A GROUP of Finns, patrolling across the bay of Viipuri, came upon a Russian soldier who was lost and had been wandering about the ice for hours. He was a miserable spectacle, half frozen, with a shaggy beard and clothes in rags. When he saw the Finns, his arms shot into the air in surrender. “Don’t shoot! I am a Russian capitalist.”

I never discovered whether or not this story was true; it was published in all the Finnish papers and provided people with one of the few laughs they had those last grim days. At the beginning of March the Finnish communiqué announced that the Russians were fighting on the outskirts of Viipuri—which meant they had broken through the Mannerheim defences. The Finnish press staff came in looking white and strained. Miss Helsinkius, the girl who usually arranged our trips, was in tears. What the Finnish losses were none of us knew. Whether or not the Finns could continue the war once Viipuri fell was, therefore, a matter of speculation.

It was an extraordinary situation. On all the other fronts the Russian advances had been halted by some of the most spectacular fighting in history; on the Waistline front, Russian attempts to drive through to the Gulf of Bothnia, cutting Finland in two, had met with smashing defeats and a loss of nearly 85,000 lives; on the Arctic front the Russian sweep down the Great Arctic Highway to the centre of Finland was stopped after a penetration of only seventy miles; and on the front north of Lake Ladoga the Russian thrust designed to outflank the Mannerheim Line had been broken.

But on the Isthmus the story was a different one. Although the Finns had succeeded in out-manœuvring and out-fighting the Russians on every occasion where strategy and tactics had come into play, on the Isthmus front—the only sector in Finland where actual trench warfare was taking place—only two things counted: men and guns. Wave after wave of Russians had fallen before the Finnish fire, but there were always more to take their place. The Finns, with a total army of only three hundred thousand—no more than half of which could be used on the Isthmus—had not been able to risk their men in large-scale counter-attacks; and the Russians, through tremendous superiority, had succeeded in smashing their way forward.

But apart from the army chiefs, the politicians, and a handful of people in the press bureau, the majority of Finns had little conception of the true situation. The Finnish papers were filled with the victories in the north and the official communiqués on the Isthmus battle were so brief it was impossible to draw conclusions from them. The Finns knew they could not hold out indefinitely against overwhelming odds, but most of them clung to a deep and stubborn faith that some unforeseen event would save them from final destruction. Morale was high and fierce and on all sides you heard the dictum: “The Russians will only conquer when every Finn is dead.”

Much of this passionate determination was due to inbred contempt for Russians. The proud and capable Finns regarded them as an uncivilized horde. One night I rode around Helsinki in a sleigh driven by a huge Finn with a drooping moustache. He had a large medal pinned on his coat which he had won against the Russians in 1918. He took me past the old Greek orthodox church with its onion domes glittering in the moonlight like diamonds; then through the bombarded section, where the charred remains of houses lying beneath a sheet of ice presented a gruesome contrast. The windows of the abandoned Russian Legation had been shattered by a bomb and the white curtains blew out into the night air beckoning like hundreds of ghostly arms. “What animal,” asked the driver, “most resembles a human being?” The answer was so obvious he did not give me a chance to reply. “The Russian,” he roared, and went into a fit of laughter that echoed all the way down the street.

With this common sentiment in mind the Finns were determined to fight to the end; when the following paragraph was published, without comment, on March 8th, the public dismissed it with a laugh:

“According to information in possession of the Finnish Government, the Soviet Union is believed to have planned the presentation of demands to Finland of a more far-reaching character than those presented last Autumn. Details, however, of these demands are so far lacking.”

A few people were puzzled, then drew the optimistic conclusion that the Russians’ enormous losses were beginning to tell; that they were trying to open conversations in an effort to make a peace that would save their face.

But in the press room the tune was a different one. The telephone rang continuously as queries poured in from all over Europe. “Is it true the Finns have lost a third of their army? Have peace negotiations started? What terms are they discussing? Can you verify whether Sweden is acting as mediator?”

We couldn’t verify anything. Bottled up as we were in Helsinki, we were at a loss to know what was happening ourselves. Every journalist had a theory of his own. Some claimed the capture of Viipuri was not of strategic importance and the Russians still had a long way to go; others that the Finns were beaten; still others that they would fight to the bitter end. Ed Beattie was pessimistic. He had a long and sorry list of wars behind him: Abyssinia, China, and Poland. “The Finns were doing all right until I got here,” he remarked gloomily. “Now the jig’s up.”

There was so little information in Helsinki I decided to go to Stockholm to see if I could get a story there. Eddie Ward was also leaving, so we travelled to Vaasa together by train, and then flew across the Gulf. Negotiations or no negotiations, the Russian bombers were as active as ever. The journey took nearly thirty-six hours; again those burning towns; those interminable waits; those short blasts by the engine whistle that sent everyone stumbling through the snow to take cover in the woods.

There was a Frenchman on the train, a rather timid creature, who mislaid his tickets, lost his baggage and asked the porter a dozen times in a harassed and nervous voice when we were due to arrive. He seemed so hopelessly out of his depth that we were sorry for him. It was only when we climbed aboard the aeroplane at Vaasa that we learned he was Colonel de la Roque, the dynamic French Croix de Feu (Fascist) leader.

We arrived in Stockholm on March 11th. On the same day the Finns issued a communiqué admitting that peace discussions were being held in Moscow and that Sweden was acting as mediator. That was all. There were no details, and the lobby of the Grand Hotel was filled with journalists trying to get a “line” on the conversations. That night Gordon Young of Reuter’s invited Eddie and me to dine with himself and Mr. Erkko, the Finnish Minister to Sweden. Erkko was non-committal, but genial; he gave us champagne and confided nothing. We told him we might return to Helsinki in a day or so, and, as it was impossible to secure seats on the plane without reserving them several days in advance, he offered to get them for us at an hour’s notice.

The following day there were more peace rumours. I ran into a Danish journalist—I don’t know his name—who told me he was positive an agreement had been reached in Moscow, but was unable to get official confirmation of it. He said that Sweden, intimidated by Germany, had refused to allow the transit of troops from England and France, and had forced the Finns to throw their hand in. Eddie and I had decided to return to Helsinki that night and rang up Mr. Erkko to arrange for the aeroplane seats. Not expecting a reply, but just as a parting shot, Eddie said to him: “Is it true that an agreement has been reached in Moscow?” To our astonishment, Erkko replied that it was. (Why he admitted it to Eddie, I never discovered, for he spent the rest of the evening emphatically denying it.)

This gave Eddie a world-wide scoop. He sent a telegram to London which was read over the B.B.C. on the six-o’clock news—the first semi-official report that the Finnish-Russian War had come to an end. We arrived at the Stockholm aerodrome about seven o’clock—an hour later—and heard the people in the waiting-room discussing it. One of the passengers, a Finnish colonel, commented on it angrily. He turned to Eddie and said: “Did you hear the report the B.B.C. is putting out? That fellow—Ward Price, I think his name is—must be crazy. Peace! We’ll make peace when the Russians withdraw every last soldier from Finland. And not before!” Eddie agreed and quickly moved away.

When we took off from the aerodrome the lights of Stockholm sparkled like diamonds against the snow and we wondered what price Sweden had paid to keep them blazing. It was a sad trip. Eddie and I were apparently the only passengers who knew what we were returning to, and somehow it seemed to make it worse. I looked at the faces around me, strong, confident faces, and dared not think what the following day would bring. The pilot was the same man who had flown me to Turku two months before. He took the usual precautions of wiring ahead to find if the way was clear, of circling the aerodrome and dropping his flares. In fact, everything was the same except that the trip was slightly more dangerous, for six or seven seats had been ripped out of the plane and the floor packed with boxes marked: “Explosives—Second Class.”

We arrived at Turku about midnight and drove to Helsinki the following morning in a bus. Although it was March 12th, the day the peace terms were announced, people were still unaware of what was in store for them. The Turku morning paper carried headlines of the number of Russian planes shot down the previous day. The only item referring to the negotiations was a small box in the corner of the front page announcing that foreign radio stations were reporting a solution had been reached in Moscow. And this was encircled by a large question mark.

It didn’t seem to attract much attention. The bus was packed with farm girls and road-workers with white capes over their clothes, who read the papers casually; they appeared to find nothing unusual in them. We stopped at one of the villages for coffee and the driver told us if the air-raid alarm sounded to climb in the bus as fast as possible so that we could get under way once more before the police stopped us and forced us into a shelter.

We drove up in front of the Hotel Kämp at eleven o’clock, just as the radio was blaring out the announcement that peace had been made. But it was not until an hour later when the Foreign Minister, Mr. Tanner, spoke, that the people of Finland realized they had been defeated.

The shock was staggering. None of them imagined they were even approaching capitulation; and many actually thought it was the Russians who had been forced to come to terms. The people on the streets seemed completely dazed. The Finnish women in the press room broke down and wept and the men turned their faces away. None of the journalists knew what to do. Commiseration seemed hopelessly inadequate. I was so miserable I went downstairs and sat in a corner of the half-empty restaurant. A group of officers came in and took the table next to me. They had the latest edition of the morning paper in which the peace terms were published. They read it silently, then one of them crumpled it up angrily and threw it on the floor. No one spoke. They just sat there staring into space. I went out and walked down the street. The flags of Finland were flying at half-mast.

That same afternoon workmen began replacing the bulbs in the street lamps and ripping down the wooden protections from the shop windows. Otherwise, there was little change in Helsinki. You expect a national crisis to mark itself on the face of a city, but somehow it never does. War or peace, peace or war, life manages to drag on in a more or less routine fashion. People filled the shops, the restaurants, the cinemas, as they always did. The only real contrast was in the press room. A few days previously it was a scene of wild confusion; now it was almost deserted. The slate which used to announce the time the communiqué would be released was wiped clean, but tacked above it was a slip of paper:

No one bothered to take it down.

Twenty-four hours later, with the flags still flying at half-mast, miles of country roads resounded to the rumble of lorries and the jingle of sleighs as the evacuation of four hundred thousand people began.

The port town of Hango, about eighty miles from Helsinki, was the first territory to fall beneath the sickle and hammer. I drove there with Frank Hayne and Eddie Ward. The streets were thronged with a medley of firemen, farmers, gunners, shop-keepers and policemen, who had volunteered to help with the evacuation; everywhere there were army trucks and sledges, groaning under furniture and household goods.

We spent several hours wandering about in a temperature of fifteen degrees below zero. The spectacle was a grim one, for Hango had been badly bombed and we passed block after block with only gaping caverns to mark the places where houses had stood. When I had last visited Hango, two months before, ten buildings along the main street, hit by incendiary bombs, were burning. To-day there were no fires or air-raid alarms; only the wind sweeping desolately through houses with no window-panes; only shops with caved-in roofs and charred ruins thickly buried under layers of ice and snow.

In the midst of these grim ruins the evacuation was going on. From one house with a bomb crater only ten feet away and a front blackened by blast, two soldiers were carrying tables and chairs piled high on their backs; from another three small children were bringing kitchen utensils and packing them carefully onto a small sled; from a third, an old man was carrying a mattress stacked with lamps and crockery. The sidewalks in front of the houses were covered with dressers, sewing-machines, bicycles, pictures, and stoves waiting to be put on the lorries.

We talked to many of the people and found that grief had already given way to bitter resentment. Why had Finland made peace? According to General Mannerheim, the Finns had lost only fifteen thousand dead, and “after sixteen weeks of bloody battle with no rest by day or by night our Army still stands unconquered”.

What had happened? Why had Finland not continued the fight? In his last Order of the Day, General Mannerheim had said:

There it was—the fine hand of Germany. But why, people asked, had Finland plunged into a hopeless war to begin with if only to capitulate, still unbeaten, to even more drastic terms than had been submitted in the first place? Not only in Hango, but from the Finns in Helsinki, you heard many bitter remarks. “Our politicians have betrayed us. There is no life this way. Far better to have fought to the end …”

The people who were being evacuated felt it even more strongly. Eddie and I talked to a soldier wheeling a bicycle through the snow, and Frank’s Finnish-American chauffeur translated his remarks. He told us he was a garage mechanic who had lived all his life in Hango. He said when he heard of the peace he refused to believe it. Even now it was a bad dream. “If it was necessary to make concessions in other directions, very well. But the Russians should have been made to fight for Hango—every inch of the way.”

Near the police station we talked to a woman and daughter who ran a small pension. They had just registered their names for a lorry to evacuate their belongings.

“When it comes I don’t know where we’ll go. We’ve got no relatives and no other prospects of making a living.”

The mother shook her head sadly. “Perhaps it’s wrong to say it, but it would almost make me happy to hear the sirens again.”

But we found that what people seemed to resent the most was turning over their houses to Russians, who, they feared, would take little care of them. Three nurses, standing at the street corner, told us it wouldn’t be so bad if any other nation were occupying Hango, but try as she would, it was impossible to think of the Russians as human beings. The second one agreed. “At least, they won’t find anything in my house but four walls and a roof. I’ve even taken the brass water-taps away.”

“Yes,” said the third. “But what a pity it is we have to leave our water tower for them.” She pointed to the old brick tower, an ancient landmark in the middle of the town.

“Oh, don’t worry about that. After a day or so they’re sure to have it out of commission.”

An old man, a factory worker, joined the group just before we left. “We’ve had a lot of bombs fall on Hango since November thirtieth,” he said, “but the worst bomb of all has been this peace.”

Everyone nodded.

Richard Busvine of the Chicago Times, Eddie and I left Helsinki a few days later. Once again we had the strange experience of passing from one war atmosphere to another. We took a plane to Stockholm, a train to Malmo, another plane to London. At Malmo, the aerodrome waiting-room was overflowing with people. Suddenly a man shouted in a loud voice: “Please form two lines. Berlin passengers to the left. London passengers to the right.” Everyone surged apart and stood glaring angrily at each other. Then they filed through the door and climbed aboard their respective planes. The engines roared. First one disappeared into the grey haze, then the other.

“Who said ‘never the twain shall meet’?” asked Richard.

“Bit awkward, that,” said Eddie. “I wish those people would stay in their own b—— country.”

“You and a hundred million others,” said Richard sourly.