Вяйнё Линна - Unknown Soldiers

‘Hey, guys! Lottas!’

‘And the Commander!’

The Battalion Commander was coming down the road, accompanied by an aide and two Lottas. They had taken a tour of the battlefield, and the aide had taken some pictures of the Lottas posing beside the captured mortars. They had gone to see some fallen Russians, and the Lottas, shuddering at the corpses, had said, ‘Phew, how dreadful!’

‘Oh, how terrible!’ they had exclaimed, seeing the fallen man whose brain had been partially torn out of his head by a piece of shrapnel.

‘Dear Lord, what pain those boys must be in!’ they had said to one another as they watched the ambulances drive the Second Battalion’s wounded off to the field hospital.

‘There was no time to take care of all of this beforehand,’ the Commander apologized. ‘The Second Battalion was encircled itself after cutting off the road.’

‘Oh, war is so terrible!’ Lotta Raili Kotilainen reminded herself that, as a woman, she was more or less obliged to make some such sympathetic remark. Truth be told, she was so happy that any feeling of pity on her part was quite superficial. For the duration of their tour, her interest had been directed toward the aide, who was a very handsome and upstanding officer indeed – quite cultivated. He even spoke four languages.

Was he the one? This Raili Kotilainen had had a dream, which led her to join up as a front-line Lotta, a role that was connected to some image of the mythic Lotta heroine conjured up by the Winter War, some dim-witted foreign journalists, and the patriotism of a countryside telephone operator with five years of elementary education.

‘The German advance has been astoundingly swift,’ the aide said, remembering the news broadcast. ‘Even the most wishful thinkers hardly dared hope for so much.’

‘Wishful thinkers, no. But careful calculators, yes. German military leadership has one golden tradition: it does not hope, it calculates. Russia has just one crucial asset: the apathetic endurance of a donkey. But the value of plain stamina is decreasing as war is becoming increasingly technological in nature. And when it comes to technical prowess, no one can compete with the Germans.’ The Battalion Commander, Major Sarastie, enjoyed talking about war and war operations ‘scientifically’. He had read quite a bit of military literature, and his own sympathies aligned, quite traditionally, with the Germans. But this scientific orientation genuinely suited him, and you really could see a spark light up in him on occasions like this. He tended to make sense of things by taking small incidents and abstracting from them to formulate maxims.

Major Sarastie was a very tall man. His stride bore the ungainly awkwardness typical of men of his stature. His neck was ruddy with health and vigor, as was his face. He carried a stripped willow branch that he was continually whacking against the leg of his boot.

The machine-gunners were lying about by the roadside, averting their eyes so as to avoid having to salute. They hadn’t yet mastered the art of ignoring the obligation altogether.

But the Major paused and asked, ‘Have you men had something to eat?’

‘Yes, we have, Major, sir,’ Salo responded, rising to attention.

The Major knew perfectly well that the men had eaten, but a commander had to make some kind of affable inquiry on a night like this. He had spent the entire day in a state of nervous anxiety, receiving nothing from the battlefield but one piece of unpromising news after the next. The number of casualties had soared and the enemy line remained unbroken. All in all, the day had stripped the battalion’s ranks of over a hundred men, and it would have been a formidable casualty count to report, were he not now striding down the main road of the village. But there he strode, and, somehow or other, could say he was in the best of spirits. He felt as if some life force had doubled within him, compounding all his capacities and making him downright impatient to set off on a new assignment. A good-natured benevolence rang in his voice as he addressed the men – ‘Strapping bundles of Finnish ferocity’.

‘Ah, good. And do you men have anything to smoke?’

‘Yes, we do, Major, sir,’ Salo responded again, but Hietanen cut in, ‘We’re rolling mahorka.’

‘Ah, I see. How’s it taste?’

‘Like home-grown tobacco, Major, sir. Tastes the same everywhere.’

‘Yes, indeed. Well, have a good rest. You’ll need all the strength you’ve got.’

‘Would you take a look at those hips?’ Rahikainen said. ‘Ah, the treasures stored up in those pistons… but what’s a private supposed to do about it, huh? Boys, there you see the sweetest goods in the world, packed up into five feet and three little inches. And yet Rahikainen here’s just left to eat his heart out. There’s another thing they’ve got divvied up all wrong. Some guys got more’n they need and others got nothin’ at all.’

‘Light field mattress, 1918 model,’ somebody said.

‘If I was a general, I’d set up a girly house for those little ladies,’ Rahikainen mused, ‘and pass out tickets on payday.’

The idea caught Rahikainen’s interest, and he said almost seriously, ‘You could do good business with those tickets, actually.’

‘Ha, ha, ha, Rahikainen doing business with those tickets? You mean, buying ’em all up? Pretty sure you’d never see him selling those off.’

Riitaoja had also turned up to eat, lugging his ammunition boxes. He blushed and smiled his childish smile. ‘There are bodies by the side of the road at the aid station. K-k-k-kaukonen’s there with the others. There are dozens from the Second C-c-c-company. The minister was breaking off the ID tags. Death tags. Some horses were killed in a blast. And lots of boys from the utilities staff. But one of the wounded guys k-k-k-kept screaming, over and over, “Forgive me… Forgive me.” He k-k-k-kept saying it again and again, muttering ugly things in between.’

Lehto turned away from Riitaoja in disgust, but the others looked at him indulgently. His childishness was disarming.

‘What kinds of ugly things?’ Rahikainen asked.

‘I wouldn’t dare to say.’

‘If a dying guy can say it, why can’t you?’

‘Jesus fucking C-c-c-c-christ, go to fucking hell.’

Riitaoja flushed with embarrassment as soon as the words left his mouth, but Rahikainen just shrugged nonchalantly, ‘Probably figured if he was headed south it’d be nice to have some company.’

‘You shouldn’t talk that way. The medics were almost c-c-c-crying.’

‘Crying’s not gonna help anybody round here. Better just man up and push on like hell. It’s pretty rough when horses are getting popped off, the ground’s shaking, and fences are all being torn down.’

At that, Mielonen arrived, yelling, ‘Everybody rrready!’

‘Ready for what?’

‘To move out, to move out.’

‘Move out where? Where are we going?’

‘To attack, to attack. Where do you think? Back home?’

‘No, goddamn it! Is this the only battalion in the Finnish army?’

‘It’s not our turn.’

‘We’ve done our share. Let the other guys go. What about the reserve regiments, the ones that were all along the roadside?’

‘I don’t command the rrregiments. I’m just a miserable corporal. But these are the orders from up top.’

‘That Major must be looking for a promotion. Goddamn giraffe. I bet he asked if we could take the lead again.’

Hietanen was as irritated as any of them, but his position as deputy platoon leader obliged him to try to help out one way or another. He hadn’t thought about what to say at all, but a keen instinct brought the words right to his lips. He turned the whole thing into a kind of game, knowing that would be the quickest way out. ‘Prepare to die on behalf of your home, your faith and your homeland! Packs on your backs, men! “ Once more the Finnish bear lives on, he lifts his claw and strikes. ”’