Määttä was smoking his cigarette in long, slow drags. There was no mistaking his words. They sensed that instinctively. His wasn’t just the usual talking big while backs were turned. What they couldn’t understand was where this sudden defiance had appeared from. In truth, the matter was simple: this quiet guy, whose reticence tended to relegate him to the fringes of things, had realized that he could stand his ground just as well as anybody else when the chips were down. Death had failed to impress him – and there’s nothing worse than that.
‘My flipper’s feelin’ pretty heavy, too,’ Rahikainen chimed in.
The morning sun was hot. The men were glum and worn out. Can’t the Third Battalion advance?… We’re gonna have to open the road again ourselves… of course we are… no news there.
Booms began echoing from the enemy side. They dragged themselves up to a seated position and listened. The rumbling lasted three, four, five seconds, and then: hoo-ee!
The first shell crashed down on the roadside just in front of them. ‘Get down!’ The order was pointless, as every one of them was already trembling in a ditch somewhere on the side of the road. All thoughts were banished and their heads pounded as they waited for their worst fears to be realized. The ground shook and blasts of air kept pressing their clothes against their bodies. Shrapnel whirred through the air, dropping to the ground with rocks and clods of earth. It lasted scarcely two minutes. When the echo of the last explosion had died away, a frantic scream pierced the silence. ‘Stretchers! Bring the stretchers! Medics!’
Two medics came running from behind, carrying a stretcher. Somebody was lying on the road bank out in front of them trying to get up. ‘Aargh… yeow… help me…’
A couple of men were kneeling beside the wounded. ‘Shh, shh, stop crying, stop crying,’ they kept repeating frantically. The man’s scream was so gut-wrenching that they lost their heads entirely and couldn’t even manage to help him. His shoulders were badly torn up. The medics started binding his wounds, struggling against the man’s frenzied thrashing. He tried to yank himself upright and yelled, ‘Help… shoot me, somebody! Ah… ow… you goddamn pansies! Somebody shoot, damn it!’
‘Ylitalo’s dead.’ A pale-faced man was coming toward them from further down the road, holding his bleeding arm. ‘Could you guys bandage this?’
The overwrought medics were in a panic. One was struggling to keep the wounded guy from thrashing about, while the other was trying to bandage him as best he could. Their words came rushing out all at once. ‘How – we can’t do everything all at once! Where the hell is the head medic? Scaredy-cat son-of-a-bitch is hiding and we’re supposed to be all over the goddamn place.’
The man sat down on the bank of the road. A resolute expression fell over his pale face as he said, ‘Stop whining like a two-year-old, for fuck’s sake. I can wrap this myself. Ylitalo over there in that ditch’s got half his brains blown out.’
The air was still thick with smoke and dust. ‘Scatter!’ Kariluoto yelled. ‘Don’t bunch up all together!’ His face was pale, but a resolute gleam lit up his eyes. In the brunt of the attack, he had lifted his head, just to test himself – and it had risen easily. He felt the same victorious feeling wash over him that he had felt after the previous day’s attack. It didn’t have the same wild abandon this time, though, as Ylitalo was one of his men, as were both of the wounded.
Lahtinen crawled out of his ditch. ‘To the Urals, huh, boys? Well, by all means, why don’t you strike up the band!’
‘You know that chorus even in your sleep, don’t you?’ Hietanen was irritated. ‘Of all the goddamn lies. Sure, just listen to a shell to hear if it’s coming close. Hell of a whopper that is! Biggest goddamn lie I ever heard. It doesn’t make any noise at all. Nothing! Just thwamp! when it blows up on the side of the road. Pre-tty curious if you ask me. They said out on the Western Front you could hear ’em in time to get down. Well, I’ll tell you straight out that those guys have never heard a shell over there if that’s the case. Maybe they’ve got something else.’
Määttä took a drag on his cigarette. ‘The thing’s gonna blow up just the same whether it makes a noise or not.’
Lammio arrived. ‘Scatter! Did you not hear the command?’
‘Oh, shut the fuck up, asshole,’ Rahikainen muttered from his ditch. Just then the enemy artillery started rumbling again and a thump shook the ground as the men dived for cover. Lammio hadn’t moved a muscle. Neither had Koskela, who was still sitting perfectly still. ‘They’re over us, guys.’
Lehto, Määttä and Hietanen pulled themselves together quickly. The bombs whistled overhead and exploded far behind them.
‘Whistling bad news for our artillery battery,’ somebody observed.
Lammio stood on the road and screeched, ‘All of you men had better start believing what you are told. That round could just as easily have struck here.’
His lack of fear made the men hate him all the more, depriving them as it did of the opportunity to despise him. Rahikainen even whispered again, ‘Quit whining, you little bugger.’
Riitaoja was still lying in his ditch, face pressed to the ground. He was like a terrified child. Lucky for him, ambition did not figure amongst his concerns. Neither did any conception of ‘homeland’, so he was at liberty to be just as terrified as he liked.
‘Why don’t you make some more noise?’ Sihvonen muttered. ‘Holler and wave your arms around, why don’t you? That way those binoculars over in that observation tower’ll spot you right away and be sure to shoot all our guts out. And we’ll just stand here like a bull’s-eye. That’s right. Nothing but goddamn blockheads running this show.’
The injured guy had fallen unconscious. Two medics drenched in sweat carried him back on the stretcher. The fellow with the injured arm had refused to let the medic bandage his wound after he’d finished with the other man, snarling angrily, ‘Gi-git…’
‘Hey, hey,’ the nervous medic said. ‘I popped out about twenty years ago and I’m not goin’ back in… Look, bandage it yourself, if you like. It’s not like I want to.’
The man walked off, waving his good arm and calling out, ‘So long, boys! This fellow here is headed home on leave.’ He was happy. Not only because of the leave, but also because he knew that later that night, somebody in a tent would say, ‘Tough son-of-a-bitch, that Rantanen guy. Whew! My God!’
‘Move out!’
They got up. They practically marched on one other’s heels they were so eager to get away. Ylitalo’s head was covered, but some liquid from his canned pork was dripping from his bread sack, as a shard of shrapnel had punctured his emergency rations as well.
‘Enemy directly ahead, behind a barricade about three hundred yards out. Two armed bunkers reported back there, at least. Artillery opens fire for five minutes. Mortars join two minutes after that. H-hour is at 10.48.’ Kariluoto kept his voice low.
The men listened, looking at the barricade visible between the trees. It ran along a rather steep slope and stretched for tens of yards. They couldn’t see any barbed wire, though. Reconnaissance missions carried out earlier had determined that there were several machine-gun nests in dugouts behind the barricade. Two fell in the sector assigned to Kariluoto’s platoon.
A scout about a dozen yards out in front of them whispered hoarsely, ‘Movement behind the barricade. Shall I give it a shot?’
‘Absolutely not. Everyone still.’
Off to the right, the artillery observer was speaking into his radio. ‘Esa speaking. Esa here. Masa, do you read me? Masa, do you read me? Over, over.’
The artillery observer’s low voice sounded as if it were reciting a strange incantation. The men’s anxiety mounted, as his call meant that all hell was about to break loose. The forest was damp with morning dew and humming with the buzzing of mosquitoes. The spiderwebs hanging in the low blueberry bushes clung to their hands unpleasantly as blood pounded through their wrists. Squad leaders whispered final instructions. The men tightened their belts and put their cartridges into their pockets where they’d be easy to reach.