by Väinö Linna
‘Seems like we might have reason to sing a dirge or two ourselves around here.’ Lahtinen took a swig of warmish water from his canteen and continued, ‘I mean, I guess they’re gonna dig in pretty good now that we’ve crossed over onto their side. Before they were, like, sure, go ahead and take Karelia if it means that much to you – look, we’ll give it to you. But we’ll just see how things go once we’re in there. I mean, you shouldn’t go poking a bear in its den, that’s all I’m sayin’.’
‘Well, it’s different if you got a gun,’ said Salo. ‘Even we’re not going in with spears to fight them this time.’
‘Humph … you and your guns … Guns aren’t gonna to be much help …’
‘There’s a lot of troops in front of us,’ Hietanen said. ‘They won’t send us back out to the line right away.’
‘Look boys, we don’t even know, our job might end right here,’ Salo broke in. ‘The fellows over there was sayin’ they told the reservists it’ll take three weeks and then we’ll be heading back in time to make hay. And it’s already been two.’
‘Ha, ha, ha,’ Lahtinen laughed with bitter contempt. ‘Where’d you get that? The Daily Bullshitter? The officers made that rumor up to get the reservists to cross the old border. Oh, they know how to do it all right. Gonna build that Greater Finland. Got their heads so hot they got steam coming out their noses.’
‘Suhna Superpower in the Making! Heehee. And they’re off! Our forest warriors show the world what Finnish spirit can do. With our valiant Lottas standing by our boys. Heehee …’
‘Humph … Tell you what …’
The lift they’d felt upon crossing the border died away, and they trudged on in silence. Astonishingly, the march ended earlier than usual, however, and they set up camp in a thicket of saplings along the banks of a creek. As soon as they’d eaten, they hurried to soak their feet in the cold creek water. Some men even splashed around trying to swim, though the water barely reached their knees. Cannons boomed somewhere out in front of them, mingling occasionally with the faint, far-off chatter of machine guns.
‘There it is again, boys. They’re waiting for us.’
‘Of course they are. We’re about to go open the road.’ Sihvonen was standing in the creek with his trouser-legs rolled up, washing his foot-rags. ‘But hey, look, the peacock’s headed this way. I wonder what he wants over here.’
Lieutenant Lammio stepped off the main road toward their encampment. He had already managed to get cleaned up and don a fresh uniform. Knowing that the regiment would still be on break for a while, he had decided to take advantage of this time by redressing the declining discipline of his company. The Lieutenant was possessed of a principle, which he had fashioned for himself by drawing upon his vast store of stupidity, as well as his many character flaws. The principle was: strict discipline and systematic militarism. He established the necessity of this principle for himself via such thoughts as: discipline is the backbone of the army, and the will of the leader can affect men only through that spine of discipline that runs down the center of the group. This reasoning wasn’t something that Lammio had dreamt up on his own, it just happened to offer a position that suited his needs. His ideal soldier was an officer who, well-groomed and white-gloved, led his unit with a cold, proud bravery. His men would feel a humble admiration toward him and obey him out of sheer respect. Such an officer would himself demonstrate unfailing compliance with the demands of military discipline. Lammio did grant his exalted being one reprieve in this regard, however, particularly while he was still young: after a few drinks, he might ride his horse right into some restaurant or other and order two glasses of champagne – one for himself, and one for the horse. He would get a confinement, naturally, but the Commander would clap him on the shoulder with a knowing smile and say, ‘Well, you know the rules … But what a devil … what a devil!’
The Division Management headquarters were nearby, and there were some ‘feisty little Lottas’ over there – which explained the white collar Lammio had fixed to the neck of his shirt.
He stopped and tapped his index finger on the stem of his bone cigarette-holder, dumping out the ash before beginning to speak in his shrill voice: ‘A-hem. The Master Sergeant will be arriving to distribute your daily allowance, so everyone is to remain within the camp area. In any case, absence without official leave is, of course, prohibited. You are to assemble in work groups with your comrades-in-arms to wash your shirts in the creek. Then you are to cut your hair and shave. If I see unkempt men at noon tomorrow, additional housekeeping diversions will be devised for those parties. And one more item. Just because we are now at war does not mean that discipline has been relaxed. I observed some notable lapses during the march, and I intend to root them out immediately. The company looked more like a band of vagrants than an army unit. That kind of pig-headed, battle-hardened mentality will not be tolerated. This regiment has already proven instrumental in the army corps’ war operations, earning a reputation on the basis of its first combat situation. Each man here is to take that reputation as his own and conduct himself accordingly. Remember, this is not the Rajamäki Regiment, nor the Friday Fishing Club. This is an elite troop of the Finnish army. And may I remind you that the upper management is located not far from where we stand, so should the company’s conduct provoke any criticism, I have plenty of means available to me to get things back in line. I hope my meaning is not lost on any of you. To your assignments.’
Hietanen was sitting on a rock on the creek bank, dangling his feet in the water. He’d been watching the others during Lammio’s speech, looking at them one at a time, and when Lammio finally fell silent, he said, ‘I trust that all of you heard this very important speech. I only hope you are capable of understanding what it means.’
Hietanen turned with affected solemnity toward Lahtinen, as if demanding his opinion. Lahtinen responded bitingly, ‘The German model, that’s what it means. And above all, it means that that nutcase has lost the one smidgin of sense he had. Wasn’t much to begin with, but now even that’s gone.’
‘Laundry. Heehee … Our boys are taking a break from the fighting to wash their shirts. Our forest warriors demonstrate the diverse range of their capabilities …’ Vanhala chuckled, then suddenly went stiff and said, ‘Guys.’
They all looked in the direction he was facing and saw one of the big trucks stop on the main road to let Lehto, Määttä and Rahikainen jump off.
‘Oh Jesus! Now they’re in for it!’ Hietanen said and began waving his arms to get their attention. He couldn’t yell, but he waved and gestured to try to alert them to the danger, whispering over and over again, ‘Guys, go! Go to the other side! Go through the woods! No, not straight ahead into the wolf’s mouth … you bumbling idiots … oh, for Chrissakes … biggest goddamn idiots in tarnation!’
The trio realized their danger too late. In the past they had always driven a way beyond the camp and then made their way back through the forest, but habit had made them careless, and now here they were, standing before Lammio with cardboard boxes under their arms.
Lammio paused for dramatic effect and then asked, ‘On whose authority were you riding in that vehicle?’
‘Our authority,’ Lehto replied. Seeing as there was no saving them now, he figured it didn’t really matter what anybody said and decided to be his usual surly self.
‘What is in those boxes? Show me.’
Nobody made a move to open the boxes, and only when he realized that the others weren’t going to say anything did Rahikainen venture, ‘Oh! Well, these here are some crackers and, uh … jelly.’
&
nbsp; ‘Tell me where you stole them from!’
With a look of pure innocence, Rahikainen shifted his feet and started to explain, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, ‘Oh, we haven’t stolen any of this! Some of the guys at the field storehouse back there by the roadside are from my home town, and they just gave us this stuff. We didn’t steal it.’
‘You’re lying. Furthermore, you have no right to take more than your allotted rations from the government’s food supply. Do you pretend you were not aware that those men had no right to give you provisions?’
Rahikainen kept playing dumb. ‘Oh, I guess that could be – that they didn’t have any right to do it. I don’t know anythin’ about their management. When they offered us stuff we hadn’t even asked for, I just assumed they knew what they were doin’.’
‘Don’t start giving me excuses. Are you really so stupid as to think I would fall for that kind of … And Lehto, am I to believe that even you were unaware that absence without official leave during a march is prohibited?’
‘Nah. I knew.’
‘The insolence! You all think very highly of yourselves. Do you know what would happen if I were to hand your case over to the court martial? You’d be stripped of your ranks and sent out to hoe swampland. How would you feel about that?’
‘Doesn’t seem like it’s worth a lieutenant’s time to ask my opinion. Seems like a lieutenant ought be able to figure out something like that all by himself.’ Lehto was in a mood – such a mood that he would have happily turned himself over to be hacked to pieces rather than humble himself before Lammio. Lammio’s tone of voice and condescending self-importance rankled him to the depths of his soul, and from that moment on, Lehto hated Lammio with a dark and unrelenting hatred. He had regarded him with cold disdain before, but now, as he clenched his teeth, it was only Lammio’s complete inability to understand anybody that protected him from perceiving what had transpired.
‘What are you saying?’ Lammio was on the verge of screaming, but then he remembered that his ideal officer would never do such a thing – he would be cool, meticulous, comme il faut – so he put on his most official voice and called out, ‘Ensign Koskela!’
‘Yee-up.’ Koskela emerged from the tent, and Lammio started dictating in a voice that insinuated to Koskela as to everyone else that he was a bad officer, incapable of maintaining discipline in his platoon. ‘Punishment for Corporal Lehto and Privates Määttä and Rahikainen issued as follows: twenty-four hours in close confinement. The punishment is modified under the circumstances into two hours’ standing at attention with full machine-gun equipment and field packs, fully loaded – to be carried out upon the start of the next hour. Offence: unwarranted absence from march formation, misappropriation of provisions, and, for Lehto, inappropriate conduct toward a superior. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Yeah, sure.’ Koskela crawled back into the tent. Undeterred, Lammio continued shouting after him, ‘The stolen foodstuffs are to be turned over to Mäkilä, to be handled in the provisions unit of the First Battalion.’
Lammio took his leave and the three delinquents slunk into their tent. Lehto threw himself on the ground and said darkly, ‘So the way it’s going to go is, I’m not standing.’
Koskela looked pained. He stood for a long time clearing his throat and finally said, ‘Yeah, uh, I don’t want to get mixed up in this thing, but it would be simplest if you guys could just do it.’
‘I’m not afraid of a little snot like him … Let ’em pin me to the wall if they want.’ Lehto clenched his teeth. ‘For a moment there we were pretty close to putting him in the hospital and me in the clink.’
Koskela rummaged around in his pack. ‘Right, well, this isn’t really about fear at all. It’s just the path of least resistance, I mean.’
‘Well, I can stand for a couple of hours, but I’m not putting anything in my pack. And I’m just saying that if that snotty little jackass doesn’t keep his distance, he’s gonna get it in the jaw and then what will be will be.’
‘I don’t care about the pack. Just that you have it on.’ Koskela seemed to relax a bit. Then he said, ‘But the stuff has to go to Mäkilä.’
‘You don’t mean we’re gonna have to give it all back!’ Rahikainen exclaimed. ‘If he was stupid enough not to check how much is in here, we can just put some in the boxes and eat the rest. I held my breath half an hour waiting to make a dash for these, and the duty guard nearly took a crack at me. I’m not gonna stand there for two hours for nothin’.’
So that was how they did it. They sent about a third of the food to Mäkilä and divvied up the rest. Koskela turned a blind eye to the proceedings, but refrained from taking his share. When they stepped out of the tent for a moment, Lehto turned to the others and said, ‘If it didn’t put Koskela in such a fix, I wouldn’t stand for two hours. Let ’em put a gun to my head, I still wouldn’t do it. Huh huh. Let ’em send six hundred strong! What are they going to do?’
III
The Master Sergeant doled out their pay. The men gathered around card games accordingly, as the pay was more than usual this time, having just been raised to the new scale. The three delinquents received their money first so that they could hurry off to take their punishment. This punishment gave Korsumäki a good laugh, and he smiled contentedly as he told the boys, ‘Well, at least you’ll hang on to your dough two hours longer than usual.’
The company secretary recorded the payments in his ledger. He was carefully groomed and combed, looking just as much the dandy as he had back in the burnt clearing. Rahikainen looked at him for a moment, thinking, and then took out Lieutenant Braskanov’s nail file and started buffing up his nails.
‘Nifty little gadget. But who’s got the time to file his nails out here? I’d trade this for a pack of cigarettes, if anybody needs a nail file.’
‘Let me see.’ The secretary inspected the file with great interest and said, after he’d thought it over for a moment, ‘I’ll give you a pack.’
‘Deal. I’m lettin’ it go awful cheap, but then, I don’t need it myself. Haven’t got time for that sort of thing.’
Others who had ended up with items from the Lieutenant’s nail-care set offered to trade them with the secretary, but none of them got more than a few cigarettes out of him.
Hietanen had been appointed to oversee the punishment, and so was urging Rahikainen to get a move on. The others were already on their way and Rahikainen trailed after them, dragging his gun behind him and chattering away contentedly, ‘I bet our gentleman neighbor wouldn’t have guessed how valuable his gadgets would be in the hands of the right fellow! Everything I touch turns to gold. That must be some kind of gift from on high. How else would you explain … But all righty, here we go, gotta go stand with the guns over our shoulders, even if we’re the ones who risked our necks gettin’ grub for the group.’
Hietanen led them a little way from the camp, as they weren’t exactly planning to carry out the orders to a T. The guilty trio shuffled themselves into a line.
‘But you’re the one who oughtta stand in the middle, since you’re the squad leader and the biggest bandit,’ Määttä said to Lehto.
‘Looks just like Golgotha, the three of you standing there,’ Hietanen said as he sat down on a rock to smoke. ‘Just stand there a little while. We’re not gonna hang around here the full two hours. The peacock went to go check out the Lottas in the staff headquarters, I’m sure of that, and Koskela’ll head to bed soon.’
‘Okey-doke. But what kind of Jesus does our corporal here think he is, standing there in the middle? Y
ou’re the one who got us into this whole mess in the first place. Leading us poor, innocent soldiers astray from the path of military discipline.’
They stood at something vaguely resembling attention. They rested the butts of their rifles on their belts so they could keep them upright without having to carry their whole weight. Hietanen had some good tips to offer, for while he generally respected authority, he had lost his temper once as a new recruit, lashing out at some corporal who’d made the mistake of being too insolent with him and twisting the guy’s nose between his fingers so hard that the cartilage squeaked. The affair had resulted in some similar standing exercises for Hietanen.
The charade had been underway for about half an hour when they started to hear a low drone coming from the sky. The sound grew louder and pretty soon they could make out black spots getting bigger and bigger.
‘Bombers.’
‘Could they be ours?’
‘Coming from the east. Though we could have planes coming from that direction, too. Oh wait, hang on, guys … one, two, three, four … Holy bejesus. Eighteen … we haven’t got a fleet anywhere near that big. Wait, more … nine fighter planes covering their tail …’
The drone grew louder. The engines sounded like organs plodding out a monotonous beat: voo voo voo voo.
‘It’s the enemy … the anti-aircraft guns are firing.’
They began to hear the light clatter of the anti-aircraft guns somewhere further off, but the red streaks of light from the shots fell far behind the enemy planes.
‘Headed this way.’
Shouts came from the camp. ‘Danger overhead! Take cover!’
Koskela emerged from the tent, looked at the approaching planes and shouted to Hietanen, ‘Stop with the guys’ punishment and get under cover!’