The Winter Warriors, page 17
After which, less experienced than his adversary and vanquished by the cold, the Russian stood up. The bullet hit him in the side of the head, even though Simo had aimed lower down.
There were still some hours of daylight left, and Simo looked for the next cross on the map open in front of him.
*
Simo reached the outskirts of the camp, leaving the cover of the trees and calling out the day’s password. After warming himself and eating, he handed the map to Juutilainen, who was watching him silently. Two red crosses had been circled: two fewer Russian snipers. Many more crosses had been added, each of them showing the position of the bodies of Finnish soldiers to be recovered. A copy was traced and given to the lieutenants commanding the 4th and 5th companies so that one of their teams could go and find them at night. That way the Finns could continue proudly to say that the White Army never left anyone behind.
That might seem audacious or suicidal, or even ridiculous, but the respect the Finns showed for their dead was enough to keep them from the abyss. At the bottom of it, madness lay in wait, and monsters howled for them to come and join them. And those monsters had their own faces. The soldiers were only one step away from plunging into the void. Each day they came a little closer; and each day the irrepressible desire to go over the edge grew. It was as if they were enchanted. To kill would become a habit, and with their souls finally condemned, anything would be permitted.
As night fell, the camp took precautions. It was no surprise when the Russian artillery began its hammering, and Simo slept a while. There were more crosses on the map.
*
In the other camp, they whispered about the ghost. That was what some of the Russians called him; others had different names. There was even more talk of him that night as they stood in the interminable lines for food. Two of their best snipers had been shot in one day.
“Borodin confided in me,” one of the soldiers said. “They call him the White Death.”
The whisper spread along the line like a shiver through a body. Belaya Smert … Belaya Smert …
“He made a unit of 200 men retreat all by himself,” another soldier said. “A bullet in the heart of the very first soldier. Then another in the heart of the next one. Another and another. By the eighth, unable to tell where death was coming from, the whole unit turned back.”
“They say six of ours were found around a fire. All six of them killed before any of them had time to pick up their weapon.”
“They say he lives in the trees and leaps from branch to branch. That’s why no-one can ever spot him.”
The poisonous rumour, growing each time it was repeated, spread from campfire to campfire, from tent to tent, until eventually it reached that of Grigory Shtern, the colonel now commanding the Soviet 8th Army.
*
Shtern had the square face, plump cheeks and amiable look of a well-fed trader. But nobody in the army was fooled by his affable appearance, and when he thumped his fist on the table, his officers turned pale.
“You don’t kill a rumour, still less a ghost,” he snarled. “I want this Belaya Smert nailed to a tree, slaughtered like a pig. With his guts round his feet, everyone will see he is nothing more than a man.”
“If he is tracking down our snipers, perhaps we should change their positions?”
The colonel thought about it. The idea was simple, obvious and appealing, but Shtern was not so concerned about protecting his marksmen as wanting to see the ghost’s white sheet gashed by a thousand holes.
He had a different idea, one that amounted to using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
46
Simo never knew he had fired at a dead body.
In this part of the forest, the level ground came suddenly to an end, leaving only a jumble of flat granite boulders among which he found a hollow big enough for him to lie flat.
A hundred metres away, the Russian was more or less on a spot marked by a cross on Simo’s map. He was standing motionless as every marksman should, hidden behind the broad trunk of a pine tree, his long rifle barrel covered in white gauze resting on a branch to avoid fatigue. When the bullet struck him in the middle of the chest, he did not budge an inch. The projectile did not even go through his frozen body.
Simo had hit his target, but in doing so had revealed his own position. And the sledgehammer descended on the nut. Dark silhouettes began to move everywhere. With a terrible roar, a barrage of mortar bombs rose into the sky. The trap was closing around him. Concealed under white camouflage, five rapid-fire anti-tank rifles spat continuously in his direction.
Simo’s stone refuge became a tomb as the shells hit the granite, shattered it into a thousand deadly fragments. All he could do was to flee. He ran from the rocky outcrop into the heart of the forest, bullets whistling round his head, ricocheting off rocks with a loud hissing noise, or tearing chunks off trees in a cloud of sawdust that smelled of burnt wood. In front of him, an explosion uprooted a tree, which cracked mournfully as it toppled. The tangled earth-covered roots formed what looked like a big crown. Simo gathered his breath under it for a moment, fists clenched, eyes closed. His parents’ farm. His forest. Rautjärvi, his village. Toivo and the others …
Today, as at every second since the start of this war, he should have died. His parents’ farm. His forest. Rautjärvi, his village. Toivo and the others … With them, or for them, he found the courage to take a leap onwards. He had gone a few metres when the blast from a shell lifted him in the air and pounded him against a tree. His rucksack softened the blow, but he blacked out for a moment. When he came to, he was face down in the snow. All around him, the detonations sent earth and a shower of snow into the sky. Simo plunged through this protective curtain and disappeared.
*
The Russian soldiers searched the forest for almost an hour.
“No-one can survive that,” their officer swore at them incredulously.
Seeing dark clouds looming in his future if he returned to camp empty-handed, without a corpse to present, the officer shouted:
“Carry on searching! Find him, for fuck’s sake!”
They had attacked a man on his own with mortars and anti-tank rifles. They had attacked a man on his own with the same firepower as if they were facing a whole army unit, and yet around them found only a wounded forest, its trees splintered by their assault.
“Belaya Smert …” the soldiers whispered to one another.
*
The noise of the storm unleashed on Simo had been heard as far away as the Finnish camp. Juutilainen had laughed, repeating to everyone: “Listen to the Russkis applauding Simo!”
Now, as if confronted by an incomprehensible phenomenon, Toivo was searching in vain for the slightest tear, the slightest hole in his friend’s snowsuit.
“They tried their best to kill you,” an astonished Onni said, “but you look as though you’re returning from a stroll.”
“It seems Death doesn’t want anything to do with you,” Toivo said.
“No, I think Death is happy with things the way they are. She will never have such a willing collaborator, or such a rich harvest. Why get rid of her best employee? Lapatossu will make a good story out of Simo and Death hand in hand!”
Simo still had his rucksack on his back. Onni helped him ease it off, while Toivo bustled him into their tent. They could hardly contain their excitement to tell him the day’s good news. This didn’t happen often, so they had to make the most of it.
“Alright, you tell him!” Onni said impatiently.
Many of the men from the Kollaa front had been despatched to Operation Talvela, and messengers had brought back news of their exploits 24 hours later. Toivo added two more logs to the stove and filled their mugs with coffee before sitting down.
“The Talvela soldiers were quartered ten kilometres upstream from Lake Tolvajärvi, convinced the Russians were still a whole day’s march away. So they made a soup. A soup with sausage, the sort we’re so good at making, heavy and tasty. No sooner was it ready than a sentinel came running. He was in a panic because four Russian reconnaissance patrols were only a few hundred metres off.”
“As you can imagine, none of the Finnish soldiers was prepared,” Onni said, thinking the story was being told too slowly. “So Colonel Talvela gave the order to abandon the camp and withdraw to the shelter of a nearby forest. By the time they had gathered all their gear and left they could already see the first Russian infantry. In the chaos, the Ivans could have easily shot our men in the back. But when they came upon the camp deserted only a few minutes earlier, the soup’s aroma filled their nostrils as if a spell had been cast on them.”
“And nothing else mattered to them,” Toivo butted in, keen to provide the conclusion. “They threw down their packs and weapons and rushed on the mess tins. They even fought one another, they were so starving. They didn’t notice that Talvela had surrounded them. Four hundred lads. All killed. Yeah, all of them. For a bowl of soup …”
*
In the course of the evening, Pietari joined them in the tent. He did not even greet them. He sat apart from the others on the edge of one of the bunks lined with straw and leaves. Simo looked enquiringly at Toivo.
“He’s received a letter,” Toivo said simply.
Pietari, with the jet-black hair almost unknown in Finland, stern features as if hewn from badly chiselled stone, sat with a distraught expression, eyes moist with tears.
He was clutching a letter that was crumpled from being read so often.
Simo sat next to him, their thighs rubbing together.
“My little brother Viktor is on the Mannerheim Line,” Pietari confessed with a sob.
He held out the clumsily written letter he was weeping over. Simo read it slowly. Pietari turned and fell into his arms.
Simo thought his day had been dreadful. But at that moment he realised that in war the worst thing was not to die. In war, the fear of dying is never as bad as the fear of seeing one’s loved ones perish.
47
Isthmus of Karelia, Mannerheim Line
No-one could say Viktor Koskinen was not courageous, pigheadedly so, but he was a dreadful soldier. He often missed his targets – purposely or not, nobody could read inside his head – he struggled to understand military orders and was often embarrassed when presented with a map.
Viktor was the only survivor from his original company, decimated on the first day of the war. The new one he joined lost so many men in such a short time it was disbanded and its soldiers redistributed according to need. So he found himself in a new “new company” which a few days later suffered from the disastrous combination of a heavy blizzard, terrible organisation and faulty radio communications. As a result, the company became separated, and then so lost they began shooting at one another in a slaughter that lasted an entire night. Sixty-two dead. But yet again no bullet claimed Viktor.
And so, despite being such a useless soldier, the Koskinen family’s youngest boy enjoyed extraordinary good luck. Two new incidents reinforced his legend, which would never be mentioned in any history book.
The first was the mine he stepped on, whose mechanism refused to function. That night, to celebrate his lucky star, for the first time in his life Viktor got drunk and spewed his guts up under a magnificent clear sky. Then, one day when they became engaged in hand-to-hand combat, there was the Russian who jumped into his trench and pressed the rifle to Viktor’s forehead, finger on the trigger, only to change his mind, fall on his knees with his hands in the air and beg Viktor to take him prisoner.
As a result of this series of miracles, the others began to touch his shoulder or back whenever they met him. Rabbit’s foot? Four-leafed clover? On the Mannerheim Line, they liked nothing better than to rub Viktor’s uniform or pat his skull twice.
They even swore that Viktor Koskinen could have sat at a table, fill a six-gun with five bullets, spin the drum, press the revolver to his temple and pull the trigger – without anything happening. He could have repeated the gesture a thousand times and despite the odds the hammer would strike the only empty chamber. Yes, Viktor was so lucky that would not have surprised anybody. But even though they never played Russian roulette, the effect the war had on him was not dissimilar. His brain was scrambled, a mass of entangled nerves full of horrors and unbearable images, smells and sounds, cries and sobs. He found it impossible to sleep, and when his eyes occasionally closed from exhaustion he would wake up screaming, chasing the screams he heard in his nightmares. From time to time he was even seen talking to his brother Pietari as he sat in front of a tree or boulder.
For all these reasons, aware that Viktor’s sanity was fracturing, the doctor at the rearguard base had him enlisted on a less stressful mission 200 kilometres from the Mannerheim Line, before his mental defences could give way and he sank into madness.
“What mission?” Viktor had said.
“There are children to be collected and escorted,” the doctor told him. “From Viipuri to Turku, passing through Helsinki, Kotka and Porvoo. And we need men to guard them.”
“But who are these kids? And where are they being sent?”
“I’ve no idea. All I know is that you’ll be away from the Line for a few days.”
This left Viktor with a painfully guilty sensation, like a prisoner facing a firing squad who is pardoned at the last second but abandons his companions facing the cocked rifles.
*
As the Russian bombers approached Helsinki, the air-raid sirens rent the sky as though all of Finland were howling with terror. None of the big cities was safe, and whereas the adults resigned themselves to going to ground in the basements of houses that had been spared or in underground shelters, afraid they might die at any moment, their stomachs in knots, fear clinging to their souls, they could not accept exposing their little ones to the same ordeal.
All over the country, the children had become a problem, because, in war, the fear of dying is never as bad as seeing one’s loved ones perish.
Unconditional love had turned into an unbearable mental burden. The question was no longer how to protect one’s children, but how to separate from them. To guarantee the new generation a future, many families decided they must leave. And Sweden, which had refused to involve itself militarily in the conflict devastating its Finnish neighbour, did offer to receive its sons and daughters.
*
For three days and nights Viktor and 300 other men were tasked with travelling from city to city to put these children on board trains. Often they would cling fast to their parents, desperate not to be parted from them, and the soldiers had forcibly to separate them, like tearing a paper heart in two.
From the platform of the last railway station before Turku, a defaced, partly destroyed hospital was visible. The wing containing supplies had been blown up, and thousands of sheets and white coats had been flung into the air. They came to rest on the branches of pine trees as if heralding some ceremony or other.
The flimsy material billowed in the breeze.
The train began to pull out. Only a few of the strongest or saddest of the children managed to find room at the windows, press their faces up against them, and retain one final image in their memory. Hands raised in farewell, the ranks of mothers smiled, inconsolable.
From the corridor inside the carriages, Viktor reluctantly had to shout to restore order, and the tiny dresses and pairs of trousers obeyed and returned to their seats. Tears were held back behind fingers or beneath pullovers, eyes sought friendship from someone new, a comrade to give them courage. A hand plucked at Viktor’s uniform.
“Why are they abandoning us?”
He sat opposite the child, felt in his pocket for a biscuit, and broke it in two.
Viktor thought: “They’re not abandoning you, they’re saving you. Three million Finns can’t leave their country, so they’re protecting what’s most precious to them, because if I’m honest, not everyone is going to survive.” But obviously he could not tell the boy the truth; the biscuit was better than a lie.
“Here, half for you and half for me.”
Instinctively, the boy smiled as he took his share from the hand held out to him. His half-whispered “thank you” pierced the heart of a man no bullet had ever managed to graze.
*
Hundreds of trains and lorries converged on the port of Turku where the Arcturus was moored. Eighty-eight metres long, and so white it melded with the horizon, the presence of the ship was betrayed only by the black smoke pouring from the huge funnel amidships.
Viktor was carrying the young boy from the train under his arm, the boy’s fingers digging into his skin in their anguish. Alongside him, all round him, 80,000 others made up the biggest evacuation of children in the world. An ocean of bewildered blond heads, eyes brimming with tears. All of them clad in white like the soldiers, camouflaged to avoid being spotted from the sky. Around their necks, a brown cardboard label hung from a cloth ribbon with their name and age written on it. Whether three or thirteen, they felt the same fear at the thought of being sent to a strange country, into strange houses and the arms of strangers, having to deal with a strange language.
“You see that long ladder running up the side of the ship?” Viktor said, trying to reassure the boy. “That’s where you have to climb. And then you’ll cross the Baltic Sea to Sweden.”
“When will I come back?”
“Let me take care of the Russians. As soon as we’ve sent them packing, you’ll be able to return. I promise.”
They heard a young girl sobbing, alone in her white dress and shiny shoes, hair unkempt, nose streaming.
“I think she could really do with a friend like you,” Viktor said, depositing the boy on the ground.
The boy went over to her, read her name on the label, and told her his. By the time he turned round again, the soldier had gone. But the instant he took the little girl’s hand, he grew up, became almost adult.
There were still some hours of daylight left, and Simo looked for the next cross on the map open in front of him.
*
Simo reached the outskirts of the camp, leaving the cover of the trees and calling out the day’s password. After warming himself and eating, he handed the map to Juutilainen, who was watching him silently. Two red crosses had been circled: two fewer Russian snipers. Many more crosses had been added, each of them showing the position of the bodies of Finnish soldiers to be recovered. A copy was traced and given to the lieutenants commanding the 4th and 5th companies so that one of their teams could go and find them at night. That way the Finns could continue proudly to say that the White Army never left anyone behind.
That might seem audacious or suicidal, or even ridiculous, but the respect the Finns showed for their dead was enough to keep them from the abyss. At the bottom of it, madness lay in wait, and monsters howled for them to come and join them. And those monsters had their own faces. The soldiers were only one step away from plunging into the void. Each day they came a little closer; and each day the irrepressible desire to go over the edge grew. It was as if they were enchanted. To kill would become a habit, and with their souls finally condemned, anything would be permitted.
As night fell, the camp took precautions. It was no surprise when the Russian artillery began its hammering, and Simo slept a while. There were more crosses on the map.
*
In the other camp, they whispered about the ghost. That was what some of the Russians called him; others had different names. There was even more talk of him that night as they stood in the interminable lines for food. Two of their best snipers had been shot in one day.
“Borodin confided in me,” one of the soldiers said. “They call him the White Death.”
The whisper spread along the line like a shiver through a body. Belaya Smert … Belaya Smert …
“He made a unit of 200 men retreat all by himself,” another soldier said. “A bullet in the heart of the very first soldier. Then another in the heart of the next one. Another and another. By the eighth, unable to tell where death was coming from, the whole unit turned back.”
“They say six of ours were found around a fire. All six of them killed before any of them had time to pick up their weapon.”
“They say he lives in the trees and leaps from branch to branch. That’s why no-one can ever spot him.”
The poisonous rumour, growing each time it was repeated, spread from campfire to campfire, from tent to tent, until eventually it reached that of Grigory Shtern, the colonel now commanding the Soviet 8th Army.
*
Shtern had the square face, plump cheeks and amiable look of a well-fed trader. But nobody in the army was fooled by his affable appearance, and when he thumped his fist on the table, his officers turned pale.
“You don’t kill a rumour, still less a ghost,” he snarled. “I want this Belaya Smert nailed to a tree, slaughtered like a pig. With his guts round his feet, everyone will see he is nothing more than a man.”
“If he is tracking down our snipers, perhaps we should change their positions?”
The colonel thought about it. The idea was simple, obvious and appealing, but Shtern was not so concerned about protecting his marksmen as wanting to see the ghost’s white sheet gashed by a thousand holes.
He had a different idea, one that amounted to using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
46
Simo never knew he had fired at a dead body.
In this part of the forest, the level ground came suddenly to an end, leaving only a jumble of flat granite boulders among which he found a hollow big enough for him to lie flat.
A hundred metres away, the Russian was more or less on a spot marked by a cross on Simo’s map. He was standing motionless as every marksman should, hidden behind the broad trunk of a pine tree, his long rifle barrel covered in white gauze resting on a branch to avoid fatigue. When the bullet struck him in the middle of the chest, he did not budge an inch. The projectile did not even go through his frozen body.
Simo had hit his target, but in doing so had revealed his own position. And the sledgehammer descended on the nut. Dark silhouettes began to move everywhere. With a terrible roar, a barrage of mortar bombs rose into the sky. The trap was closing around him. Concealed under white camouflage, five rapid-fire anti-tank rifles spat continuously in his direction.
Simo’s stone refuge became a tomb as the shells hit the granite, shattered it into a thousand deadly fragments. All he could do was to flee. He ran from the rocky outcrop into the heart of the forest, bullets whistling round his head, ricocheting off rocks with a loud hissing noise, or tearing chunks off trees in a cloud of sawdust that smelled of burnt wood. In front of him, an explosion uprooted a tree, which cracked mournfully as it toppled. The tangled earth-covered roots formed what looked like a big crown. Simo gathered his breath under it for a moment, fists clenched, eyes closed. His parents’ farm. His forest. Rautjärvi, his village. Toivo and the others …
Today, as at every second since the start of this war, he should have died. His parents’ farm. His forest. Rautjärvi, his village. Toivo and the others … With them, or for them, he found the courage to take a leap onwards. He had gone a few metres when the blast from a shell lifted him in the air and pounded him against a tree. His rucksack softened the blow, but he blacked out for a moment. When he came to, he was face down in the snow. All around him, the detonations sent earth and a shower of snow into the sky. Simo plunged through this protective curtain and disappeared.
*
The Russian soldiers searched the forest for almost an hour.
“No-one can survive that,” their officer swore at them incredulously.
Seeing dark clouds looming in his future if he returned to camp empty-handed, without a corpse to present, the officer shouted:
“Carry on searching! Find him, for fuck’s sake!”
They had attacked a man on his own with mortars and anti-tank rifles. They had attacked a man on his own with the same firepower as if they were facing a whole army unit, and yet around them found only a wounded forest, its trees splintered by their assault.
“Belaya Smert …” the soldiers whispered to one another.
*
The noise of the storm unleashed on Simo had been heard as far away as the Finnish camp. Juutilainen had laughed, repeating to everyone: “Listen to the Russkis applauding Simo!”
Now, as if confronted by an incomprehensible phenomenon, Toivo was searching in vain for the slightest tear, the slightest hole in his friend’s snowsuit.
“They tried their best to kill you,” an astonished Onni said, “but you look as though you’re returning from a stroll.”
“It seems Death doesn’t want anything to do with you,” Toivo said.
“No, I think Death is happy with things the way they are. She will never have such a willing collaborator, or such a rich harvest. Why get rid of her best employee? Lapatossu will make a good story out of Simo and Death hand in hand!”
Simo still had his rucksack on his back. Onni helped him ease it off, while Toivo bustled him into their tent. They could hardly contain their excitement to tell him the day’s good news. This didn’t happen often, so they had to make the most of it.
“Alright, you tell him!” Onni said impatiently.
Many of the men from the Kollaa front had been despatched to Operation Talvela, and messengers had brought back news of their exploits 24 hours later. Toivo added two more logs to the stove and filled their mugs with coffee before sitting down.
“The Talvela soldiers were quartered ten kilometres upstream from Lake Tolvajärvi, convinced the Russians were still a whole day’s march away. So they made a soup. A soup with sausage, the sort we’re so good at making, heavy and tasty. No sooner was it ready than a sentinel came running. He was in a panic because four Russian reconnaissance patrols were only a few hundred metres off.”
“As you can imagine, none of the Finnish soldiers was prepared,” Onni said, thinking the story was being told too slowly. “So Colonel Talvela gave the order to abandon the camp and withdraw to the shelter of a nearby forest. By the time they had gathered all their gear and left they could already see the first Russian infantry. In the chaos, the Ivans could have easily shot our men in the back. But when they came upon the camp deserted only a few minutes earlier, the soup’s aroma filled their nostrils as if a spell had been cast on them.”
“And nothing else mattered to them,” Toivo butted in, keen to provide the conclusion. “They threw down their packs and weapons and rushed on the mess tins. They even fought one another, they were so starving. They didn’t notice that Talvela had surrounded them. Four hundred lads. All killed. Yeah, all of them. For a bowl of soup …”
*
In the course of the evening, Pietari joined them in the tent. He did not even greet them. He sat apart from the others on the edge of one of the bunks lined with straw and leaves. Simo looked enquiringly at Toivo.
“He’s received a letter,” Toivo said simply.
Pietari, with the jet-black hair almost unknown in Finland, stern features as if hewn from badly chiselled stone, sat with a distraught expression, eyes moist with tears.
He was clutching a letter that was crumpled from being read so often.
Simo sat next to him, their thighs rubbing together.
“My little brother Viktor is on the Mannerheim Line,” Pietari confessed with a sob.
He held out the clumsily written letter he was weeping over. Simo read it slowly. Pietari turned and fell into his arms.
Simo thought his day had been dreadful. But at that moment he realised that in war the worst thing was not to die. In war, the fear of dying is never as bad as the fear of seeing one’s loved ones perish.
47
Isthmus of Karelia, Mannerheim Line
No-one could say Viktor Koskinen was not courageous, pigheadedly so, but he was a dreadful soldier. He often missed his targets – purposely or not, nobody could read inside his head – he struggled to understand military orders and was often embarrassed when presented with a map.
Viktor was the only survivor from his original company, decimated on the first day of the war. The new one he joined lost so many men in such a short time it was disbanded and its soldiers redistributed according to need. So he found himself in a new “new company” which a few days later suffered from the disastrous combination of a heavy blizzard, terrible organisation and faulty radio communications. As a result, the company became separated, and then so lost they began shooting at one another in a slaughter that lasted an entire night. Sixty-two dead. But yet again no bullet claimed Viktor.
And so, despite being such a useless soldier, the Koskinen family’s youngest boy enjoyed extraordinary good luck. Two new incidents reinforced his legend, which would never be mentioned in any history book.
The first was the mine he stepped on, whose mechanism refused to function. That night, to celebrate his lucky star, for the first time in his life Viktor got drunk and spewed his guts up under a magnificent clear sky. Then, one day when they became engaged in hand-to-hand combat, there was the Russian who jumped into his trench and pressed the rifle to Viktor’s forehead, finger on the trigger, only to change his mind, fall on his knees with his hands in the air and beg Viktor to take him prisoner.
As a result of this series of miracles, the others began to touch his shoulder or back whenever they met him. Rabbit’s foot? Four-leafed clover? On the Mannerheim Line, they liked nothing better than to rub Viktor’s uniform or pat his skull twice.
They even swore that Viktor Koskinen could have sat at a table, fill a six-gun with five bullets, spin the drum, press the revolver to his temple and pull the trigger – without anything happening. He could have repeated the gesture a thousand times and despite the odds the hammer would strike the only empty chamber. Yes, Viktor was so lucky that would not have surprised anybody. But even though they never played Russian roulette, the effect the war had on him was not dissimilar. His brain was scrambled, a mass of entangled nerves full of horrors and unbearable images, smells and sounds, cries and sobs. He found it impossible to sleep, and when his eyes occasionally closed from exhaustion he would wake up screaming, chasing the screams he heard in his nightmares. From time to time he was even seen talking to his brother Pietari as he sat in front of a tree or boulder.
For all these reasons, aware that Viktor’s sanity was fracturing, the doctor at the rearguard base had him enlisted on a less stressful mission 200 kilometres from the Mannerheim Line, before his mental defences could give way and he sank into madness.
“What mission?” Viktor had said.
“There are children to be collected and escorted,” the doctor told him. “From Viipuri to Turku, passing through Helsinki, Kotka and Porvoo. And we need men to guard them.”
“But who are these kids? And where are they being sent?”
“I’ve no idea. All I know is that you’ll be away from the Line for a few days.”
This left Viktor with a painfully guilty sensation, like a prisoner facing a firing squad who is pardoned at the last second but abandons his companions facing the cocked rifles.
*
As the Russian bombers approached Helsinki, the air-raid sirens rent the sky as though all of Finland were howling with terror. None of the big cities was safe, and whereas the adults resigned themselves to going to ground in the basements of houses that had been spared or in underground shelters, afraid they might die at any moment, their stomachs in knots, fear clinging to their souls, they could not accept exposing their little ones to the same ordeal.
All over the country, the children had become a problem, because, in war, the fear of dying is never as bad as seeing one’s loved ones perish.
Unconditional love had turned into an unbearable mental burden. The question was no longer how to protect one’s children, but how to separate from them. To guarantee the new generation a future, many families decided they must leave. And Sweden, which had refused to involve itself militarily in the conflict devastating its Finnish neighbour, did offer to receive its sons and daughters.
*
For three days and nights Viktor and 300 other men were tasked with travelling from city to city to put these children on board trains. Often they would cling fast to their parents, desperate not to be parted from them, and the soldiers had forcibly to separate them, like tearing a paper heart in two.
From the platform of the last railway station before Turku, a defaced, partly destroyed hospital was visible. The wing containing supplies had been blown up, and thousands of sheets and white coats had been flung into the air. They came to rest on the branches of pine trees as if heralding some ceremony or other.
The flimsy material billowed in the breeze.
The train began to pull out. Only a few of the strongest or saddest of the children managed to find room at the windows, press their faces up against them, and retain one final image in their memory. Hands raised in farewell, the ranks of mothers smiled, inconsolable.
From the corridor inside the carriages, Viktor reluctantly had to shout to restore order, and the tiny dresses and pairs of trousers obeyed and returned to their seats. Tears were held back behind fingers or beneath pullovers, eyes sought friendship from someone new, a comrade to give them courage. A hand plucked at Viktor’s uniform.
“Why are they abandoning us?”
He sat opposite the child, felt in his pocket for a biscuit, and broke it in two.
Viktor thought: “They’re not abandoning you, they’re saving you. Three million Finns can’t leave their country, so they’re protecting what’s most precious to them, because if I’m honest, not everyone is going to survive.” But obviously he could not tell the boy the truth; the biscuit was better than a lie.
“Here, half for you and half for me.”
Instinctively, the boy smiled as he took his share from the hand held out to him. His half-whispered “thank you” pierced the heart of a man no bullet had ever managed to graze.
*
Hundreds of trains and lorries converged on the port of Turku where the Arcturus was moored. Eighty-eight metres long, and so white it melded with the horizon, the presence of the ship was betrayed only by the black smoke pouring from the huge funnel amidships.
Viktor was carrying the young boy from the train under his arm, the boy’s fingers digging into his skin in their anguish. Alongside him, all round him, 80,000 others made up the biggest evacuation of children in the world. An ocean of bewildered blond heads, eyes brimming with tears. All of them clad in white like the soldiers, camouflaged to avoid being spotted from the sky. Around their necks, a brown cardboard label hung from a cloth ribbon with their name and age written on it. Whether three or thirteen, they felt the same fear at the thought of being sent to a strange country, into strange houses and the arms of strangers, having to deal with a strange language.
“You see that long ladder running up the side of the ship?” Viktor said, trying to reassure the boy. “That’s where you have to climb. And then you’ll cross the Baltic Sea to Sweden.”
“When will I come back?”
“Let me take care of the Russians. As soon as we’ve sent them packing, you’ll be able to return. I promise.”
They heard a young girl sobbing, alone in her white dress and shiny shoes, hair unkempt, nose streaming.
“I think she could really do with a friend like you,” Viktor said, depositing the boy on the ground.
The boy went over to her, read her name on the label, and told her his. By the time he turned round again, the soldier had gone. But the instant he took the little girl’s hand, he grew up, became almost adult.
