Hietanen was not fond of having people fret over his soul. He personally had never been too concerned about what kind of shape it was in. Somehow or other it seemed to him that since the government had sent him out here, it would probably look after him if he died and make sure its fallen soldier’s sins weren’t taken too strictly into account. The government had ministers to straighten things out with God, after all. Hietanen’s discretion and debt of gratitude prevented him from letting Mäkilä see any of his irritation, however. So he said solemnly, ‘Yee-eah… Don’t have to tell me. Folks definitely get to thinking about that stuff when things get rough. When the lead’s really coming down. But people are funny, soon as it’s over, they just start singing all kinds of things and swearing like sailors. But hey, look, I gotta run. And thanks again, thanks a ton!’
Hietanen tossed the herring into his mouth as he left. He didn’t have the heart to chew it, so he just gulped down the sad little runt Mäkilä had enlisted to save his soul.
The section departed as soon as they’d eaten. Lammio remained out of sight, managing things with Koskela via Mielonen, who acted as go-between. As far as Koskela was concerned, the whole spat was forgotten. He tossed his pack onto his back with his usual nonchalance and said, ‘Well, onwards, huh?’
Vanhala put on a Savo dialect – which cracked him up and which he did not refrain from using frequently – and commanded himself, ‘Rrrrrrifles over your shoulder and forward, march!’
He heaved his gun over his shoulder in accordance with his own command and started off, grinning to himself. The others’ glumness at having to depart prevented them from enjoying his antics, though.
Their spirits had reached a new low. Out in front of them there was a dugout and a trench. Other than that, life was pretty unremarkable. Things had been very quiet leading up to the spring. In April they had put down a significant enemy attack, though admittedly it had looked like a pretty close call at one point. The enemy had cut in deep from the side, but finally they managed to push them back and hold on to their critical bridgehead on the south side of the Svir.
The arrival of summer did brighten their spirits somewhat. Even Koskela looked into the dense forests running beside the log road and thought, ‘Wouldn’t the cows have a field day here?’
Sturdy grass had emerged from the damp soil. It was warm. It made you want to just sit on the grass and let the sun shine on you.
The men marched behind Koskela in silence. Only their heads bobbed slightly whenever a boom sounded out in front of them.
‘Headed for Mount Million,’ somebody said. ‘Bet those fellows’re making a run for their foxholes.’
Rokka glanced around. Nothing but solemn faces and steady shoulders swinging in unison. ‘What’s troublin’ you fellas? I was thinkin’ I might clear the air with a lil’ singin’. I’ve tried just ’bout everythin’, see, but makin’ up a song’s sumpin’ I ain’t never tried my hand at yet. Whadda ya say, fellas?’
Rokka’s shoulders began to sway as he improvised, ‘Mmbada go we gadda go we gadda go…’
Vanhala scuttled over to Rokka as if he were a magnet. ‘If you have a heart within you, gay or weary, come join into Singing Finland’s Song, heehee!’
Hietanen perked up as well. ‘Hey, guys! I know. Let’s make a kinda rat-trap that’ll catch ’em alive. We can write some whoppers on scraps of paper and stick ’em round the rats’ necks and set ’em loose. Then when the guys from the next dugout meet up with ’em, they can listen to what the little monsters have to say by reading the tags.’
‘Hang on, boys, I got it!’ Rahikainen said. ‘There’s that guy from Salmi in the Second Company knows Russian. If we have him write in Russian, then we can send the letters ’cross the way.’
‘Let’s make ’em good and dirty, heeheehee.’
‘Yeah, yeah. They’ll be able to see us just round this bend. Let’s turn off into the forest.’
Chapter Eleven
Their bunker was situated beside a small, alder-covered hill. On the other side of the hill, there curved a trench leading to a machine-gun nest at either end. On the left, the trench continued on into a shallow communication trench connecting to the neighboring stronghold. On the right, the land dropped off into a soggy ditch, beyond which you could make out more positions. A bit further off the terrain rose, and there sat Mount Million and Mini-Million, the ‘advanced posts from hell’, the latter of which was worse. They were perched on a treeless hill, which came under enemy fire from three directions, because the line turned sharply to the right just behind the hill. The spot generated plenty of bad news, even during quiet periods. Each unit had to man it for two weeks at a time, so the hill was like an almanac by which the whole sector kept time: ‘So and so many weeks ’til it’s our turn.’
In front of the position lay a swamp, and beyond the swamp, the ‘Devil’s Mound’, complete with mud-log enemy gun-nests. The Finns had taken the hill twice, but holding it proved to require constant, heavy fighting, so they had ceded it back both times. Only the low ridge extending from the bottom of the hill had been held, and indeed that was where both of their advanced positions were now situated. It didn’t make much difference anyway, whether the line wandered this way or that at any given point, as the thing looked like it had been drawn by a nitwit to begin with. And, of course, it had been – drawn by the feuding egos of two states, both of whom had decided, ‘From here we will not retreat’.
They had squabbled over these hillsides in the autumn of 1941, tired of it, and then abandoned the mess just as it was on both sides. The positions were littered with the remains of Siberian soldiers. No one had bothered to bury them over the winter, and by the springtime nobody could bring himself to. By this time they had dried out and turned white. Nothing but hollow sockets peered from beneath their helmets.
Koskela’s platoon had reinforced their bunker with beams scrounged from a neighboring town’s tshasovna, one of those Karelian Orthodox chapels, so they didn’t have any of the bedbugs that plagued the bunkers reinforced with timber scrounged from people’s houses. It was Koskela who had seen to this, further enhancing his reputation amongst his men. ‘Son of a bitch thinks of everything.’
A masonry oven made of round stones sat between the door and the window. Bunk beds lined the walls. Koskela’s solitary bed lay below the window. The men had insisted it go there, though Koskela would have been just as content to sleep in a regular bunk. And once again, the trivial proceedings revealed a curious fact. While the men in other platoons begrudgingly addressed their officers as ‘sir’, turning the show of respect into a mockery, Koskela’s men sought to make everything a little bit better for him than it was for themselves.
The steady monotony of the positional war brought out Koskela’s quiet, solitary side even more than before. He would lie on his bed staring at the ceiling, and might remain there for hours at a time without saying a word. He had taken it upon himself to do rounds on fire-watch, half out of a sense of duty, half out of a hankering for the solitude of the night shift. He enjoyed pitter-pattering around by himself in the quiet night. His favorite task was trapping rats. He would lie motionless for a long time, holding the wire trap open beside a rat-hole, and as soon as some meddling rat would cautiously step inside, he’d pull the snare shut. Then his solitary face would light up with a wide grin as he dangled the squeaking rat before his eyes, whispering, ‘Well, whatta ya know! Hullo, gramps!’