WE were the only civilians on a troop train. The corridors were so jammed with kits, rifles and greatcoats, it was almost impossible to move along them. The soldiers had been home on leave and were now returning to the front. They were husky, broad-shouldered men in high spirits; a few of them slept, a few of them stared silently out the window, but most of them sat laughing and talking, every now and then breaking loudly into the chorus of marching songs. We were sorry we couldn’t open a conversation in Finnish, for they eyed us curiously and offered us some dried apricots, bread and sausages. Ed Hartrich dug in his pocket and brought out a package of cigarettes; all Ed Beattie could contribute was a bar of chocolate, which he found in the bottom of his knapsack, left over from the siege of Warsaw.
It was hot on the train and the air got so close we climbed off whenever we could and walked up and down the platform. Once we all surged into a restaurant for coffee and sandwiches. The windows had been shattered by a bomb explosion and were covered over with cardboard. A dim light burned inside and in the semi-darkness half a dozen waitresses behind a counter poured out cups of coffee, serving the whole lot of us in twenty minutes.
The troops were evidently on their way to the Isthmus. It was the twentieth of February, and three weeks previously the Russians had opened up their second big attack against the Mannerheim Line. They had prepared an artillery barrage more ferocious than any since the World War in a final desperate effort to break through the Finnish defences. They had been advancing slowly, and the Finns, with their tiny army, were throwing in every available man to stem the terrible onslaught. I looked at the faces around me and wondered how many would return.
The Russians had also tried to force the back door to the Isthmus. They had sent several divisions north of Lake Ladoga in an outflanking movement to bottle up the Mannerheim Line from the rear. But in this sector the Finns had been able to use guerrilla tactics. They had attacked and destroyed one division and chopped another into small remnants, surrounded and isolated from their bases. Ed Beattie, Ed Hartrich and I were now on our way to the G.H.Q. of the Lake Ladoga front, near the town of Sortavala, to see the spoils of the victory.
Normally the trip from Helsinki to Sortavala was only a six or seven hours’ run, but the railroads had been disrupted by bombing and the journey took nearly two days. Some of the time we read and some of the time just stared out of the window. The great sweep of snow was not monotonous; there was an awesome grandeur about it, and every now and then you caught a picture which stamped itself vividly on your memory. I remember the hospital trains moving slowly across the white panorama, the blinds pulled down and the red crosses painted on the sides frozen over with ice; the freight trains panting into the stations, some of them with cars riddled with machine-gun bullets or smashed where bombs had hit them. I remember the cavalry train headed for the front; the doors of the box-cars were open and we caught a glimpse of the soldiers and horses. Some of them stood in the openings—huge men with brilliant red cheeks, dressed in fur caps and ankle-length coats—a race of giants going to war.
In the daylight, with the brilliant blue sky and the sparkling snow, it was difficult to feel the drama of the struggle going on, but at night a grim curtain fell. We arrived at the town of Pieksamaki as it was getting dark, and from there to Elisenvaara, about a hundred miles away, we travelled in the wake of terrible destruction. Russian planes had been bombing all afternoon, and we were the first train to pass through the area since the attack had taken place. Often we stopped for several hours at a time while workmen tested the rails. We passed through countless villages with only the framework of houses silhouetted against the snow; others had collapsed in a crazy fashion, and still others were blackened by fire and blast. At one of the stations we had such a long wait we made our way across the platform and asked the Stationmaster for the hotel. He was a huge man bundled up in a white coat and hood. He couldn’t speak English very well; he could only shake his head, point to the sky, and say, “Molotov”. But we knew what he meant.
We pulled into Elisenvaara to find the station burning. It was a terrible spectacle, for an icy wind had whipped the flames into a roaring inferno. They licked the dark sky savagely, turning the snow pink for miles around. Men with buckets and hoses were trying to get them under control, but it looked a hopeless task. The soldiers surged off the train to make another connection, and our last glimpse of them was standing on the platform, silhouetted against the red night.
We arrived at Sortavala the following morning. Normally the town had a population of thirteen thousand inhabitants, but now it was almost deserted. In spite of its gaily-painted pink and white houses, it presented a desolate appearance. We passed through street after street entirely razed to the ground, with only a forlorn row of chimneys and a heap of bricks to mark the spot where houses had stood. Although there was little left to bomb, a Finnish press officer who met us at the local hotel told us the bombers still came over several times a day.
Unlike most Finns, generally reserved and rather dour, our press officer, known to all as ‘Larry’, was a gay young man. He told us he had learned English by going to see Al Jolson in “Sonny Boy” eighteen times. He drove us out to a country villa, about fifteen miles outside the town, which was being used as Press headquarters. Here we slept for the next two nights. It was a charming villa on the shores of the lake, and in the summer must have been a delightful place to live. But in the winter it was a different matter. The wind whistled through the thin walls and it was impossible to light any of the fires for fear the smoke would attract the enemy’s attention. “None of the houses around here light fires,” ‘Larry’ explained. “If the Russians thought people were living in these villas they’d be sure to bomb them.” When we went outside we were cautioned to keep to the path so that we wouldn’t leave footprints in the snow. In spite of all these precautions the villa was bombed a few days after we left and ‘Larry’ informed me cheerfully one of the bombs had gone straight through my room.
‘Larry’ made arrangements for us to visit the front the day we arrived. As the roads were continuously swept by enemy planes it was impossible to travel in the daylight and we didn’t set out until late afternoon. We stopped at G.H.Q. and picked up a Finnish army officer—a captain who had taken part in the battle. We drove through miles of countryside, deserted save for an occasional farmhouse, but as we neared the front we heard the rumble of trucks and the jingle of sleighs. We passed a long line of lorries hauling back captured field guns, then a column of white-hooded soldiers in small horse-drawn sleds, stacked high with ammunition. For the next five miles the road and the woods were alive with Finnish soldiers hauling back their war booty. It was getting dark and we could only half distinguish the objects that passed us.
The scene at the front was even more terrible than the ‘dead man’s land’ of Suomussalmi. The night accentuated the gruesomeness; a full moon shone uncertainly through dark-moving clouds and the rising wind moaned through the pine-trees, blowing sudden gusts of snow across the roadway like the fitful passage of evil spirits. Before us lay the dreadful wreckage of the battle. The road was strewn with the hulks of tanks turned half over like giant beetles, with field-kitchens, battered lorries and heavy guns. And on either side of the road, scattered through the woods, lay hundreds of frozen bodies of the dead, shapeless mounds beneath a blanket of freshly-fallen snow.
It was only when you saw the carnage of the battles that you realized how deadly and dramatic these forest wars had been. You could visualize the Russian columns moving down the roads, every now and then the heavy tanks and tractors floundering into the snowbanks, blocking the advance for hours; you could picture the Russian soldiers, with their deep superstitious fear of the forests, clinging in bewilderment to the roadside, and the invisible, white-coated Finns creeping up from behind the trees to launch their attack. I remember one of the Russian prisoners in the internment camp summing it up naïvely: “The trouble was, we could never see the Finns!”
We walked for two miles along the road until we turned a bend and came within sight of the Russian lines, a dark rolling hill about half a mile away. As we trudged along we heard the sharp crack of bullets singing through the forests, and every now and then the low rumble of artillery. Several times the sky lighted up with a sudden flash as the Finnish guns opened up behind us. In the woods on either side of the road were hundreds of pits dug under the snow and walled by logs, where the Russians had lived. Near one of the dug-outs, among a litter of books and cartridge-cases, we found an odd object—a woman’s shoe. We discovered it was a Finnish shoe which had probably been looted by one of the soldiers to give as a present upon his return to Russia.
The suffering which the Russian troops must have undergone living week after week in the bitterly cold forests wasn’t difficult to imagine. Their food had given out some time before and for the last ten days they had lived on bits of horse-flesh and occasional meagre supplies dropped by planes. “But even when we had them completely surrounded and their position was hopeless,” said the Finnish captain, “they refused to surrender.”
This was partly due to the propaganda leaflets dropped by aeroplanes promising them aid would soon arrive; and partly to the fact that Russian soldiers were systematically told that Finns shot their prisoners. Carl Meidner, a photographer who was taking pictures for Life, told me that when the Finns had brought in a Russian prisoner at Salla, he had asked the guard to bring the man into a barn so he could photograph him. The Russian walked into the shed and when the light of the camera flashed he crumpled to the ground in a heap. A few seconds later he rose slowly, rubbing himself, with a bewildered expression on his face. He thought he had been taken into the barn to be shot; when he was convinced he was still intact, he ran up to Carl, clasped his hands and thanked him over and over again.
The Finnish captain led us off the road, a few yards into the woods. He said when the attack came many of the Russians huddled together like sheep; at one point, five hundred of them, refusing to surrender, had been mowed down in a single heap. But the most ghastly sight was the dead gun-crew. In the moonlight they looked like badly executed waxworks: one of them had fallen over the gun carriage, his hands still on the lanyard, two of them sprawled against the wheels, and a fourth lay half propped up against the tree as though he were still giving orders.
“Poor devils!” said the captain with sudden compassion. “I suppose they didn’t even know what they were fighting about.”
Curiously enough, although the Finnish soldiers were waging one of the most desperate struggles in history, most of them had little hatred for the Russian soldiers. Their feelings were more akin to pity. I heard many of them express horror at the fact that the enemy was made to advance like cattle on completely hopeless attacks. “We don’t mind shooting them with rifles,” continued the captain, “but what’s so horrible is when they won’t surrender and we have to mow the whole lot of them down with machine-guns!” I remembered the officer at Suomussalmi who told me on a similar occasion that one of his machine-gunners had gone mad and came back to the dug-out with tears streaming down his face.
We walked up the road for two miles. I learned that the Finns had used only a few thousand men against two Russian divisions numbering about thirty thousand. But the captain seemed much more worried about the Russian advance on the Isthmus than in his own victory. “We can hold them up in the forests,” he said, “but on the Isthmus it’s a different matter.” Then he asked with an almost touching anxiety: “Do you think the outside world will be disappointed in the Finnish Army?”
In spite of their fantastic victories, the Finns, a quiet reserved people, made no show of bravado. The only thing which they were openly gleeful about was the capture of Russian war material. At almost every front the officers delightedly showed you their captured guns and field-glasses. As we were walking along, the captain found a Russian pistol half buried in the snow, and the chauffeur was lucky enough to ferret out a rifle. All the way back they discussed the relative merits of their newly-acquired weapons, as pleased as a couple of children.
We started back for our villa at Sortavala about midnight. We dropped the captain off at headquarters. Before he shook hands with me, he pulled a red star out of his pocket—a star embossed with the hammer and sickle, worn by Russian officers on their caps.
The first time I’d seen one of these stars was on a train coming down from the north. At one of the stops two wounded Finnish soldiers climbed on. They had evidently just come from the front, for they were still wearing their white capes. One of them had a bandage round his head, the other a leg in splints. They sat down across from me and nodded politely. Then the second one pointed to his leg and said, “Molotov.” He didn’t leave me in doubt as to what had happened to the Russians unlucky enough to have taken a shot at him, for he then produced a wallet from his uniform pocket and proudly showed me three red stars. He evidently collected them with the same fervour that cowboys used to notch their guns.
The captain handed me the star, bowed solemnly, and said: “With the compliments of a Russian major.” I wore it on my bracelet for a few days, but every time it caught my eye I wondered to whom it had belonged. I finally took it off and put it away.
* * *
We returned to Helsinki to learn that the attack on the Isthmus was increasing in fury. On the ten-mile Summa section the Russians fired three hundred thousand shells in twenty-four hours—nearly three times the number of shells used by the British Army during any one day of the Great War. The Russians had thrown nearly four hundred thousand men into the attack—a hundred thousand more men than the total of the Finnish Army fighting on four fronts. Although the Finnish communiqué revealed little, by studying the map you could see the Russians were slowly battering their way through the Mannerheim zone of fortifications. But you could only guess at what was happening, for no journalists were allowed to cover the attack.
We had been permitted to visit front-line positions before a battle began; to talk to Russian prisoners; to inspect captured war material; to be bombed as often as we liked—or didn’t like. We had been allowed to visit forest patrols, and some of us had been lucky enough to be at headquarters when minor skirmishes had taken place. But no journalist was allowed at any front while a major battle was taking place. For news we had to rely on the laconic official communiqué which was handed out in Helsinki each evening; on land operations it usually averaged no more than a hundred and fifty words.
The reason the Finns observed these restrictions was that success depended on the secrecy of their movements, the surprise of their outflanking attacks, and the cunning of their strategy. They couldn’t take the chance of correspondents, with first-hand knowledge of their tactics, leaving the country and inadvertently giving information to the enemy. It was also forbidden by the censorship to criticize the Russian tactics for fear the enemy might profit by his mistakes and correct them; and, needless to say, the number of Finnish troop concentrations and casualties were never revealed.
The journalists, therefore, could work only on conjecture. The press room of the Hotel Kämp overflowed with correspondents from a dozen different capitals, arguing, doubting, grumbling, questioning. The telephone rang continuously. From one end of the hotel to the other you could hear journalists shouting their stories across Europe—to Stockholm, Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Paris and London, and even across the Atlantic to New York. Much to everyone’s annoyance, New York was the only connection so distinct you could hear as well as though you were sitting in the next room. I usually telegraphed my stories to London, but they were often delayed for five or six hours, and occasionally I was forced to telephone. The line was so bad I had to repeat every word three or four times, and I hate to think what the charges must have been. Some of the delay, however, was due to the fact that the Sunday Times telegrapher couldn’t understand my American accent; once, in desperation, I handed the telephone to Eddie Ward.
“I say, is that really Mr. Ward speaking? Why, I heard you over the radio only an hour ago. And am I really talking to Helsinki? By Jove! What’s it like there? Pretty cold, eh?”
The communiqué was issued every evening about eight o’clock and there was always a mad scramble among the big agencies as to who got the news over the wires first. All of them put in telephone calls to Amsterdam, Stockholm and Copenhagen—blitz calls at nine times the normal rate. Once the Associated Press hung on to the telephone for twenty-five minutes waiting for the communiqué to be issued. Five minutes after hanging up in despair a call came through for the United Press, and at the same moment a boy walked into the room with the communiqué. Black looks were exchanged. As a matter of fact, all calls that came through seemed to be for the United Press, and I learned later this was due to a very handsome arrangement with the Hotel Kämp telephone operator.
The daily routine was constantly interrupted by the air-raid sirens. Although Helsinki was bombed only twice during the war—and not badly at that—when the warnings sounded everything ceased automatically. Unlike Spain, everyone was forced to take cover. Customers were cleared from shops and restaurants, people evicted from their offices and pedestrians shooed from the streets. The city became so quiet you could almost hear a pin drop.
As the sirens sounded five or six times a day the boredom was immense. The policemen on the street corners occasionally tried to break the monotony by starting snowball fights. Guests in the Kämp dining-room shook their heads angrily, picked up their plates, and carried them across the street to the shelters in the park. You heard the telephone operators cutting off the calls with the outside world in voices of irritation: “Sorry, Copenhagen, we’re having another warning.”
Journalists had special permission to stay above-ground, but even so it was impossible to go on working. Besides the operators knocking off, the Finnish press officers surged downstairs, and even the censors stopped censoring. The censors, by the way, were mysterious people who lived behind barred doors. No one ever saw them. A boy took your copy to them and when it came back red-pencilled you might as well complain to God for all the good it did. We used to watch the people filing into the shelter and try to guess which were the censors. There was one very old gentleman who always carried a black satchel. We were sure he was one of them and took great pains to smile at him until we discovered he was the local veterinary.
Owing to the inconveniences of the alarms, many foreign diplomats and attachés moved out to Grankulla, a town about fifteen miles from Helsinki, where they could carry on their work undisturbed. Here I found Frank Hayne, the assistant American Military Attaché to Moscow with whom I had made the trip through the Ukraine the year before. He had been transferred to Finland for the war and greeted me jovially. “I thought you’d turn up sooner or later. I saw your friend Martha Gellhorn a few weeks ago and we were wondering where you were.”
Martha had come to Finland in December to write an article for Collier’s and had left a few days after the war broke out. Frank had never met her before, but on the night that the Russians presented the Finns with an ultimatum threatening to bomb Helsinki off the map unless their demands were accepted, he saw a beautiful, demure-looking blonde sitting in the corner of the Kämp restaurant. He thought she was an American and much in need of protection. He went up, introduced himself, told her about the ultimatum and asked her if she wanted to be evacuated.
“Christ, yes.”
Frank, somewhat taken aback, told her to go upstairs and get her things. “And five minutes later,” he said, “she came downstairs with a pair of pyjamas and a bottle of whisky. I knew at once that girl had been evacuated before.”
Frank’s activities were even more curtailed than those of the journalists. The Finnish authorities were unwilling to allow the German and Italian military attachés at the front, and, being unable to discriminate against them separately, made it a set rule that no attachés could visit the front. Frank pored over the maps and studied the positions on the Mannerheim Line, but with only scanty information it was difficult for him to determine the true state of affairs. One day, Frank’s Finnish chauffeur received a letter from his brother, who was an officer on the Isthmus. Frank had the letter translated into English, and one day when Ed Beattie and I had lunch with him, he showed it to us. This was the letter:
“DUGOUT CAT,
February 10, 1940. 6.35 a.m.
“Dear Brother,
Now I know what an artillery barrage is like. Friend ‘Klim’ Voroshilov certainly has done his best to appease the ‘father of nations’ and to slake his thirst for blood. He has tried and tried again and is continuing to try to break our resistance, but with bloody heads the Russians have been thrown back time and time again.
Thousands of them lie bleeding in silent, immobile shapes on these sparkling February snowfields. They share the fate of the other thousands who in former times have invited the carrion birds and wolves of our forests to a feast.
If there had not been that frightful, tearing artillery fire with its rending explosions, one would almost have felt pity for the grey Russian masses who in their long overcoats waded up to their thighs in soft snow against the death-spitting mouths of our machine guns. Obediently and silently, they came, trying to make use of armoured shields, but in vain. Everything was futile. Murderous fire swept the field time after time leaving only twisting heaps of bodies, which soon became immobile.
The tanks advancing ahead of the infantry were destroyed by our anti-tank weapons and by skilfully thrown bundles of hand grenades tied together. One would have felt sorry for these grey hordes marching to the slaughter, but the incessant artillery fire aroused merciless hate in us who were subjected to it.
I am not ashamed to confess that artillery fire to me, as well as to most of the others, is simply revolting. I have not yet suffered from ‘artillery sickness’, although I feel like pressing my hands against my ears and crying out in pain. The explosion of six-inch shells on an average of every fourth second during nine consecutive hours, the incessant detonations, screaming splinters and blinding bursts of flame create in our bodies unspeakable terror, which can be overcome only by exercising one’s entire psychic courage. It is killing to try to be an example to one’s men; to joke, suck calmly on one’s pipe, feeling at the same time that every nerve is taut as a violin string.
To know that if one should for one second give up one’s self-control the hands would begin to shake, the head to nod and the eyes to flinch, which has happened to several of my men. It is terrible to try to make such a man carry on his duty by encouragement and threats, but so far I have succeeded and every time prompt action has been required the men have been ready.
If the Russians had been subjected to a fraction of the drum-fire that has been poured over us in the last twenty-four hours, the entire seventh army of the U.S.S.R. would have been in wild, panicky flight towards their steppes. The superiority of material and masses is so overwhelming that it is inconceivable how we can withstand it, but we do.
Up to now I have been afraid that we either stand or fall, but now there is no longer an alternative—we will stand. The whole battalion has lost only one man dead (he died in a field hospital) and we have had on the average one wounded man every second day. Usually the wounds have not been dangerous. I have not lost any of my men, not even as wounded, although our quarters are far from being safe.
A couple of men have gone off their heads, and a couple of others are on the way, but it is because of our heavy guard and patrol duty and the consequent lack of sleep, not because of anxiety. We are tired, and we need beside pursuit-planes, guns and anti-tank instruments, men—plenty of men who would at least do manual labour and stand guard duty so that we could get some rest once in a while. I know that we are going to be replaced soon and taken to the rear to rest, and then I hope to get a few days’ leave. But at the same time my mind is burdened with anxiety for those who remain here. Not because of any fear of defeat, but because, while the Russians change their men four times, we can change ours but once, and we always have fresh forces against us. My dear brother, what is Sweden doing for us? And will England and America help? Write soon and tell me. I am starved for news.
Yours,
LASSIE.”