Another thud came from the forest. Masking his fear in an artificially raspy voice, the guard called out, ‘Password!’
No password came, but the supply guys emerged from the tent in their underwear.
‘What’s over there?’
‘I don’t know. Something made a noise.’
‘Must be birds rustling around.’
Rahikainen had already pulled the soup vat into the bushes and left the men to wonder over the cause of the mysterious noises. He returned to their previous meeting point to wait for Rokka, who arrived promptly.
‘How’d it go?’
‘Take a look!’
‘Aw, shit, that’s swell! All we gotta do now is screw the top on and we’re all set.’
Rokka tossed the vat over his shoulder and off they went. Their tent was pitched in a little clearing in the forest, and some of the guys were lying around it. The two men stopped before they’d left the cover of the trees. Rahikainen gave a low whistle.
‘C’mon out! Coast’s clear.’
Rokka and Rahikainen’s arrival aroused lively interest. Everybody gathered around the tent, except the guy on guard. Shouts of joy burst forth as the men spotted the vat. They crowded around it, touched it and inspected its interior. Vanhala stuck his head inside and let out a yodel. ‘Ba-aaha-aahha-aa!!’
He must have enjoyed the sound of the echo, judging from the massive grin spread across his face when he removed his head.
The first section was ‘standing down’, in other words, laying a road. The company had organized their time off the line by section, and each rest period lasted one week, during which time the guys on their break would stay back somewhere by the supply crew and lay a log road extending toward the front line. It was the first day of Koskela’s section’s turn, and they had decided a long while back that when their next break came, they would make home brew. The lack of a vessel was their only concern, and since they knew there was no use in asking Mäkilä for such a thing, they had decided to steal it. Koskela had agreed to the plan, seeing as he could hardly use his position to pressure Mäkilä, under the circumstances. And anyway, even Koskela’s authority would hardly have induced Mäkilä to surrender his pot for such nefarious purposes.
Määttä and Vanhala went to fill the pot with water. Then they added a bowl of boiling water to it. Rokka took the helm, while Koskela tossed in brief, occasional words of advice. First, Rokka poured in the sugar they had collectively saved, followed by the precious yeast obtained through many tricky twists and turns. Finally, in went the pieces of bread each man had saved from his rations.
Then they screwed the lid shut and shoved the vat into a corner of the tent, covering it in coats and backpacks. The joy of anticipation gleamed in all of their eyes. Vanhala put his ear to the side of the vat. ‘Hissing already. The oppressed are rising to power in there.’
‘But we can’t just leave it sitting in here alone,’ Hietanen pointed out. ‘Somebody’s gotta stand guard. Mäkilä might suspect we took it and come and inspect the tent.’
Koskela looked like he was thinking. ‘Nobody’s really allowed to just hang around here. But doesn’t anybody have some kind of injury? Maybe somebody could go to the aid station and ask for sick leave.’
‘I got a sore throat!’ Rahikainen broke in, but Koskela replied, ‘No. It’s gotta be somebody legit, somebody they’re not going to question. Salo, you got any kind of injury you could go complain about? Wouldn’t occur to anybody to suspect you of trying to get off.’
‘I do have a sore on my foot. But it’s almost dry already.’ Salo was very flattered, taking Koskela’s selection as a straightforward compliment and missing its insulting insinuation entirely.
Salo removed his boot when Koskela ordered him to show him the wound. ‘Scratch it a little. And in the morning before we set off, rub it so it gets all red. Then go ask for first aid, really earnestly.’
‘Tell ’em like this,’ Rokka instructed, ‘tell ’em it ain’t that it hurts so much, it’s just that it rubs when you put on’nat boot, see. And tell ’em that it’s been that way for a long time, but it don’t git any better so long as you have to keep movin’ it all’a time.’
The next morning Salo went to the aid station and obtained his sick leave, though only for three days. But now that this precious wound had attracted the attention of the whole section, it got so much worse that after three days Salo really did limp to the aid station and easily obtained three more days’ leave. So he was able to guard the vat, whose absence had caused a great hubbub amongst the supply crew. Even Mäkilä wouldn’t have thought to suspect that it was Koskela’s men who had taken it, mostly because it would never have dawned on him what they would do with such a vessel. Otherwise he would certainly have linked the coincidence of the vat’s disappearance with Rahikainen’s movements near the kitchen around the same time and drawn the obvious conclusions.
The life of the entire section began to revolve around the vat of home brew. When the men returned from laying the road, they hurried directly to the vat. They listened to it and tapped gently on its sides, and when they forgot about it for a moment, somebody would ask, ‘What’s hissing over there under the packs?’
‘Bubba’s in there.’
For some reason the jug of home brew had acquired the name ‘Bubba’.
‘Seems like things’ve been quiet an awfully long time. Be a damn shame if we got called up before he was done. We’d have to drink him as is.’
‘That won’t happen here. They need all the boys they got down in Crimea and Kharkov.’
‘What have the Fritzis got brewing down there, anyway?’
‘Let ’em brew whatever they want. All we’re worried about here is what’s brewin’ in Bubba.’
‘In my town, we had this one old guy, this Heikki Vastamäki, who cursed like a sailor. And one time the minister stopped in to ask for something to drink, and this Heikki, he pulls the blanket off his keg and says, “Beer brews like a bastard and grain floats like shit, but why the hell is a pastor here askin’ for it?”’
‘And once, in our town—’
‘But I was saying—’
‘Or then this one time—’
The low rumble of fire echoed from the line, ersatz coffee bubbled over the campfire and, in the corner of the tent, the home brew was hissing away.
June 4th, 1942, was a glorious summer day. The Marshal was celebrating his seventy-fifth birthday, and the event consumed the whole of public life. For those in the army, the day was remarkable because it brought with it one bottle of liquor for every five men: ‘cut cognac’ it was called.
‘But just one thing. When we start getting sloshed, we can’t make a racket. So if anybody in the group starts looking for a fight, we all take him down together, OK? What do we do to him?’
‘Butter his balls in rifle grease.’
‘OK.’
‘OK.’
‘Sh’we get things rolling with Mannerheim’s liquor?’
‘Cut cognac, heeheehee! What do you think you cut cognac with?’
Hietanen measured out the drinks into field cups, and when everybody had some, they took a group swig. Hietanen raised his cup and said, ‘So, hey, cheers! To our good luck! Better dedicate the first one to Lady Luck for sparing us so long.’
Cups turned bottoms-up and the bliss of the celebratory drinks settled over the men.
‘C’mon, that’s nothing, let’s have Bubba!’
‘What are they gonna say tomorrow when they find out where the soup vat’s been?’
‘Bah! Don’t worry about tomorrow!’