On the Finnish Front

I

THERE was a cordial invitation to come to Helsinki awaiting me when my transatlantic boat docked at Gothenburg. I determined to go. Three years before, I had spent a couple of days in Helsinki, where I met and came to admire the Governor of Finland’s Central Bank, Risto Ryti. Ryti has been called the ‘Colbert of Finland.’ And it is no extravagant appellation.

I recalled that of all the European leaders I had met three years ago Ryti was the only one who prepared me for the tragic events which are now engulfing Europe. In conversation he even envisaged a Russo-German alliance. Assuredly I ought to renew acquaintance with him.

Arrived in Stockholm, I got another invitation from Helsinki. It said that any interviews I might desire would be arranged on receipt of a wire. Whom did I wish to meet? I thought vaguely of the President, the Premier, and the Foreign Minister—the usual haul of a visiting journalist of any repute in the smaller countries of Europe. But in Stockholm’s elegant dining rooms a name I hadn’t heard before came to my ears with recurring emphasis. It was that of Kaarlo Paasikivi, leader of the Finnish Conservatives, and Minister without Portfolio in Finland’s wartime cabinet. I found that in Sweden’s capital he was the Finnish hero. Story after story I heard about him. Accordingly, as I prepared to take the plane for Helsinki, I wired ahead that, in addition to Mr. Ryti, there was only one leader I wished to meet, and that was Mr. Paasikivi.

You may have heard of Mr. Paasikivi. Former Prime Minister, Finnish Minister to Stockholm when he was invited to take Finland to Moscow, he played David to Stalin’s Goliath in the negotiations in Moscow which petered out in war. I won’t repeat the Stockholm stories of the duel because Mr. Paasikivi, when I did meet him, laughingly denied them. But you will never persuade the admiring Swedes that the stories are apocryphal. They had been waiting too long for a man to stand up to the Man who was beginning to walk like a Bear, and, having found him, they were bent upon lionizing him.

As a matter of fact, nobody admires a Finn more than a Swede. And nobody admires anybody who can pull the Russian beard more than a Swede. There’s a statue of Charles XII in Stockholm, index finger pointing at Russia, which keeps the Swedes forever reminded of their ancient enemy. Swedes have cast an anxious look at that statue ever since Stalin and Hitler became bedfellows. And a Finn who can tweak a Russian’s beard — that’s a combination for you, to the average Swede.

I met the redoubtable Paasikivi within a couple of hours after coming down in Helsinki out of the Bothnian air. His like I had seen many times before. I was brought up in the north of England, where every little township had at least one German — he was the pork butcher. And Mr. Paasikivi was the very image of our German butcher clad in his Sunday best. There he was in the flesh — ruddy-faced, an Elihu Root cast of eye, hair clipped en brosse, and a fairly distended paunch across which hung an old-fashioned heavy-as-lead watch chain. The difference was that Mr. Paasikivi greeted me in a well-stocked private library.

You hear everywhere that the Finns are silent as the grave. Mr. Paasikivi wasn’t. Afterward he explained, in reply to my facetious comment, that Eastern Finns are less silent than their Western kinsmen. I discovered subsequently, however, that Mr. Paasikivi is a Westerner! At any rate, he opened up about his talks with Stalin. It appeared that there had been eight sessions with the Muscovites at which Stalin was present at seven.

‘Quite clearly the Baltic policy is Stalin’s,’ said Mr. Paasikivi. ‘He did all the talking. Molotov remained quite impassive. And Stalin would have come to all eight sessions but for some last-minute detention. It was Stalin who outlined the Soviet policy toward Finland.’

‘And what was that?’ I inquired.

‘Well, I may not give you all the terms, but they fell into three categories: one, a defensive alliance with Soviet Russia; secondly, rectification of the Finnish-Soviet frontier; and, thirdly, the lease of naval and air bases on our coast line.’

‘You couldn’t accept them?’ I queried.

‘Of course not,’ replied Mr. Paasikivi, with decision. ‘There would have been less left of Finnish sovereignty under this arrangement than we had when we were a Grand Duchy.’

I then ventured to remind Mr. Paasikivi that all Scandinavia was ringing with stories of his tilt with Stalin. He said that probably the stories were a product of the Swedish imagination. But he made up for his wet blanket by giving me a true story. Stalin on October 12 put all the Soviet cards on the table. After he’d read them off — in excellent Russian, by the way — he turned to Paasikivi and inquired his reaction.

‘Is that all?’ the heavy-set Paasikivi responded.

Paasikivi said he made his response in a pleasant manner because the Finns knew ahead of time all that would be asked of them when they followed their Baltic neighbors into the Bear’s lair. I was quick to ask for Stalin’s comeback.

‘Stalin is a man of humor,’ responded Paasikivi, rebutting the suggestion that he’s a modern Ivan the Terrible, even in private conversation.

‘He took my reply with a smile, and — if this is also a testimony to his sense of humor — spent the remaining session in trying to teach me the wisdom of giving in to Moscow.’

Paasikivi wasn’t convinced; neither was Finland. For in sum the demands would have squeezed the life, let alone the sovereignty, out of Finland. They were equivalent to a demand on America for the Panama Canal, Catalina, and Long Island — coupled with the resignation of all independent foreign policy. The Finns would have lost all selfrespect if they had given in. They didn’t. But Stalin’s mind, apparently, was set. And as soon as the delegation got back to Helsinki the Russians began to trump up allegations of Finnish aggression as a pretext for invading the country.

II

The Paasikivi interview is, I think, a necessary introduction to the events that followed. I saw Paasikivi on Tuesday night, November 28. Just before I left, Mr. Paasikivi was called to the telephone. The call came from his conegotiator in the Moscow parleys, Väinö Tanner, later Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the message informed Mr. Paasikivi that the Soviet had just denounced its non-aggression pact with Finland. It was a grave moment. But not by a shadow did Mr. Paasikivi’s face show that any untoward news had come to him over the telephone. It was my Finnish interpreter who told me what had been said. Mr. Paasikivi simply continued the interview where we had left off, and later bowed me out of his home with simple Finnish courtesy. Outside, when I was told what had happened, I realized that the Finnish-Soviet pot was furiously aboil.

During the Moscow negotiation women and children had been sent away from Helsinki as a precautionary measure. Fully 75 per cent of them had returned when I arrived at the capital. Schools had reopened, and, except for the furious knitting of the womenfolk, life seemed to have returned to normal. It was astonishing that there should be this seeming détente after the defiant return of the Finnish delegates. For since then there had been several frontier incidents which caused the radio from Moscow to sizzle with abuse and the harsh Molotov to protest violently. One incident in particular boded ill for peace. It must have forewarned such leaders as Mr. Paasikivi that the Soviets were preparing to take by force what they could not obtain by diplomatic bludgeoning. This was the incident that caused the Soviet denunciation of the non-aggression pact.

The incident in question occurred on Monday, November 27, on the frontier in eastern Karelia. According to the Soviet account, which was embellished with the most lurid billingsgate on the radio from Moscow, Finnish artillery had fired on the Soviet frontier forces, and had caused some casualties. The Finns denied the charge. As a sign of good faith they proposed the establishment of a joint commission of inquiry in accordance with the Soviet-Finnish frontier convention of September 24, 1928. Moreover, the Helsinki government added the proposal for a coöperative withdrawal of troops on both sides for a predetermined distance.

Fair enough! But by this time the Soviets weren’t in any mood to be fair. Already Moscow was whipping up indignation in the Red Army and among the workers against the ‘dregs of capitalist henchmen’ — namely, the Helsinki government. It all had what Shakespeare calls ‘a very ancient and fishlike smell.’ Hitler had already taken out the patent at the expense of Czech and Pole. Accordingly not a word of the Finnish reply appeared in the Soviet press. It was just mentioned by way of peg for the prompt and curt response from Molotov of Tuesday, November 28, denouncing the treaty of non-aggression.

In Helsinki that Tuesday I listened in, through an interpreter, to the radio heralds of the Molotov note. It gave me some idea of the depths to which international dealings have descended. Hoarse cries came out of the instrument from Moscow for the heads of Finland’s ‘bandits of capitalism.’ The Finns were said to be endangering ‘the city of Lenin ‘ by their mobilization. Finland’s frontier, as I subsequently found, is only twenty miles from Leningrad at its southernmost tip on the Gulf of Finland. The Muscovite spokesmen shouted through the microphone that the Finns should withdraw fourteen miles farther back, or ‘out of gun range of Leningrad.’

This was the theme, so far as I can make out from available summaries,¹ of the Molotov note of November 28. The peril to Soviet Russia was underlined by references to little Finland’s mobilization at the frontiers. This mare’s-nest of Finnish mobilization was courageously exposed by the London Times correspondent in Moscow. In that newspaper, for November 29, occurs this passage from him: ‘In justice to Finland it must be pointed out that the first hostile act of that nature was committed by the Soviet Union, which began mobilization in the Leningrad district in the month of September, and remained mobilized while negotiating upon the demand for Finnish territory.’ A pointed comment to come out of Moscow!

Granted that a frontier which marches so close to Leningrad — Russia’s second city — is probably a subject for negotiation. It’s quite an omnibus to grant in all the circumstances. Finland, surely, isn’t much of a threat — with a population of 4,000,000 compared with Russia’s 185,000,000—to the Soviet colossus. Still the Finns had been quite prepared to grant the argument. And, as Mr. Paasikivi told me, he had expressed his willingness to discuss the rectification of this frontier. What the Finns couldn’t stomach was the coupling of this demand with others for a defensive alliance and the cession of naval bases around Finland’s coast line.

III

The sand was running out of the hourglass. Frontier seemed likely to lapse into front in a matter of hours. I determined to get to it by hook or by crook. On leaving Mr. Paasikivi I went to the Foreign Office, and found that the Ministry was sending a mission to Karelia to make an on-the-spot investigation into the incident I have mentioned — namely, the allegation that on the previous day the Finnish troops had fired on the Russian frontier guard. By good fortune I managed to persuade them to take me along. We boarded the Leningrad express that same Tuesday night, and I found on the train the Helsinki correspondent of the United Press and a distinguished writer for the Svenska Dagbladet, Stockholm’s conservative newspaper.

It is the oddest sensation to go to a front line and peer at the ‘enemy’ after leaving a train which is going straight through into ‘enemy’ territory. I thought of what Mr. Borah would call the ‘phoniness’ of everything I was seeing in Europe. But, after the excitement of the day, it was time to go to bed. I didn’t wake up till the morning crept through my windows and showed me the dim outline of Vipuri, capital of Finnish Karelia, and the gulf port through which much of Finland’s export lumber — source of Finnish wealth — is sent to world markets. Sending lumber to market, alas, wasn’t its present job. Now it was the headquarters of the Vipuri division, one of Finland’s nine, as compared with the Soviet’s 130.

So we were in the famous isthmus. This is where the major fighting is now taking place. If you will look at the map, you will see that the Karelian isthmus is the bottleneck of land stretching from the Neva and Leningrad which is enclosed between Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland. At its opening stretch it is only forty miles across. But it widens out as it gets into Finnish territory to about double that distance. Vipuri marks the beginning of the isthmus on the Finnish side, and we still had about fifty miles to go to the frontier. We were therefore entering interesting territory. I scrambled out of bed to join the party as it crowded at the windows to survey the passing scene.

The country had quite a Christmascard look. Snow had been falling in the night — falling so lightly that it clung to the serried trees. The landscape was little different from Canada and parts of rural New England in winter. Finland is 75 per cent forest and water, and we were passing through forests of pine and spruce and lakeland.

I was about to comment upon the familiarity of the scene to my companion when I observed him smiling. He had a long Finnish name which meant Stonelake — a lieutenant attached to the Ministry of Defense, but in private life a business man whose youth belied his importance in Finnish business. Stonelake was rubbing his hands with seeming satisfaction, ‘Snow,’ he said; ‘just what we want. This will hold up the Russians if they start anything.’

Just what the Poles said about General Mud, I thought. But there was no doubt that General Snow would be a good ally for ally-less Finland. It wasn’t freezing point, and the snow was soft and deep, banked up in drifts close to the railroad. Indubitably General Snow would reenforce General Terrain, or the dense forests of birch, spruce, and pine.

Just before we came to the frontier I caught a glimpse of Finland old and new in juxtaposition. It was at a place called Mustamaki. A disused Russian church came into view, bulbous with Byzantine architecture, a reminder of the days when Finland was a Russian Grand Duchy. Next to it was a cooperative store. Finland in its twentyone years of independent existence has become much more than Sweden the model of consumer and farmer cooperatives. And there, way out in the country, was a unit of the consumer system. I noted the contrast. But there was another contrast I thought of — the contrast between this little evidence of a coöperative commonwealth and the land twenty-five miles farther on which had had engrafted upon it, also in the name of the people, a régime of tyrannical statism. Moscow’s radio onslaughts against the ‘bandits of capitalism’ slid off Finnish backs the more easily because of that contrast.

But we were now at the frontier town of Raivola, and not more than twenty miles separated us from Leningrad. Within a stone’s throw of us was the village of Tereyoki, which within a week was to come into some renown as the situs of Stalin’s ‘true democratic republic of Finland’! I saw the place just over the hill, but our route lay from this southernmost point on the Gulf due north along the frontier.

First, however, we had to be introduced to waiting officials. First there was the government official whose sworn duty it was to see that frontier peace wasn’t broken by the Finnish guardsmen. Preliminary sign that the Finns had no desire to start anything! Then there came up one by one the chief officers in command of the frontier force. This was the final sign that the Finns were not turning the frontier into a front. For the frontier force was composed of men and officers who had been ordered from their regiments for this special duty. I subsequently found this preliminary observation borne out — that the Finns hadn’t introduced an army disposition anywhere along the Karelian frontier. The defense of the Mannerheim (called after Finland’s liberator and hero, Field Marshal Mannerheim) line was strung along the isthmus fully ten miles behind the frontier.

Snow was still falling — to the Finns’ great delight. The road along which we traveled by car had been cut through the forest, and, except for several unfamiliar sights, we still might have been going through rural New England. Some of these unfamiliar sights were very ominous. Every once in a while we would see tall blocks of granite standing on either side of the road as high as a drawbridge. They were obviously in position to be thrown across the road at the first sign of a Russian advance. And the forest clearings looked like miniature cemeteries. Stones the size of little monoliths stood up in closely packed rows like huge gravestones. I was told that they had been put there when the Finns read of Germany’s easy march into Poland. To my inexpert eye they looked as if they could trip up both artillery and tanks. And they did perform precisely that service when the Russians finally appeared.

Finland is sometimes called ‘the land of rocks,’ sometimes ‘the land of lakes and forests.’ Both make Finland a tough nut for an invading army to crack, though there are cross-country routes in northern and middle Finland which, taken in conjunction with the Russian spurs off the Murmansk railroad, facilitate military operations from the Russian direction. Here, however, no defending general could wish for a better terrain, especially when it is borne in mind that the invaders have to shove themselves through the forty-mile bottleneck of land sandwiched between Lake Ladoga and the Gulf of Finland.

Soldiers in twos and threes appeared at irregular intervals along our route. Some of them were already appareled in white winter overalls over their fieldgray uniforms. Sleighs drawn by horses with high Russian collars were bringing up skis with which the Finnish troops are all equipped in wintertime. The Finns delight in sports — how sad they are that they won’t have the honor of entertaining the Olympic sportsmen in 1940! And they are adept at sports, too. Having seen them on skis, I have a very definite impression of their mobility when I read the military experts’ account of their ‘highly mobile units.’

Trevelyan said of the British that they are warlike but not militaristic. You could say the same thing about the Finns. Their rifles and belt knives testified to a disposition which isn’t exactly Quaker-like. In Stockholm I’d been facetiously warned against going to Helsinki by references to the handiwork of the Finn with his dirk-like knife. ‘If he likes you,’ I was assured, ‘he might suggest a round of knife-playing, a game which consists of sticking an inch or two into your soft parts by way of showing personal regard.’ Naturally, therefore, I noted those dirks with reminiscent interest. The rifles, too, looked curious. The sight guards were wide-outstretching metal flaps, and the Finns, in whom skill in musketry is as well developed as is that of the Swiss, explained that this was the feature that gave the Finnish rifle its name. It’s called the Finnish for lap dog, whatever that is.

IV

By this time we’d arrived at our destination. Our task, as you may remember, was to check up on the allegations of Finnish firing on the Russians two days before. Foreign Office officials took out forms for the filling-in of affidavits. We looked on interestedly with our notebooks in hand. We talked to the sentries who were on duty on Monday, and from them we gathered that all that had happened was some mysterious practice shooting from the high trajectory Stokes mortars. The firing, it was explained, with the aid of logs, compasses, and all the paraphernalia of frontier post records, was done crosswise, and the shots had dropped into a field in no man’s land.

What on earth the Russians were up to was a question which seemed honestly to puzzle the Finns, as it puzzled us. There seemed only one explanation in the light of subsequent events. It is difficult to be absolutely barefaced in telling falsehoods, and the Russians had to have a pretext of some kind for going to war. Other than for this exercise, we were told, everything had been quiet, though it was perfectly obvious to the Finnish sentries that the Russians were bringing up guns on their side of the frontier. Sometimes they tried to cover up those movements with smoke screens.

A deathly quiet hung over the frontier as we made our survey in the intervals of taking down depositions. We strolled around. The frontier wore all the appearance of the front to which I had been accustomed in wartime France. Our road was torn up immediately in front of us. It was covered with a high bank of trees. Sentries on the Finnish side were posted in the trees with telephone apparatus at hand. The road wound up a slight incline. On the crest was a tall watchtower, and through the window of the nest on top we could discern the figure of a man, the Russian sentry. At another place on the frontier we looked down upon a trickle of a river covered only with breakable ice. This was Systerbäck, or frontier river. On the other bank was the Russian village of Mainola. I borrowed a Finnish sentry’s glasses, and saw Russians in twos and threes walking to and fro between the farmhouses. It was just in front of those houses that the Russian shells had dropped. But now everything was as peaceful as a Christmas card — though the sentries restrained my anxiety to see everything.

After taking our depositions we drove back to the headquarters of the frontier guards, located in a farmhouse; and here I saw more Finnish soldiers than I’d seen along the frontier. They were off duty, sleeping side by side in the hayloft. Our dining room was the harness room, and as we entered the radio was blaring out the news from Moscow. And what do you think we heard? An account of the sniping and troublemaking that were going on over the precise spot of land we had just left. The colonel smilingly excused the interruption, and said, ‘We hear that every day, but I must say it’s so quiet here that it’s a tiresome duty.’

At the meal there were half-a-dozen officers present in addition to our party. It was an all-Finnish meal, ‘except for the salt’: a simple smörgåsbord of herring and cheese, a meat and potato soup, and meat and potatoes again, all washed down with good Finnish milk. I enjoyed it. ‘What do the soldiers get?’

I inquired. ‘Just the same,’ I was told. No difference in the meals served to officers and men! I entertained a few not-so-pleasant thoughts of dietary distinctions prevailing in armies of other democratic countries. It was a subject that interested me out of my own experience.

On further inquiry I found that Finnish tradition dictates that landowner and field laborer must eat at the same table. ‘Our army custom, therefore, is merely part of the same tradition. Of course we don’t eat together, since that wouldn’t be good for discipline.’ And the discipline was as excellent, I observed, as the democracy. On the way back in the Leningrad express (again I had a queer feeling!) officers and men were eating cheek by jowl, but the enlisted man always bowed to the officer as he entered the car, and bowed as he left. There was some Prussian heel-clicking, too.

Dusk was now falling, and we had to catch the train back. One sight rewarded us for a detour. This was a little pyramid erected in front of a farmhouse commemorating 200 Finnish peasants who had repulsed 1500 Russian soldiers. The date was 1555.

Russian and Finn! For all those years, and many before, the Finn has been fighting for his independence against the invading Tartar. Over long stretches he has lost that independence as a people. But it has always burned in him individually as fiercely as does the independence of the Vermont farmer or the Scottish crofter. Those who think of national characteristics as coming from climatic and environmental factors may well ponder the influences which make all three so much alike. All of them live among stones. And they might take their dourness from them, for all I know. Even when the Finn as a nation became subject to the Tartar, the Russian could never subjugate him. The Finn remained Lutheran. He still obtained all manner of privileges, even a customs barrier against Russian products, which left him more independent than, say, Wales.

But the Finn knows today that there would be no such tolerance if the Bolshevist colossus crushed his beloved Suomi. So he is fighting with the same tenacity as his forefathers did — and against the same fearful odds.

The war broke out within a few hours of our return to the Finnish capital, in a rain of bombs upon the city and an attack upon the front which we had just visited. The Russians let the guns go off without even bothering to receive the Finnish reply to Molotov’s denunciation of the non-aggression pact which they knew had already arrived in Moscow.