Hietanen turned with affected solemnity toward Lahtinen, as if demanding his opinion. Lahtinen responded bitingly, ‘The German model, that’s what it means. And above all, it means that that nutcase has lost the one smidgin of sense he had. Wasn’t much to begin with, but now even that’s gone.’
‘Laundry. Heehee… Our boys are taking a break from the fighting to wash their shirts. Our forest warriors demonstrate the diverse range of their capabilities…’ Vanhala chuckled, then suddenly went stiff and said, ‘Guys.’
They all looked in the direction he was facing and saw one of the big trucks stop on the main road to let Lehto, Määttä and Rahikainen jump off.
‘Oh Jesus! Now they’re in for it!’ Hietanen said and began waving his arms to get their attention. He couldn’t yell, but he waved and gestured to try to alert them to the danger, whispering over and over again, ‘Guys, go! Go to the other side! Go through the woods! No, not straight ahead into the wolf’s mouth… you bumbling idiots… oh, for Chrissakes… biggest goddamn idiots in tarnation!’
The trio realized their danger too late. In the past they had always driven a way beyond the camp and then made their way back through the forest, but habit had made them careless, and now here they were, standing before Lammio with cardboard boxes under their arms.
Lammio paused for dramatic effect and then asked, ‘On whose authority were you riding in that vehicle?’
‘Our authority,’ Lehto replied. Seeing as there was no saving them now, he figured it didn’t really matter what anybody said and decided to be his usual surly self.
‘What is in those boxes? Show me.’
Nobody made a move to open the boxes, and only when he realized that the others weren’t going to say anything did Rahikainen venture, ‘Oh! Well, these here are some crackers and, uh… jelly.’
‘Tell me where you stole them from!’
With a look of pure innocence, Rahikainen shifted his feet and started to explain, as if it were the most natural thing in the world, ‘Oh, we haven’t stolen any of this! Some of the guys at the field storehouse back there by the roadside are from my home town, and they just gave us this stuff. We didn’t steal it.’
‘You’re lying. Furthermore, you have no right to take more than your allotted rations from the government’s food supply. Do you pretend you were not aware that those men had no right to give you provisions?’
Rahikainen kept playing dumb. ‘Oh, I guess that could be – that they didn’t have any right to do it. I don’t know anythin’ about their management. When they offered us stuff we hadn’t even asked for, I just assumed they knew what they were doin’.’
‘Don’t start giving me excuses. Are you really so stupid as to think I would fall for that kind of… And Lehto, am I to believe that even you were unaware that absence without official leave during a march is prohibited?’
‘Nah. I knew.’
‘The insolence! You all think very highly of yourselves. Do you know what would happen if I were to hand your case over to the court martial? You’d be stripped of your ranks and sent out to hoe swampland. How would you feel about that?’
‘Doesn’t seem like it’s worth a lieutenant’s time to ask my opinion. Seems like a lieutenant ought be able to figure out something like that all by himself.’ Lehto was in a mood – such a mood that he would have happily turned himself over to be hacked to pieces rather than humble himself before Lammio. Lammio’s tone of voice and condescending self-importance rankled him to the depths of his soul, and from that moment on, Lehto hated Lammio with a dark and unrelenting hatred. He had regarded him with cold disdain before, but now, as he clenched his teeth, it was only Lammio’s complete inability to understand anybody that protected him from perceiving what had transpired.
‘What are you saying?’ Lammio was on the verge of screaming, but then he remembered that his ideal officer would never do such a thing – he would be cool, meticulous, comme il faut – so he put on his most official voice and called out, ‘Ensign Koskela!’
‘Yee-up.’ Koskela emerged from the tent, and Lammio started dictating in a voice that insinuated to Koskela as to everyone else that he was a bad officer, incapable of maintaining discipline in his platoon. ‘Punishment for Corporal Lehto and Privates Määttä and Rahikainen issued as follows: twenty-four hours in close confinement. The punishment is modified under the circumstances into two hours’ standing at attention with full machine-gun equipment and field packs, fully loaded – to be carried out upon the start of the next hour. Offence: unwarranted absence from march formation, misappropriation of provisions, and, for Lehto, inappropriate conduct toward a superior. Do I make myself clear?’
‘Yeah, sure.’ Koskela crawled back into the tent. Undeterred, Lammio continued shouting after him, ‘The stolen foodstuffs are to be turned over to Mäkilä, to be handled in the provisions unit of the First Battalion.’
Lammio took his leave and the three delinquents slunk into their tent. Lehto threw himself on the ground and said darkly, ‘So the way it’s going to go is, I’m not standing.’
Koskela looked pained. He stood for a long time clearing his throat and finally said, ‘Yeah, uh, I don’t want to get mixed up in this thing, but it would be simplest if you guys could just do it.’
‘I’m not afraid of a little snot like him… Let ’em pin me to the wall if they want.’ Lehto clenched his teeth. ‘For a moment there we were pretty close to putting him in the hospital and me in the clink.’
Koskela rummaged around in his pack. ‘Right, well, this isn’t really about fear at all. It’s just the path of least resistance, I mean.’
‘Well, I can stand for a couple of hours, but I’m not putting anything in my pack. And I’m just saying that if that snotty little jackass doesn’t keep his distance, he’s gonna get it in the jaw and then what will be will be.’
‘I don’t care about the pack. Just that you have it on.’ Koskela seemed to relax a bit. Then he said, ‘But the stuff has to go to Mäkilä.’
‘You don’t mean we’re gonna have to give it all back!’ Rahikainen exclaimed. ‘If he was stupid enough not to check how much is in here, we can just put some in the boxes and eat the rest. I held my breath half an hour waiting to make a dash for these, and the duty guard nearly took a crack at me. I’m not gonna stand there for two hours for nothin’.’
So that was how they did it. They sent about a third of the food to Mäkilä and divvied up the rest. Koskela turned a blind eye to the proceedings, but refrained from taking his share. When they stepped out of the tent for a moment, Lehto turned to the others and said, ‘If it didn’t put Koskela in such a fix, I wouldn’t stand for two hours. Let ’em put a gun to my head, I still wouldn’t do it. Huh huh. Let ’em send six hundred strong! What are they going to do?’
The Master Sergeant doled out their pay. The men gathered around card games accordingly, as the pay was more than usual this time, having just been raised to the new scale. The three delinquents received their money first so that they could hurry off to take their punishment. This punishment gave Korsumäki a good laugh, and he smiled contentedly as he told the boys, ‘Well, at least you’ll hang on to your dough two hours longer than usual.’
The company secretary recorded the payments in his ledger. He was carefully groomed and combed, looking just as much the dandy as he had back in the burnt clearing. Rahikainen looked at him for a moment, thinking, and then took out Lieutenant Braskanov’s nail file and started buffing up his nails.
‘Nifty little gadget. But who’s got the time to file his nails out here? I’d trade this for a pack of cigarettes, if anybody needs a nail file.’