medic?’ Hietanen yelled.
‘Dead. Help …’
Hietanen pulled the man out and fumbled his way back to the rear of the ambulance, yelling, ‘Anybody who can’t get out, just grab my hand here! I’ll pull you. But anybody who can make it, try to get yourself out. Everybody behind the bus!’
Somebody grabbed hold of his outstretched hand, and though the effort brought a sharp pain to his head, he pulled the man along the floor of the vehicle. The man screamed and wailed as his wounded pelvis dragged along the floor. There were six wounded men, but the two positioned up in front had been killed in the same shower that took out the medic and the driver. As he was dragging the man out, Hietanen heard the last of the survivors screaming for help. ‘Help me! The car’s on fire! I don’t have legs! I can’t get out!’
The screaming turned to choking, as the ambulance was beginning to fill with smoke. Hietanen made his way out of the back door with the wounded man and yelled, ‘I’m coming right back! I won’t leave you!’
The man who had made it out first, who had also been in the back of the ambulance, was the same new recruit that Hietanen had been wounded trying to help. He was actually in better shape than Hietanen was, but he was in such a state of shock that he couldn’t think of the others and just tried to crawl to cover behind the bus. A bullet aimed straight at his head cut short his escape, though.
When Hietanen got the other man to the door, he lowered himself from the vehicle and pulled him out. The man suddenly panicked and started screaming, ‘Get down, get down! He can see you! Over there!’
That was as far as he got. The shower struck the open doors of the bus and the man fell limply between them. Hietanen sank slowly down onto his side. His body shook for a long time as a shower of machine-gun fire tore through it. Sergeant Urho Hietanen was a happy-go-lucky kind of guy.
The ambulance burned, crackling and sparking. For a long time a choked coughing and crying rose up over the din, calling out, ‘Come and help me! Why did you leave me? Can’t anybody hear me? I’m burning. My blanket’s on fire!’
The coughing went on for some time, then changed into a wild bawling. First came a long, drawn-out scream, and then, the voice clarified into words. ‘Where the fuck did you go? I’m burning! Get me a submachine gun. I’m gonna kill you. I’m gonna kill everybody!’
The fire hissed. The voice choked and receded into coughs, and then, finally, a pleading whimper. ‘Stop … stop … this is the Red Cross … For the love of God … stop, no more … I’m on fire … no more … This is the Red Cross …’
Then the voice was drowned out by the crackle of the flames. The organs of bomb squadrons boomed through the clear blue of the summer afternoon. In the south, toward Ladoga, an artillery barrage was rumbling.
IV
Kariluoto was sitting at his command post eating a garden tomato – the last of the food he’d brought from home. He had come from the exultation of love smack into the middle of this misery, and the shock had sent his spirits plunging to a painful low. He had had enough of hearing about all the phases of the retreat. They attested to a total collapse. Columns harassed by ground-attack planes, destroyed supplies, the mood of hopelessness, the deserters, the reluctance to fight at all.
It pained Kariluoto to listen to these reports. On top of everything else, the defeat brought shame. He had thought the army would pull out fighting with everything it had, but the stories he heard revealed the truth, recounted in soldiers’ bitter, sarcastic slang.
They had fled before as well. Been scared, run away – but at least they had been ashamed and tried to make up for it. Now no one thought anything of it. The men themselves would lau
ghingly tell about how they’d run away, making a joke out of it. To be sure, there was not a thing in the world they were not willing to make into a joke, but it still pained Kariluoto to hear it.
He didn’t actually condemn fear, having recognized the fear in himself long ago. He had even looked back on that baptism of fire and seen it for what it was, stripped of any self-protective shield. If he weren’t company commander, who knows? Maybe he would be running away too. It was his position that compelled him to pull himself together.
He remembered the ghost that had haunted him. The gray-haired captain who had advanced under fire, body angled, shoulder high. Many times that broken voice had echoed in his ears: ‘Give it another go, Ensign. They’ll take off all right.’ It had always made him groan with shame and agony. But eventually the specter had forgiven him, as Kariluoto came to realize that he himself had issued the same exhortation dozens of times. Kaarna’s frame of mind from that day was well known to him now.
He did envy the men to whom bravery just came naturally. But he had devised careful protection against that. He had resolved for himself that that kind of bravery was merely pragmatic – it had no moral or ethical merit. Once, when they had been talking about Viirilä’s insane bravery, he had smiled almost contemptuously, saying, ‘Well, sure, and the horses out here are the least frightened of all.’
No, fear he was prepared to understand. But indifference – this bitter, biting mockery of their misfortune – it brought tears of anger to Kariluoto’s eyes.
At first it didn’t occur to him to pay any particular attention to the sounds of shooting coming from somewhere further to the rear. Only after some time had passed did it suddenly strike him that someone was fighting over there. A patrol, maybe.
Kariluoto cranked the phone handle, but there was no answer from Battalion Command. He called over a battle-runner and ordered him to go and get the Third Platoon leader from the reserves. When the man arrived, Kariluoto ordered him and his platoon to go and secure the main road heading toward the battalion’s command post, and no sooner had the man set out on his task than the shooting started up again. This time the shots were coming from a Russian machine gun, a weapon that was rare in their experience. The sound made Kariluoto think of the ambulance. It must be just around that vicinity now. Then an even more important fact occurred to him. If there was a machine gun involved, whatever unit had turned up on the road was bigger than just a patrol. He tried the phone again, but to no avail.
He rounded up more men and sent them to help the Third Platoon as he himself headed for the artillery’s observation post.
‘Phone line’s down. Mortars, too. We’re trying radio.’
‘Ask them to get me the Commander.’
When they finally got a connection, the artillery battery’s firing position reported that connections were down at Battalion Command. According to their information, men had come from that direction saying that Sarastie was dead and that the enemy had cut off the road. The Jaeger Platoon was in the midst of trying to set up some kind of barricade on their side of the cut-off point. Then they reported that they had received more information. The mortar positions had been seized by the enemy and Captain Lammio had ordered the supply train to pull out while he rounded up all the men available to help the Jaeger Platoon.
Kariluoto’s breath quickened. His hour of trial had come. He was the eldest company commander in the battalion save Lammio, and Lammio was on the other side of the cut-off.
‘Ask them to get me the Detachment Commander.’ Kariluoto lit a cigarette and took a long drag on it in an effort to calm himself. He tried to hide the trembling of his hands as he took the radio transmitter from the Ensign.
Conversation was difficult, as they had to avoid giving clear information for fear that someone might be listening in. The Commander gave his order briefly: ‘Cut to minimum edge. No delay. Erecting barricade wetht. Help negligible. Pothition retention imperative.’
‘I can curve.’
‘Objective not curve but pothition retention. I am confident it ith not very thtrong. Quick attack will clear up. Hit hard. You choothe method. Over.’
There wasn’t much left for Kariluoto to decide, actually. The Second Company and all the machine guns would hold the line along the brook. The First and Third Companies he would round up to carry out the attack.
When Koskela and the company commanders arrived, Kariluoto explained the situation. He assigned Koskela to take command of his own company. Koskela was looking at the map.
‘If we pull off the line gradually and curve round between those ponds, we can slip out like a dog through a gate. They can’t have many men securing that area, so far from the road. And as for holding the brook line, there’s no way. They’re not going to sit back and let us open the road just like that. The line can hardly hold with the men it’s got on it now, much less with just the Second Company and the machine guns. In any case we’d better make a plan to destroy those two anti-tank guns.’
‘The command was clear.’
Koskela clapped the map shut. ‘Yup. But it doesn’t change anything about the situation.’
‘The Commander knows the situation. Explaining it to him isn’t going to help anything.’
‘Of course not. That’s not what I was suggesting.’
The companies split up and the Second Company spread out to try to cover the areas the others had vacated. Koskela took Rokka and Määttä’s machine guns with him. He knew, of course, that the weapons would make little difference in this attack, but he wanted the men with him, Rokka particularly. Rokka even left Vanhala in charge of the machine gun and promised to join the firing line himself. The men moved swiftly and determinedly. No questions, no dilly-dallying. The gravity of the situation had restored their old edge. They had wondered over Hietanen’s fate for a moment, realizing that the ambulance must have been in a danger zone, but time had cut short their musings. Tonight, their lives were on the line, more precariously than ever before. Many of the men assigned to stay on the brookline asked to join the attack detachment, and Kariluoto took a few of the best.
The groups were set. The Third Company on the left side of the road, the First on the right. His own former platoon Kariluoto held in reserve.
Koskela had explained the situation to the company, adding, ‘Guess there’s just one way out of this fix – the old-fashioned way.’
But before setting out, he turned to Kariluoto and said, ‘Soon as we set in, the neighbors are going to do the same. It won’t make any difference how quick we are. They’ve been ready this whole time. The barrage earlier was just a cover for this encirclement. It’s been three hours since then and you can see how they’ve dug their heels in all over the terrain. They’ve already got two or three loads of logs over there that they’ve started building bunkers with. Slipping into the forest is the only way out.’
‘You know the order.’
‘Yeah, I do. And I also know that the Commander has no idea what he’s asking. He should come and open the road from his direction. But he has no idea how to do it. Problem is, it’s even harder for us. Two hours from now you’ll see what the situation is. When we have the Second Company retreating at our backs and the First and Third lying in shreds under the spruces by the command post. Good luck to any man trying to get out of that.’
Kariluoto diverted his gaze. He knew that Koskela was right, but while he had courage enough in him to make personal sacrifices, going against a commander’s order was something that was beyond him. His voice cracked as he said curtly, ‘There’s an easy way out. Only hurts once.’
r /> Koskela stole a glance at Kariluoto. It was the first time he had heard him take such a personal tone with him. Up until now, Kariluoto had always deferred to his views. Koskela knew it went back to those very first days of the war, and sometimes he had even been a bit embarrassed by it.
Koskela said nothing. Then, as Kariluoto left, a thought flashed through his mind, as if it were an axiom: That man will die today.
And then he banished the thought. ‘Who knows? Maybe it’ll work. And if we’re going through with it, then in any case we have to do it like we believe it might succeed. Otherwise there’s no point at all.’
Rokka was shoving hand grenades into his belt. He was on his knees beside the crate when Koskela found him. ‘You think many fellas gonna die tonight?’
‘I dunno. Anyway, now we just do the best we can.’
‘Oh, you don’t need’da pump me up. I ain’t the pep-talk type. But Lord I hope you know how to pray!’
‘Can’t remember.’
‘Well, try, y’hear? Sankia Priha the Great, he just laughed when’na fellas started puttin’ their packs on, but it don’t strike me we got much to laugh at.’
‘Guess a straight face might be best for all of us this time. By the way, you can decide yourself which way you want to go. It would actually make sense to get together one shock troop, but we don’t have time, and I guess the stronger guys will figure out what to do regardless.’
‘Oh, I’ll be all the shock troop you need, right here.’ Rokka set off, humming as he went. ‘Take my darlin’ by the arm …’