The adjutant led Walter and Simo through the winding trenches, coming to a halt at a reinforced corner.
Twenty-odd soldiers clad in grayish-white camouflage sat leaning against the earthen walls. Some were pressing rounds into their rifle magazines; others chewed silently on frozen chunks of black bread. This was the reinforcement unit Colonel Martola had allocated to them.
Walter scanned the group. None of them looked like textbook elites. They were ordinary men, their sharp edges long since blunted by the grind of war.
The cook was wiping a rifle bolt with his apron, a stubborn glint in his eyes. The clerk pushed up a pair of battered spectacles held together by twine as he meticulously checked the ammo pouches on his chest. The deafened machine gunner sat bolt upright; though he could not hear the crashing shells, his bloodshot eyes remained fixed on the trench exit. They were not lambs for the slaughter, but survivors whose passion had been hollowed out by extreme cold and constant fire.
As Walter and Simo approached, the soldiers stood up one by one. They eyed the two well-equipped second lieutenants with the habitual scrutiny and suspicion of veterans.
"Walter... Simo..."
The clerk repeated the names under his breath, his brow furrowed as if searching through a memory.
"Those names sound familiar," a bearded soldier nearby muttered. "The newspapers from a few days ago, or maybe the radio? I think I heard them."
"Is it the guy who captured the Russian general alive?" another soldier chimed in, but then shook his head with a self-deprecating laugh. "Forget it. Heroes like that are probably in Helsinki right now, drinking coffee and taking photos. Why would they be sent to fill a hole at Hill L with us?"
To these men, those names belonged to distant myths. The two officers standing before them looked more like fellow wretches sharing a hard fate.
Walter felt the thick layer of anxiety and dread in the air. He knew that under the relentless bombardment of the Isthmus line, any grand rhetoric would ring hollow. He walked over to the cook without a word and reached out, deftly tightening a loose rifle sling for him.
Then, Walter turned to the group. "The Colonel is sending us to Hill L. It's a furnace right now, and the Russian artillery is zeroed in on that position."
The soldiers remained silent. They had heard such things too many times before.
"I'll only say one thing," Walter continued. "Come with me to Hill L, and I will do everything in my power to bring you back alive."
"Second Lieutenant Ilves," the clerk finally spoke. His voice still trembled, but his eyes were clearer. "There's only a few of us left. How long are we expected to hold?"
Walter looked at the clerk, then scanned the twenty pairs of exhausted eyes.
"Listen, I'm not going to talk to you about the nation. Big words won't save your lives." Walter locked eyes with the clerk. "We stay on that hill until six o'clock tomorrow morning. If we make it until then, we withdraw."
He paused for emphasis. "At six a.m., a fresh relief unit will come up. That is a personal promise made to me by Colonel Martola. If the relief hasn't arrived by then, I'm leading you all back myself. Even if the Colonel puts a machine gun to my head, I'm bringing you back."
"Six o'clock..." the cook whispered.
A specific point in time often holds more magic than vague phrases like "hold to the end." It gave these desperate men a clear finish line.
"Let's move, Lieutenant," the cook said, tightening his sling. The wooden look of a man awaiting execution finally vanished from his face. "I've got two pigs waiting for me to feed them back home. Six a.m. tomorrow, I've marked it."
6 a.m. was Walter's bottom line. He didn't care about grand strategy; he only knew that he wouldn't let the Soviets plant a red flag on a hill made of Finnish corpses on Red Army Day. If the Soviets wanted a tribute, Walter would make them pay an unimaginable price for it.
…
The group marched through communication trenches choked with mud and shattered ice toward Hill L. Along the way, the dull thud of artillery made their chests ache. By the time they finally crested Hill L, it was midday.
The sight before them reduced the twenty-man squad to total silence.
Could this even be called a "hill" anymore? Days of continuous Soviet shelling had literally shaved two or three meters off the summit. The once-lush red pine forest was reduced to jagged stumps. Crater overlapped crater, and some deep pits were filled with translucent icy water mixed with a dark red liquid that shimmered like oil under the bleak sunlight.
"Halt! What unit?"
A dark muzzle suddenly poked out from a bunker that had lost half its overhead cover. A man followed, his face blackened by soot and his left arm held in a grimy, black-stained bandage. The warrant officer insignia on his shoulder was tattered.
"Regimental reinforcements," Walter said, walking toward the bunker.
The man squinted, eyeing Walter and Simo. Though he didn't realize these two lieutenants were the famous Mannerheim Knights from the papers, the sight of their fresh uniforms, superior weaponry, and cold, steady eyes caused the ashen despair in his own eyes to crack.
"I'm Warrant Officer Niemi. Acting Company Commander. Whatever unit you're from, you've got guts."
Niemi shifted his position with a wince of pain, grit his teeth, and lowered his voice to brief them. "Our organization is gone. The CO was bayoneted through the gut during a counter-charge last night. The remaining platoon leaders... one is in pieces in a crater, and the other two were carried off on stretchers. They probably died before reaching the regiment."
He pointed to the soldiers huddled in knee-deep snow pits outside the bunker.
"Counting me, there are only thirty-six men left who can hold a rifle. Half are wounded, and the rest are half-deaf from the shell-shock. A while back, the Russians used an M-30 howitzer to blast our heavy machine gun bunker on the left flank straight into the earth."
Walter looked where Niemi pointed; there was nothing left but a massive hole.
"When do they attack?" Simo asked.
"It's their 'Defender of the Fatherland' day. Those commissars are acting like lunatics, organizing a charge every hour. They've got tanks, and they've pushed all kinds of artillery right up to the front. See that woods?"
Niemi gave a cold smirk, revealing yellowed teeth. He pointed to a treeless, blasted grove less than seven hundred meters away.
"There's at least a battalion of infantry hiding there, and a few big 'beasts' are fueling up. They plan to plant the red flag on this summit as a tribute before nightfall."
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