‘Those are our boys,’ an officer said, watching the planes speed off into the horizon. ‘Shielding our army from attack… I bet our neighbors over there aren’t celebrating now the way they were in the Winter War.’
The men no longer cared about the Winter War, however – any more than they cared about this one. Their feet were covered in pus-filled blisters and they were exhausted and irritated, trudging on with little thought of anything going on around them. The first day they’d been buoyed up by some sort of delight in the fact of advancing. But the strain of the march had sapped their spirits quickly.
This army had a style all its own. It’s possible that other armies of the world resembled it while in flight or retreat, but certainly not at any other time. In this army, it was all the same – advance or retreat. They lumbered along in a disjointed herd. The companies would assemble in rows in the morning when they set out for the day’s march, but within the first hour they would drift into smaller groups, plodding along as they pleased, requesting no instructions and ignoring any that might be on offer. Rifles dangled and swung from side to side. One guy tiptoed barefoot through the grass beside the road, his boots slung over his shoulder and the hems of his long johns dragging through the dirt. Another guy was bare-chested, sunbathing as he walked, carrying all his gear bundled up under his arm. The first day, one fellow carried a mildewy suitcase over his shoulder, dangling from the end of a pole. The suitcase contained items scrounged from various houses: a glass jar and a worn-out pair of women’s shoes (never know when you might need ’em!).
By the second day, however, the suitcase had already flown, literally, by the wayside, which had become the receptacle of even essential belongings. The gas masks were rounded up, as too many of them would have been tossed aside otherwise. The men scrounged for food wherever they got so much as a whiff of it. One village had had a pig kolkhoz, whose livestock were now running free in the hills, the collective farm having been disbanded. A light machine gun, it turns out, is very effective in a pig-hunt, but only the companies marching in front had a chance to take advantage of the bounty, as the pigs were quickly rounded up and taken to safety.
Some of the villages had been inhabited. Arbors framed their alleyways, and ornaments made out of moss and stone popped up here and there.
‘What’s with all the decorations?’
‘They must have had some kind of harvest festival. I’ve heard folk dancing is really popular around here.’
‘All kinds of trumped-up shit out there in this world.’
Their bitterness let fly at every possible pretext. Trucks drove by transporting laughing officers and Lottas. A comet tail of staff, canteens, laundries, field hospitals, and everything else trailed after the troops. The men jeered at the vehicles as they passed, hurling such obscene expletives at Finland’s proud Lottas that the overexcited auntie Lottas back in the local parish would have died of a collective heart attack had they been within earshot. The passing general’s car provoked such a virulent spate of swearing that an onlooker would have thought the army only about a day away from all-out mutiny.
‘Sure, just spray that dust in the infantry’s eyes, asshole! Funny how the gas shortage doesn’t matter a shit when the boss feels like taking his field whore out for a spin. Who the hell is whistling over there? Shut up! We got our hands full enough over here without you hissing on top of everything else.’
Village after village slipped by. Columns of men cut across Karelia, streaming down every road to Lake Ladoga. Dust clouds rose underfoot, blending into the blue smoke of countless forest fires, and the sun glowed red and hot through the haze. Somewhere, further off, where shoe soles weren’t pocked with holes and collarbones weren’t chafed raw beneath carrying straps, exultation was at its height: Finland was marching forward.
Lehto, Määttä and Rahikainen did not march. They disappeared from the ranks each morning and reappeared at the camp each night from somewhere further down the convoy. They didn’t offer much of an explanation as to where they’d spent their time, but anybody could guess, even without an explanation. Each night they brought something to eat, however, and when they shared it with the others like good Christians, no one pressed the issue of their apparently effortless march.
One evening Rahikainen was more chipper than usual. ‘Lehto over there’s got butter and flour in his pack. Anybody for hotcakes?’
‘For real?’
‘Show ’em.’
‘Good Lord! Guys!’
‘Quick, boys, get the campfire going!’
Their exhaustion was forgotten. They fried up the pancakes in a mess tin and devoured them in the quiet, summer twilight. The sun was sinking in a red globe behind the forests of the Karelian borderlands and a dusky haze softened the contours of the landscape.
‘Don’t wolf them down all at once! Those didn’t come cheap. I had to trade eight times before I managed to get my hands on ’em. I had a bottle of booze at one point and I didn’t even drink it.’
‘You’d have drunk it if I’d have let you,’ Lehto said, establishing who was to thank for the outing’s results, which the whole platoon was now enjoying.
The march started up again.
‘OK. Better get going again, huh?’ Koskela rose and tossed his pack over his shoulder. Grunting and cursing, the men slowly got up out of the ditch where they’d been lying with their feet propped up on a muddy bank. Using their rifles as walking sticks, they hobbled along the first couple of steps until their legs could handle bolder strides.
Koskela seemed to be immune to fatigue. His shoulders swung steadily in front of his men, mile after mile. ‘Train yourself to walk properly,’ he had instructed them. ‘Don’t get all tense and rigid. You should have a kind of loose, easy step, like a tramp. That lax, sort of vagabond walk saves the most energy. Your leg has to move from the hip.’
Vanhala’s gait was stiff, but despite his stiffness and his chubbiness he withstood the marching and exhaustion pretty well. And his good spirits never flagged, not even for a moment, despite the prevailing atmosphere of annoyance. His eyes had a smile in them that was ready for anything. Once he looked as if he had suddenly remembered something. Then he gazed around for a long time, looking at all the men marching, and finally he burst into an explosion of giggles, shouting, ‘Suhnas on the March!’
A few angry glares silenced him, but he continued chuckling with pleasure at his own joke. He looked at the men shuffling along – faces grimy and covered in dust, expressions dour, caps and shirts dangling from gun barrels, trouser-legs hanging down over the tops of their boots.
‘Suhnas March off to War!’ he giggled to himself, tickled at the startling discrepancy between the high, overblown patriotism surrounding the Finnish soldier and his actual existence. The Information Bureau pamphlets, amongst other things, provided Vanhala with an endless source of amusement. By now he had amassed a stockpile of official terminology from whatever pamphlets had fallen into his hands: ‘our boys’, ‘our deep-forest warriors’, ‘our fearless fighters’, ‘the blazing will of the nation’s defense’. He would toss in these sayings now and again, whenever an opportunity presented itself, though he had to restrain himself somewhat during the marches, as there was a limit to what the men would tolerate.
Riitaoja marched at the very back of the group, silent but childishly happy that they weren’t under fire. He would gladly have marched from eternity to eternity and withstood the strain of endless marching rather than hear those angry squeals whistling in his ears, announcing death in search of its prey.