Three hundred yards later, the battalion ran up against formidable enemy forces and took up its defensive positions. A massive tank rumbled into view from round a bend in the road, followed by a second. Under cover of the two vehicles, a sizeable fleet of infantrymen were gathering in groups, preparing to attack.
‘Dig.’
‘With what? Our fingernails?’
‘What’d you guys do with your shovels? Well, now you’ll see what you get for lightening your load. You might be best to head back to Koirinoja to find yours, Aromäki. I think that’s about where I saw it flying by the wayside.’
The company’s shovel strength tended to vary greatly. It would gradually increase during periods of heavy fighting, since the men scrounged equipment from dead enemy soldiers, but even a short break or slightly longer march would prompt them to send their shovels flying by the wayside. There were at least a few shovels left, however, and they were already in heavy use. The men without tried to dig themselves some kind of shelter using anything they had, which, in some cases, was indeed their bare fingernails. Self-delusion can always rise to the occasion, when called upon. They positioned themselves behind small rises in the terrain, set some rotting tree branches on top, and built up the structure with a few chunks of moss. A bullet could sail straight through even a thick tree trunk, it’s true, but this shelter was really more for the soul than the body. A man felt a little more secure behind it.
The men were actually fairly calm and decisive. There was a sort of irrevocability about the situation that brought it about. Since there was no escaping the fix they were in, deciding how one felt about it was rather a straightforward matter.
Kariluoto and his platoon would defend the main road. The first and second machine-gun teams from Koskela’s platoon would join them, setting up one on either side of the road. Kariluoto crawled down the line. His own chest felt hollow, but he urged the other men on nevertheless. ‘Remember guys, nobody leaves his hole. Everyone stays put. No matter what.’
One of their own mortars shot off a pathetic barrage of their precious grenades. First, the men cursed its ineffectiveness, then the fact that it had been launched at all – for no sooner had it than the enemy started preparing to attack in what seemed to the men like an act of revenge for a few measly shells. When the first boom rang out in front of them, and the first grenades crashed down behind them, the men gave frightened, furious shouts of ‘Motherfuckers! Now you’ve done it. See what that gets us!’
Shells crashed down behind them, the majority of them, luckily, having been launched too long. When the crashing died down, they began to catch glimpses of men in brown uniforms darting between the trees, and then, resonating over a terrifyingly broad expanse, there came a long, hair-raising cry of ‘Uraa… aaa… raaa… aaaaaaaa!!’
And then it started. A constant, unbroken clamor dulled the men’s hearing. It was as if they were drunk on the rat-a-tat-tat of these endless, clattering waves that echoed endlessly through the air. In their midst, voices rose and fell, bellowing, ‘Uraaaaaa uraaaa… aaaaa… aaaaa!!!’
The enemy tanks started to advance. They were evidently aware that the anti-tank equipment had failed to reach the enemy troops flanking them in the dense forest, as they drove boldly up to the point where the Finnish sappers had mined the road, emptying their ammunition supply as if they were on a firing range.
Panicked cries came from the line. ‘Anti-tank rifle! Get the anti-tank rifle!’
The men with the anti-tank rifle crawled closer, making their way down the long ditch that ran beside the main road. On the other side, the ensign who had mined the road tried to yell over the shooting, ‘It won’t work! Hey! Guys! The rifle won’t work on those tanks. They’re KVs…’
The men couldn’t understand anything the Ensign was yelling and kept advancing. Three of them advanced with the rifle while the rest held further back down in the ditch. The anti-tank rifle managed to fire off two inconsequential rounds. Then, like the judging eye of God, the tank’s main gun turned toward them. When the shot was fired, the men and the rifle disappeared into a cloud of smoke. As the cloud dispersed, three dismembered bodies came into view, a bent, upturned gun barrel sticking up between them.
Cries of panic rang out from the line. ‘Get the short-range weapons!… Hey, satchel charges!… We gotta hit ’em up close…’
They knew that as soon as the tank commander conquered his fear and turned boldly off the road to advance alongside it, they would be done for.
Already the enemy infantrymen were less than a hundred yards off. A hunched man would suddenly appear out of the blue, darting into view for a moment before disappearing under cover again, or else falling mid-dash. The firing line’s barrels were hot from shooting. Silent, dazed from the tension and the clanging, the men loaded and shot, loaded and shot, and each time a hand grabbed a cartridge from a pocket, a panicked mind writhed with the thought, ‘Is that all I have left…?’
Here and there voices screamed, ‘Mediiics…’ and some guy shooting would notice that the weapon beside him had gone silent, then turn to see his neighbor lying still, his head sunk over the butt of his gun. But the man’s attention would not rest there long. The noise of their own shooting prevented them from hearing anything else, so they didn’t realize that the same clamor was underway in both the Second and Third Battalions’ sectors. Nor had they exactly managed to keep track of what going on around them. With blanched, strained faces and hoarse voices screaming out warnings and commands, they fought, literally, for their lives.
The enemy forces were clearly piling up as they edged ever closer. Gradually, the fighting settled into a shoot-out. But both tanks were rumbling back and forth along the road as their opponents watched, hearts frozen in fear, waiting for them to turn off into the forest.
Hietanen was lying behind a rock on the left side of the road. Rahikainen lay a little way to his right, Rokka having taken all the other men from the machine gun off to join the firing line. There was a patch of juniper trees situated about a hundred yards in front of Hietanen, and he could glimpse some sort of frantic movement inside it. He suspected they were dragging a machine gun in there, and soon a crackling filled his ears, confirming this suspicion.
When the hail of bullets came down around them, Rahikainen ducked his head behind the rock and fired away, aiming his gun almost directly upwards. The senseless squandering of ammunition infuriated Hietanen, who, tense with anxiety over the situation, exploded, ‘Aim, damn it! Don’t shoot into the clouds! That juniper patch over there is crawling with men!’
Rahikainen shot, but his head stayed just where it was behind the rock. In Hietanen, as in many brave men, fear expressed itself in the form of a restless will to action, in light of which Rahikainen’s hiding appeared all the more despicable. Hietanen was perfectly aware that destruction awaited them if they failed to stop the attack, as the enemy would have no trouble whatsoever steamrolling over a scattered mass of men. This fear threw him into a rage and he exploded, cursing, ‘Jesus Christ! Stop wasting cartridges! They’re not falling from the sky, you know!’
Rahikainen could feel his old aversion toward Hietanen surging up in him. He had hardly forgotten Hietanen’s words beside Lehto’s body, even if circumstances had now thrust them down another road. ‘Don’t you order me around, pal. Commander, my ass.’