Unknown Soldiers

by Väinö Linna

  It was rare that Mäkilä gave handouts, so to him this occasion felt downright momentous. There was even a sort of chummy warmth in his voice as he said, ‘Make sure nobody sees you eat it. Otherwise I’ll have the whole lot of them after me. And don’t come asking for anything else for a little while.’

  ‘Cheers.’ Hietanen was annoyed at first. But then, he had to laugh at this pathetic little herring that looked as though it had died of starvation. He could imagine how very great the gift was in Mäkilä’s estimation though, so he tried to keep a straight face as he said, ‘Well, gee, this’ll last me a good half a year! Thanks so much, really, thanks a ton.’

  Mäkilä stalled, fiddling awkwardly for a moment. He blushed with embarrassment, and after clearing his throat for a good while, said, ‘It’s not right for you to drink like that. We’re about to set out again. At four o’clock this morning they hit a dugout dead on over at the third emplacement. Couple of boys gone and three taken to the field hospital in pretty weak condition. Chuh … send-offs can be pretty quick. What condition will our souls be in when the time comes?’

  Hietanen was not fond of having people fret over his soul. He personally had never been too concerned about what kind of shape it was in. Somehow or other it seemed to him that since the government had sent him out here, it would probably look after him if he died and make sure its fallen soldier’s sins weren’t taken too strictly into account. The government had ministers to straighten things out with God, after all. Hietanen’s discretion and debt of gratitude prevented him from letting Mäkilä see any of his irritation, however. So he said solemnly, ‘Yee-eah … Don’t have to tell me. Folks definitely get to thinking about that stuff when things get rough. When the lead’s really coming down. But people are funny, soon as it’s over, they just start singing all kinds of things and swearing like sailors. But hey, look, I gotta run. And thanks again, thanks a ton!’

  Hietanen tossed the herring into his mouth as he left. He didn’t have the heart to chew it, so he just gulped down the sad little runt Mäkilä had enlisted to save his soul.

  V

  The section departed as soon as they’d eaten. Lammio remained out of sight, managing things with Koskela via Mielonen, who acted as go-between. As far as Koskela was concerned, the whole spat was forgotten. He tossed his pack onto his back with his usual nonchalance and said, ‘Well, onwards, huh?’

  Vanhala put on a Savo dialect – which cracked him up and which he did not refrain from using frequently – and commanded himself, ‘Rrrrrrifles over your shoulder and forward, march!’

  He heaved his gun over his shoulder in accordance with his own command and started off, grinning to himself. The others’ glumness at having to depart prevented them from enjoying his antics, though.

  Their spirits had reached a new low. Out in front of them there was a dugout and a trench. Other than that, life was pretty unremarkable. Things had been very quiet leading up to the spring. In April they had put down a significant enemy attack, though admittedly it had looked like a pretty close call at one point. The enemy had cut in deep from the side, but finally they managed to push them back and hold on to their critical bridgehead on the south side of the Svir.

  The arrival of summer did brighten their spirits somewhat. Even Koskela looked into the dense forests running beside the log road and thought, ‘Wouldn’t the cows have a field day here?’

  Sturdy grass had emerged from the damp soil. It was warm. It made you want to just sit on the grass and let the sun shine on you.

  The men marched behind Koskela in silence. Only their heads bobbed slightly whenever a boom sounded out in front of them.

  ‘Headed for Mount Million,’ somebody said. ‘Bet those fellows’re making a run for their foxholes.’

  Rokka glanced around. Nothing but solemn faces and steady shoulders swinging in unison. ‘What’s troublin’ you fellas? I was thinkin’ I might clear the air with a lil’ singin’. I’ve tried just ’bout everythin’, see, but makin’ up a song’s sumpin’ I ain’t never tried my hand at yet. Whadda ya say, fellas?’

  Rokka’s shoulders began to sway as he improvised, ‘Mmbada go we gadda go we gadda go …’

  Vanhala scuttled over to Rokka as if he were a magnet. ‘If you have a heart within you, gay or weary, come join into Singing Finland’s Song, heehee!’

  Hietanen perked up as well. ‘Hey, guys! I know. Let’s make a kinda rat-trap that’ll catch ’em alive. We can write some whoppers on scraps of paper and stick ’em round the rats’ necks and set ’em loose. Then when the guys from the next dugout meet up with ’em, they can listen to what the little monsters have to say by reading the tags.’

  ‘Hang on, boys, I got it!’ Rahikainen said. ‘There’s that guy from Salmi in the Second Company knows Russian. If we have him write in Russian, then we can send the letters ’cross the way.’

  ‘Let’s make ’em good and dirty, heeheehee.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. They’ll be able to see us just round this bend. Let’s turn off into the forest.’

  Chapter Eleven

  I

  Their bunker was situated beside a small, alder-covered hill. On the other side of the hill, there curved a trench leading to a machine-gun nest at either end. On the left, the trench continued on into a shallow communication trench connecting to the neighboring stronghold. On the right, the land dropped off into a soggy ditch, beyond which you could make out more positions. A bit further off the terrain rose, and there sat Mount Million and Mini-Million, the ‘advanced posts from hell’, the latter of which was worse. They were perched on a treeless hill, which came under enemy fire from three directions, because the line turned sharply to the right just behind the hill. The spot generated plenty of bad news, even during quiet periods. Each unit had to man it for two weeks at a time, so the hill was like an almanac by which the whole sector kept time: ‘So and so many weeks ’til it’s our turn.’

  In front of the position lay a swamp, and beyond the swamp, the ‘Devil’s Mound’, complete with mud-log enemy gun-nests. The Finns had taken the hill twice, but holding it proved to require constant, heavy fighting, so they had ceded it back both times. Only the low ridge extending from the bottom of the hill had been held, and indeed that was where both of their advanced positions were now situated. It didn’t make much difference anyway, whether the line wandered this way or that at any given point, as the thing looked like it had been drawn by a nitwit to begin with. And, of course, it had been – drawn by the feuding egos of two states, both of whom had decided, ‘From here we will not retreat’.

  They had squabbled over these hillsides in the autumn of 1941, tired of it, and then abandoned the mess just as it was on both sides. The positions were littered with the remains of Siberian soldiers. No one had bothered to bury them over the winter, and by the springtime nobody could bring himself to. By this time they had dried out and turned white. Nothing but hollow sockets peered from beneath their helmets.

  Koskela’s platoon had reinforced their bunker with beams scrounged from a neighboring town’s tshasovna, one of those Karelian Orthodox chapels, so they didn’t have any of the bedbugs that plagued the bunkers reinforced with timber scrounged from people’s houses. It was Koskela who had seen to this, further enhancing his reputation amongst his men. ‘Son of a bitch thinks of everything.’

  A masonry oven made of round stones sat between the door and the window. Bunk beds lined the walls. Koskela’s solitary bed lay below the window. The men had insisted it go there, though Koskela would have been just as content to sleep in a regular bunk. And once again, the trivial proceedings revealed a cur
ious fact. While the men in other platoons begrudgingly addressed their officers as ‘sir’, turning the show of respect into a mockery, Koskela’s men sought to make everything a little bit better for him than it was for themselves.

  The steady monotony of the positional war brought out Koskela’s quiet, solitary side even more than before. He would lie on his bed staring at the ceiling, and might remain there for hours at a time without saying a word. He had taken it upon himself to do rounds on fire-watch, half out of a sense of duty, half out of a hankering for the solitude of the night shift. He enjoyed pitter-pattering around by himself in the quiet night. His favorite task was trapping rats. He would lie motionless for a long time, holding the wire trap open beside a rat-hole, and as soon as some meddling rat would cautiously step inside, he’d pull the snare shut. Then his solitary face would light up with a wide grin as he dangled the squeaking rat before his eyes, whispering, ‘Well, whatta ya know! Hullo, gramps!’

  Then he would let the rat out of the trap and say, ‘Ga home! But make sure I don’t ever catch you round here again.’

  Once in a while, just as the summer night was giving way to morning, he would sit outside, looking as if he were day-dreaming. This wasn’t precisely the case, however. His attentive eyes would be following the early morning birds, and if one of the guards happened to pass by, Koskela might say, ‘Folks talk about those carefree birds up in the sky, but I’ve never seen a man work that hard for his bread.’

  The men wrote letters, took turns standing guard, and made rings. Rokka and Rahikainen set up a business: Rokka did the making and Rahikainen did the selling. It was worth it for Rokka, even if he knew Rahikainen cheated a bit in the accounting. He didn’t say anything, because the amount of money wasn’t really worth it, and because he knew that, for Rahikainen, the whole appeal of doing business lay precisely in these little ruses.

  Rokka had a vast supply of ring-making materials. Once, while they were watching some air combat, a Russian fighter plane had been shot down. It had fallen a little way away from their bunker, prompting Rokka to stick some pliers in his pocket, toss a hacksaw and a submachine gun over his shoulder, and take off after it.

  Lucky for him, the fighter plane had fallen in no-man’s-land, and the Russians had managed to get a security squad to the site to guard the wreck. Otherwise things would have been all cleaned up before Rokka could have got there. As it was, teams of scavengers were walking away disappointed when Rokka arrived. He was certainly not planning to return empty-handed, however. He managed to talk the braver of his men into joining him, and the rest tagged along behind. The Russian patrol squad vanished when Rokka shot their leader and let loose one of his terrible howls, which frightened even his own comrades so much that the less hearty among them took to their heels.

  The wreck was surrounded by a terrific hubbub. One guy was lusting after the measuring gauges, somebody else wanted the parachute silk, and a third guy was after the pilot’s mangled, blood-stained leather jacket. Most of them wanted the light metal alloy to make rings with, though.

  Their time was cut short, as the Russians sent out a sturdier squad, compelling the ‘freebooters’ to make a hasty exit. By rights of leadership, Rokka was permitted to take his pick of the loot. With the triple-blade, fighter-plane propeller over his shoulder, he returned to the bunker crowing far and wide, ‘Don’t think those wartime shortages are gonna pose much threat to my raw material supply! But goollord, how we ran! What with those Russkis on our tail, we had’da press our tongues to the bit like a team a sled hounds. I wouldn’na managed to git this fella out if he hadn’na already come loose on his way down.’

  As a result of the excursion, all of the men from the neighboring battalion who had gone with Rokka ended up assigned to the next patrol. The ‘patrol volunteers’, as the command put it.

  Hietanen and Määttä were the most avid card-players in the group. Hietanen routinely lost his entire daily allowance, and when it ran out, he would explode into a long, post-game fury. ‘Jesus! Why am I so goddamn stupid? What was I thinking pulling that last card? I’m sticking to fifteen from now on.’

  Then he did an extra round of guard duty for fifty marks, and when he’d managed to lose those, he scratched his head and said, ‘No. Goddamn it, I’m pulling nineteen. Might shoot it all to hell but I’m sick of being stingy.’

  And so the others always knew where they could find Hietanen at any given time, and that evening Hietanen wrote in his stiff handwriting, his tongue sticking out the corner of his mouth and following his flourishes, ‘… send meat, bread and butter. And send a little cash, too, so I can pay for my cigarettes. Sincerely, Urho.’

  He never played with the money he got from home. ‘But it’s not worth trying to save this petty cash. It’s not like I’m out here for the money.’

  II

  Rokka rubbed a darning needle along the ring’s surface, polishing it up with a few final touches. He raised the ring up to the window, checking it in the light, and then said to Koskela, lying on the bed, ‘Lammio’s clear forgotten’na come git that propeller a mine. He says it belongs to the government. Gaddamn it, if I go fetch the booty fair and square, it belongs to me. You think he knows what kind a whippin’ he’d git if he came ’n’ took that piece a metal from me?’

  ‘He won’t take anything,’ Koskela said, rather awkwardly. He found all of the squabbling between the men and the officers bothersome.

  ‘I don’t believe it. Lissen, you don’t hear how that fella bangs on and on about discipline. The sharper fellas can’t stand goin’na war themselves, so they send fellas like him out to do it. And they start returnin’ everythin’na discipline. ’Fyask me this whole business’s gone to hell. Nothin’ssa way it oughdda be any more. The men don’t know what’s comin’ and they start seein’ everythin’ like it was a joke. Pretty soon they ain’t even gonna care who wins any more. And those clowns think they’re makin’ things better by keepin’ everbody in lock step. I can’t even figger out if they believe it themselves or not. It’s hard’da imagine grown men actin’ that unreasonable … Keep the men in lock step! Gaddamn it! They spend all their time buildin’ fancy chimneys for their command post and makin’ a contest outta whose’s the best. Ain’t nothin’ gonna come outta that. I’ve started’da wonder ’bout some a that stuff those fellas do.’

  Rokka polished the ring quietly for a little while and then said suddenly to Koskela, ‘You think we’re gonna lose this war?’

  Koskela stared at the ceiling for a long time and finally said, ‘They’re pressing on pretty well down south.’

  ‘Ain’t that that worries me. They’re actin’na way a bumblebee does when he’s caught in a spiderweb. More he tears in, more tangled up he gits. Last year I thought they was gonna make it all right, but come fall I already guessed there wasn’t a chance in hell a that. Don’t take a whole lotta wits to figger out what’s goin’ on. If they’d a struck then maybe, but any chance we might’ta had was gone by the time winter come.’

  ‘Yeah, you might be right.’ You could tell from the tone of Koskela’s voice that he’d given the matter some thought and didn’t think Rokka’s conclusion at all implausible.

  Rokka, for his part, cast the matter aside and said, returning to his former carefree self, ‘Well, anyhow, this ain’t the time to worry ’bout none a that here. Would you believe I sent six thousand marks to the missus, all from these here rings?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Hey, all you heroes out there! Mess tins’s boilin’.’

  They had built a grate to set atop the stove to make coffee. There we
re a few mess tins full of boiling water on it now, and the men wandered inside to stir in packets of coffee substitute.

  ‘Million’s still takin’ it hard from those six-inchers,’ Rahikainen announced, sitting on his bed, which was pasted with a series of pictures cut out of Signal magazine: ‘Sabine before her bath’, ‘Sabine bathing’ and ‘Sabine after her bath’.

  ‘Must not get much sun down there,’ Hietanen said.

  ‘We ain’t gonna git much round here, neither, if you all don’t quit stirrin’ up a ruckus out there on guard duty. Sankia Priha the Great, you better quit hollerin’ at them the whole time, hear?’

  ‘Heeheehee!’

  Koskela got up and went to the window, having spotted a few strange men heading down the path to their bunker. ‘So here are the delayed reinforcements.’

  The door opened and four men stepped inside. Koskela’s men stared in wonder at the private who entered first.

  He was a man of towering height, in his thirties, with big, earnest eyes staring out of his long, horse-like face. The real cause of their astonishment, however, was the bow and arrow dangling from the man’s shoulder. He snapped stiffly to attention and, without moving a muscle, addressed Koskela in earnest, gravely respectful tones.

  ‘Is this the bunker belonging to Lieutenant Koskela?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Lieutenant, sir! Might I have a word?’