DEAD MAN’S LAND

WHAT the Finns thought of the six foreign journalists laden down with sleeping-bags, knapsacks and typewriters, who jumped off the train at every stop and bolted into the station restaurants to gulp down cups of hot coffee, I never discovered. We all knew the Finnish word for coffee—kahvi, that was easy; and we could all count up to four because it sounded like: “Ooxie, coxie, call me, nellie.” Beyond that we had to rely on gestures or go behind the counter and help ourselves.

When at last we reached a rather primitive hotel in the small town of Kajaani, the proprietress looked at us in bewilderment, as though we were part of a travelling circus. Soon, I think she decided a lunatic asylum was more likely, for during the next forty-eight hours her telephone rang with calls from New York, Amsterdam and Copenhagen, and everybody sat up all night typing out endless stories. Besides Harold Denny and myself, there were Walter Kerr of the Herald Tribune; Edward Ward of the B.B.C.; Desmond Tighe of Reuter’s; and Ebbe Munck, a Danish journalist.

Kajaani served as G.H.Q. for the Central Command. There in the slender waistline of Finland, some of the fiercest battles of the war were taking place. During the previous seven weeks, over a hundred thousand Russian troops had crossed the frontier, in repeated attempts to cut Finland in two. But the Finns had repulsed the onslaughts with some of the most spectacular fighting in history; they had annihilated entire divisions and hurled back others thirty and forty miles to the border from where they started.

To understand how they did it, you must picture a country of thick snow-covered forests and ice-bound roads. You must visualize heavily-armed ski patrols sliding like ghosts through the woods; creeping behind the enemy lines and cutting their communications until entire battalions were isolated, then falling on them in furious surprise attacks. In this part of Finland skis outmanœuvred tanks, sleds competed with lorries, and knives even challenged rifles.

The evening we arrived in Kajaani we dined with General Tuompo, the brilliant fifty-year-old ex-journalist general, who had only begun his military career ten or twelve years previously and who, before the Finnish war was over, took a toll of nearly eighty-five thousand Russian lives. He arranged for us to visit a front-line position on the Russian-Finnish frontier, where we saw the patrols at work and had our first taste of Soviet artillery fire. We started off with the idea of, perhaps, accompanying one of the Finnish border patrols on a quick jaunt into Russia and back. Not that any of us imagined the frozen Russian landscape would prove interesting, but we all thought it would be fun to step into the Soviet Union without the formality of getting a visa.

Accompanied by a Finnish army lieutenant, we left at four o’clock in the morning, hoping to arrive at the front before dawn. But the roads were so slippery our car skidded into the ditch three times, delaying us considerably; it gave us a small idea of what the mechanized Russian units were up against. We approached the village of Suomussalmi just as dawn was breaking, and here I witnessed the most ghastly spectacle I have ever seen.

It was in this sector that the Finns, a few weeks previously, had annihilated two Russian divisions of approximately 30,000 men. The road along which we drove was still littered with frozen Russian corpses, and the forests on either side had become known as “Dead Man’s Land”. Perhaps it was the beauty of the morning that made the terrible Russian débâcle all the more ghastly when we came upon it. The rising sun had drenched the snow-covered forests, their trees like lace valentines, with a strange pink light that seemed to glow for miles. The landscape was marred only by the charred framework of a house; then an overturned truck and two battered tanks. Then we turned a bend in the road and came upon the full horror of the scene. For four miles the road and forests were strewn with the bodies of men and horses; with wrecked tanks, field kitchens, trucks, gun-carriages, maps, books, and articles of clothing. The corpses were frozen as hard as petrified wood and the colour of the skin was mahogany. Some of the bodies were piled on top of each other like a heap of rubbish, covered only by a merciful blanket of snow; others were sprawled against the trees in grotesque attitudes.

All were frozen in the positions in which they had died. I saw one with his hands clasped to a wound in his stomach; another struggling to open the collar of his coat; and a third pathetically clasping a cheap landscape drawing, done in bright, childish colours, which had probably been a prized possession that he had tried to save when he fled into the woods. They were everywhere, hundreds and hundreds of grotesque wooden corpses; in the ditches, under the trees, and even in dugouts beneath the snow where they had tried to escape from the fury of the attack. I learned, with a shock, that they had been members of the 44th Division—the same division that just a year ago I had seen swinging along the country roads in the Ukraine.

What these troops must have suffered in the cold was not difficult to imagine. They were wearing only ordinary knitted hoods with steel helmets over them, and none of them had gloves on. This was accounted for by the fact that the Russians didn’t wear “trigger finger” mittens as the Finns did; they wore only ordinary mittens which they had to take off to fire their rifles. And how they must have suffered from hunger; the horses had even eaten the bark off the trees.

I was staggered by the amount of equipment they had brought with them. Although the Finns had hauled away all the usable stuff, the ditches were still full of battered lorries, machine-guns, bayonets, helmets—even an amphibian tank which seemed pretty useless in a country of frozen lakes. Our Finnish officer told us that for at least a week after the battle it was impossible to drive down the road at all. As it was, our chauffeur had to thread his way along the four-mile stretch slowly. Near the end of it, we passed a group of Finnish boys playing in the roadside, curiously prodding the corpses. They had taken one of the bodies and stuck it head down in the snow; all we could see was two brown stems with boots at the end. I was very nearly ill.

About an hour later we reached our destination. A sentry in a white cloak stepped out of the forest into the roadway and motioned us to stop. The car was backed into a clearing between the trees, and as we followed our guide through the twisting paths the woods suddenly became alive with stalwart Finnish soldiers, only their black rifles visible against the snow, moving noiselessly in and out among the trees.

The major’s hut was built of logs, half underground, and covered with snow. The camouflage was so clever the only way we knew we had arrived was by the skis stacked up against the trees. We crawled in the shelter, which had two beds in it, a long desk covered with maps, and a small stove that kept the temperature at thirty degrees. The major, a strapping man with a red face, greeted us in halting English and told us breakfast was ready; he motioned us to a table laden with coffee, bread and butter, reindeer meat, cheese and pickled fish. A few minutes later we were interrupted by the whine of an engine, which broke into a loud roar as a plane passed only a few hundred feet above our heads. The major said the Russian planes patrolled the forests for several hours each day and often did a considerable amount of machine-gunning. “That’s what we want—planes.” Then he asked us if we thought the outside world would send any to Finland and searched our faces eagerly for our replies. “If only,” he murmured, “those kind old ladies in America who send us comforts could knit us some aeroplanes and crochet us some anti-tank guns.”

When we asked him if there was any possibility of our sneaking across the frontier into Russia, he smiled and said he would send us up to the observation-post, where we could have a look at the situation, and if we still wanted to go it was ours for the asking. He then detailed a captain to look after us.

The captain’s hut was some distance away; it was made of beaverboard built around the trunk of a tree so that the smoke from the stove would be diffused by the thick branches. The captain was a gay fellow who showed us with great relish the huge Russian samovar he had captured in the Suomussalmi battle. He also had a pair of field-glasses he had taken from a Russian officer, but his most prized possession was a machine-gun from a Russian tank. He said every time a plane went by he took a pot-shot at it; adding that it wasn’t exactly his business, but with the gun so handy it was difficult to resist.

The captain led us through the woods to the observation-post. It was some distance away and we were accompanied by a ski patrol of eight men equipped with rifles and wicked-looking machine pistols. They slipped in and out through the trees like wraiths, managing their skis with astonishing agility. One moment they slipped behind the trees and we thought they were lost; a few seconds later they were on the path in front of us.

The observation-post was just a shallow pit dug in the snow; in it there was an observer with a pair of field-glasses and a telephone. But we did not need glasses to see the Soviet Union. Only three hundred yards away across an icebound lake lay the frozen landscape of Russia.