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… Ladies and Gentlemen… 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.
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 laughingly 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.