The winter warriors, p.2
The Winter Warriors, page 2
“I hope there was a Ryssä spy there today,”2 Toivo said.
“They’re everywhere, even under our beds,” Onni said.
“Then he’ll have seen you, Simo, and he’ll tell his friends how good we are with a weapon in our hands.”
There were shouts of “Huraa”, and Toivo shook Simo by the shoulders, even though his friend was abashed at being the centre of attention. To embarrass him further, the others began to cry “Simo! Simo!” as the trophy was returned to its place between his legs. It swayed to and fro as they drove along the bumpy roads back to their village on the Russian border. Despite the discomfort, many of them fell asleep, heads resting on their neighbour’s shoulder.
Toivo, who was still wide awake, whispered: “My cousin in the army came to visit. He said their headquarters had forbidden all officers to take leave until further notice. He also said we’re going back to the defensive lines on the border, to strengthen them.”
“Again? We did that only last summer!” Onni protested. “Haven’t the Russians asked us to abandon them?”
“And if they ask you to abandon your wife, will you do it?”
“I hope they at least give me time to marry her! But ask me again in a few years, and perhaps I’ll go myself and dump her in Moscow!”
*
At nightfall, the Rautjärvi team jumped down from the truck in the middle of their village, saying goodbye to one another as they reached their homes. Eventually only Simo and Toivo were left.
From first light the next morning, at an hour when only peasants are out of bed, the Finns would return to their fields and farms. Men and women, foreheads bathed in sweat, were building a country that was prospering. Even though there were still some well-off families and rich individuals, there were few who allowed themselves the kind of bourgeois lifestyle found in wealthier countries. Finland had only been independent a little more than 20 years, and everything was still to be done.
This meant the only leisure activity for young peasants and workers was the Civic Guard. In town and country, they were taught the history of Finland, and how to defend it. They were taught the ideal of the patriotic Finnish male, with a virile body and educated mind. But perhaps above all, enrolling in the Civic Guard gave these youngsters the chance to broaden their minds and travel round the country on military exercises or for rifle competitions.
In a country desiring only peace, they were also taught the art of war, and both in the village and their Civic Guard regiment, Toivo and Simo were united by an unbreakable bond.
“See you when I see you, and the sooner the better,” Toivo said, taking Simo’s hand.
Simo repeated the same, and the friends parted.
Simo Häyhä in the Finnish Civil Guard, c.1922
3
Before it was plunged into terror, nature had chosen to pamper Finland with the most beautiful summer. The hay had grown in leaps and bounds; harvests had been abundant. The sun shone by day and the rain fell at night, without ever getting in each other’s way.
Toivo was with his cousin, a career military man. They were sitting in the shade of a big rock, gorging on the red and black bilberries and whortleberries. Lips still stained, his cousin lit a cigarette and they shared it, gazing out over the fields of barley awaiting the autumn harvest. There were rumours circulating in the countryside, at the mill where wheat was taken to be ground, at the market stalls and in factories. Rumours of a possible war. Some believed them. Others thought war was unthinkable. Toivo could not make up his mind, and was hoping his cousin could clarify matters.
“Finland has never been a threat to Russia. So why would Stalin be so scared he would threaten to invade us?”
“He couldn’t care less about our pitchforks,” his cousin assured him, in a cloud of cigarette smoke. “It’s the Third Reich that keeps him awake at night. If Hitler wants to attack Leningrad, he’ll only have to march from Berlin through the neutral countries – Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland – sweep down our coast, cross the isthmus of Karelia, and Nazi Germany will be in Russian territory without having fired a shot. Stalin isn’t afraid of Finland; he’s afraid that Finland will do nothing if Hitler invades us.”
He spat out a strand of tobacco sticking to his lip before passing the cigarette to Toivo. He went on:
“Why do you reckon Stalin is asking us to hand over entire regions and allow him to station his troops on our territory? Making war outside his own country is far easier, if you ask me. Our government is about to mobilise all professional soldiers, the reservists and the civic guardsmen, in order to reinforce our defences on the Russian border. We’ll be told it’s a special military operation, nothing more than an exercise to test our readiness. It reminds me of those animals that farmers fatten up. They must think we’re very kind to feed them so well, until their throats are cut.”
“Do you really think they’d prepare us for war without telling us?”
“What I really think is that if Finland and Russia come to blows, it won’t have much to do with our side. Everything will come from Moscow. I also think you and your friends should make the most of the end of summer, Toivo.”
4
The Kremlin, Moscow
Woken in the middle of the night, the colonel was now in the Kremlin’s Great Palace, sitting stiffly in his dress uniform on a carved gilded chair in a corridor as long and wide as a street, lined with white columns beneath a painted ceiling with a row of chandeliers that could hold as many as a thousand candles.
Sitting there, his face crumpled, and with maps rolled up on his thigh, the colonel had been roused from sleep by fists thumping on his door.
“I have no idea,” he told his worried wife.
For two years, Stalin had embarked on a massacre in his own country. His insistence on Western conspiracies and internal betrayals, fed by his acute paranoia, had led him to despatch more than ten million of his fellow countrymen to the gulags, and to kill a million more with a bullet to the back of the head. It was a period of history that would forever be known as the Great Purge.
Consequently, however many awards or medals one had, there was always great trepidation when you were summoned in the early hours to the Kremlin.
“Go to your sister’s,” he told his wife, kissing her hands. “I’ll find you there.”
An hour later and the colonel was none the wiser. As he felt for his fob watch in his inside pocket, a poorly fixed medal came loose from his chest and clattered to the floor. The metallic echo reverberated down the immense corridor, making him feel yet more alone and tiny, despite his rank.
A door opened in the distance. The guard took a whole minute to reach him, approaching steadily, heels clacking on the polished wooden parquet.
Invited to follow the man, the colonel hastily gathered his things under his arm and strode after him. He noticed a clock above the huge double doors that closed behind the guard, leaving him once more on his own in a meeting room into which a school or a theatre could have fitted, and across it a table where two weddings could have been celebrated.
The colonel heard the voice of Vyacheslav Molotov, the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, long before he saw him enter the room.
“Colonel Tikhomirov, thank you for coming.”
Wearing a pair of small oval spectacles, with a round, amiable-looking face and well-trimmed moustache, Molotov sat down at one end of the table. Tikhomirov still had no idea why he had been summoned. Congratulations for his unswerving loyalty? Not at this time of night. A bullet to the head? In those years, a rumour could condemn you as surely as a cancer, but why call him to the Kremlin when the deed could be done in a discreet alleyway or out in the countryside?
“Are we expecting more people?” the colonel asked, uneasy at being all alone.
“No. And this meeting must never be referred to. I need six men for a mission of the utmost importance. A driver, a gunner and four soldiers. Only nine of us will know about this operation. You, me, the six men you choose, and Comrade Stalin, of course.”
No congratulations then. No execution either. Tikhomirov felt jubilantly alive, and promised himself to find the time to watch the sunrise.
Still standing to attention, the colonel assured Molotov: “I’ll find you the very best among our elite men.”
“No, that will not be necessary. Have you ever visited the gulag at Belomorkanal?”
Before the colonel could envisage this question as a threat, Molotov said:
“Don’t worry. I’m sending you there because that’s where your mission begins. If Finland continues to refuse our demands to annex territory, they will have to declare war on us.”
“War? Against us?” Tikhomirov was astonished. “I don’t think they have the means. Or any wish to do so. It would be suicidal, to say the least. Why would they contemplate so rash an act?”
“Because we’re going to force them to,” Molotov said with a smile.
5
Finnish National Defence Council,
21 Korkeavuorenkatu, Helsinki
As chairman of the Finnish National Defence Council, Carl Gustaf Mannerheim cut an improbable figure. In his seventies, tall and rangy with a prominent moustache and a lively, penetrating gaze, he looked more like a dandy or a Conan Doyle private detective.
Having married the daughter of a general to advance his career, he had been a wretched husband until their divorce, but his two daughters made a good father out of him. A loving, protective father. Escaping a Finland that had the same opinion of homosexual women as much of the rest of Europe, Anastasia had settled in Paris, her sister Sophie in London. In these capital cities that they hoped were more enlightened, they could live and love freely. And it was to the Parisian Anastasia, living far from the threats looming over her native country, and to her alone, that Mannerheim could confess his despondency.
I am going to tender my resignation to the President once more, as nobody seems willing to listen to me. And if they won’t listen, they should at least understand Stalin’s demands. If he wants part of our country, a port or a military base, if he wants to station soldiers on our territory to guard against the rise of the Third Reich and his fears over an Adolfus who is marching across Europe, let him have his way! I was a soldier of the Tsar when Finland still belonged to Russia, and know how determined they are. I know them better than they do themselves. We ought to give way a little so as not to lose everything. Because here we are in the middle: innocent, vulnerable, busily preparing for the Olympic Games – the place for noble competition, as our President constantly reminds us. But competition is not war, and I’ve never seen any nobility in war. Not to heed Stalin’s demands is unwise. Not to foresee his anger is a huge blunder. Yes, we’re stuck in the middle between Eagle and Bear, protected by our neutrality, but that’s a very weak shield. We seem to think the storm will pass without us getting wet. Ragnarök is on its way, I can feel it. And if our future means war, we’re not ready for it, of that I’m sure.
Mannerheim read this through, massaging the hand crushed many years earlier by an old nag weighing half a ton, an accident that meant he was forced to write in a curious manner, his fingers holding the pen like a pair of sugar tongs.
Surrounding this perplexed head of the Finnish armed forces, scarcely leaving room for the few paintings hanging from the walls, 7,000 volumes of books on history and geography were stacked in a library too heavy ever to be moved. Carl Gustaf Mannerheim knew that the decisions his government was about to take would write the history of his country in the pages of the national novel that would one day find its way into this very library. His name would appear there. It remained to be seen what would be said of him, and what Finland would be remembered for – if it still existed, that is.
He signed the letter “Gustaf”, as he did all his personal correspondence. He was laying down his pen when the office door opened: it was Aksel Airo, a former cadet at Saint-Cyr military academy in France. His most trusted assistant.
“Is the Ghost ready?” the field marshal said, picking up his baton.
6
Aksel Airo made Mannerheim wait by the side of the 1915 Rolls Royce Silver Ghost convertible, the field marshal’s official car. A shiny black and powerful panther, with leather seats and walnut trim, two gigantic headlights and a streamlined body, the car would make even the most timid of drivers look impressive.
In front of them, an officer was checking that the sub-machine guns in the boot were loaded, while another was peering underneath the chassis to make sure there was no bomb.
“Is this really necessary?” Mannerheim said impatiently.
“Cars have been blown up.”
“You listen to the radio too much, my friend.”
“You’re protecting Finland. Let me protect you.”
“I’m protecting Finland,” the field marshal repeated to himself. “That’s amusing. Don’t tell anyone, but I have absolutely no idea how to get us out of this mess.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“If we give way to Stalin by offering him territory, I’m afraid he’ll only want more. And then make the whole of Finland as Russian as it was hitherto.”
“That’s why you are also preparing the country for war.”
“A war we will be certain to lose. So if we give way we will lose; if we fight, we will perish.”
For weeks now Mannerheim had been living with two radically opposed states of mind: a diplomat searching for peace; a military leader preparing for a deadly conflict. He was both at the same time. Airo took a seat next to him in the now inspected Rolls Royce.
“While we’re still negotiating, I don’t think there’ll be any warlike move,” Airo said. “Stalin would never dare to fire the first shot, especially on an independent country.”
“Ukraine, too, wanted its independence. And he starved it. Four million dead can testify to that. Are you sure your reading of the situation is correct? I don’t know how he’ll do it, but if Stalin wants to move against Finland, he’ll find an excuse.”
On its way to the Esplanadi quays where they had a meeting with the president in his palace, the Rolls Royce did not go unnoticed: Mannerheim and Airo in the rear, and in front of them, next to the driver, their escort, who kept a tight hold of the loaded gun on his lap. Mannerheim searched in his jacket pocket.
“Here are two letters and some money. One for Paris, the other for London.”
“Money? But you sent your daughters some only last week,” said an astonished Aksel.
“The future looks grim. I prefer to be prepared.”
“So you really believe there will be a war?”
Mannerheim believed it so strongly it kept him awake at night. And whether you worried about the ambitions of a greater Russia or feared an attack by the Nazis, Finland was caught in the middle.
“That would be a catastrophe,” Mannerheim admitted. “If the negotiations fail, we’ll exhaust all our wealth on the battlefield. The day will come when we’ll be forced to ask married couples to melt down their wedding rings to recover the gold and silver.”
Hearing this, Aksel Airo instinctively twisted the gold ring on his finger. He thought of his wife Wilhelmina and his two daughters, Aila and Anja. Debate with words, beat with fists. Once the very last words had been uttered, the last hopes for peace exhausted, that would leave only weapons. Both at the front and in the rearguard, nobody in Finland would be safe any more.
“I am sure we can still avoid it,” Airo said, to reassure himself.
“What do you think I spend my days and nights trying to do?”
“I know, Field Marshal. I do the same.”
The Silver Ghost came to a halt, but nobody got out.
“Are you ready?”
The future of Finland was at stake in this meeting.
“I’m too old to shilly-shally. Either the president allows me to mobilise my soldiers, or I resign.”
7
The president had listened, and Mannerheim had not resigned. And so as the field marshal had envisaged, a general mobilisation for defensive purposes had been ordered. And yet not even Mannerheim liked the idea. It left a bitter taste, and was a cruel, underhand strategy. But he accepted he would not be able to hold his head up high if it came to war.
“Make a company of soldiers out of the sons of the same village, then on the battlefield there will be brothers, friends, neighbours, so that they will have what they must defend before their eyes. It will not be people they do not know dying next to them, it will not be strangers whose lives they will want to save. They will have no choice but to fight, because who would dare to desert when his brother is calling for help?”
*
Like blood coursing through the veins, emissaries travelled along every road in Finland. On horseback, in cars, on bikes, on foot and by boat. No farm was ignored, even if it was surrounded by lakes or marshes. No reservist or able-bodied member of the Civic Guard was spared.
Pietari, with the jet-black hair that was almost unknown in Finland, heard the spluttering old car even before he saw it. He closed the door to his little red-painted farmhouse with its white-framed windows, rolled the grass stalk he was chewing to the corner of his mouth, and folded his arms determinedly.
“Pietari Koskinen?” the visitor said, rummaging in his bulging satchel as he jumped out of his vehicle.
“You know who I am. We’ve met in the Civic Guard,” Pietari said as gruffly as if he was telling a stranger to get off his land.
The messenger did not come any closer, warned not only by Pietari’s coal-black hair but also by his face as angular as a badly knapped flint and thin, razor-sharp lips that looked as if they never broadened into a smile.
