Conclusion: The uses of War Heroes
The heroic status of the Jäger Officers was an important part of the process of merging the forces of nationalism and conscription to create the new Finnish Army. Post World War I, Armies were no longer small permanent forces where the soldiers were “mercenaries, criminals, vagabonds and destitutes.” Instead, they were volunteers or conscripted citizen-soldiers, respectable citizens of their communities. Their dying in war mattered to these communities in quite a different way to the deaths of soldiers drawn from the margins of society in the pre-WWI era. As entire nations had to be mobilised for war in the new era of mass armies, death on the battlefield had to be given a higher meaning. The reality of the war experience was transformed into “the Myth of the War Experience”, which looked back upon war as a meaningful event that made life worthwhile for conscripts and provided a mass feeling of national unity. This mythical notion of war, which grew and developed throughout the nineteenth century, was a key factor behind the war enthusiasm that swept over Europe in August 1914.
There was a need on the home front and among the veterans to find a higher meaning in reyurn for the losses and suffering. The Myth of the War Experience provided this. Through the eternal commemoration of the dead by the whole nation after the war, the fallen would be made “immortal.” Those who were active in the construction of the myth were a rather small number of articulate middle-class men who had often volunteered for the war. “The aim was to make an inherently unpalatable past acceptable, important not just for the purpose of consolation, but above all for the justification of the nation in whose name the war had been fought.” The heroic narratives about the Finnish Jägers can be read against this cultural background, as an attempt to construct a purposeful story about national warriors, national struggle and ultimate victory out of the events of the Civil War of 1918, which was largely experienced as frightening, shameful, humiliating and traumatising. The Jägers’ hero myth can be seen as helping society deal with the grief of the dead soldiers’ families; constructing a national self-image of Finland as a “ nation”; and mobilising a patriotic readiness to fight and sacrifice anew.
As the Jägers and their supporters immediately started preparing the country’s defence for another war against Russia, there was a great need for continued patriotic mobilisation. As the narrators of the Jäger myth were anxious that the nation should recover from one war and prepare for the next war, there was a need for something similar to the Myth of the War Experience. In the Finnish case, it was an image of the Finnish “Liberation War” as a noble and meaningful fight and the patriotic sacrifices made there served as models for a possible war with Russia. The Jäger narrative could also be used to direct public attention away from the internal conflict towards the perceived conflict between Finland and Russia. According to the Jäger story, the Jägers’ “invincible wrath” had been directed against Russia all along and continued to be now that the nation was independent - but in the nationalist world-view, constantly threatened from the East.
The need presented by military educational thinkers to educate a “new” kind of Finnish citizen-soldier and transform conscripts into “new human beings” through military training can be read as an extension of the Jäger hero narrative. The Jägers were exceptional men, but in order to fight a modern war against Russia, every Finnish soldier had to be trained to achieve the same level of patriotism and spirit of self-sacrifice that drove the Jägers. This was a difficult undertaking for the conscript army, and a daring promise to make. It meant enormous demands on the training officers supposed to succeed in this task, but also implied that the men fit for that task – the Jägers themselves – were national heroes not only in wartime, but in peacetime as well. Although many dead heroes were commemorated and honoured, living heroes making splendid military careers in the brand-new national armed forces probably catered better to the need to optimistically look towards a rosy national future rather than back at the painful war between brothers. The Jäger heroism was about spirit of self-sacrifice, a journey into the unknown, hardships and ordeals, but also about home-coming, victory, success and prestige in post-war society.
For conscripts who were to be educated into citizen-soldiers in interwar Finland, this perhaps made the Jägers more attractive military models than the fallen heroes of the war, no matter how gloriously they had died. Yet as we have seen, the Jägers’ public image was not completely free from shadows and contradictions. This Post has mainly looked at the crafting of the Jäger myth, not its reception. The fraught political situation meant that the Jägers were “impossible heroes” for a large part of the population. Their militancy, harshness and at times ruthless selfrighteousness also made for a frightening edge to the Jäger image. However, in spite of these cracks in the idealised image, and the differences among the Jägers as real-life military educators, the Jägers’ story communicated an enormous faith in the military and in the moral power of idealistic patriotism and self-sacrifice. This applies to all the three aspects of the Jäger image analysed in this chapter – the heroic war narrative, the image of the Jägers as post-war officers with a “national spirit”, as well as the Jägers’ patriotic spirit of self-sacrifice as a guiding-star for the conception of a “modern” national citizen-soldier.
When they set out for their journey, the future Jägers had oftentimes been confronted with a strong scepticism against their venture and a solid reluctance to gain political solutions based on military violence. In post-war society, there was, as we have seen, still a strong resistance against the militarisation of society. Through the Jäger myth, the Jägers and their supporters asserted an image of the citizen-as-soldier as the foundation of civic society and national independence, an image much resisted in Finnish society, yet also very influential. Within the constory of interwar
nationalism and the gendered division of labour in the defence of the nation – men and boys training for combat in the army and civil guards, women and girls working with auxiliary tasks in Lotta Svärd – the Jäger story offered both men and women the security of belonging to an national collective superior in strength and virtue to others.
(Permanent) Army Training leading up to the Winter War?
Conclusion: The uses of War Heroes
ex Ngāti Tumatauenga ("Tribe of the Maori War God") aka the New Zealand Army
Training the Conscript Citizen-Soldier (in the 1920’s)
Training the Conscript Citizen-Soldier (in the 1920’s)
The Finnish Army faced enormous challenges in the interwar years. It was supposed to organise and prepare for defending the country against vastly superior Russian forces. It had to train whole generations of young Finnish men into skilled soldiers and equip them for combat. Furthermore, it was expected to turn these men into the kind of highly motivated, patriotic, self-motivated and self-sacrificing modern national warriors envisioned by the Jägers and other officers in the younger generation. The starting point was none too promising, due to the criticism and scepticism in the political arena towards protracted military service within the cadre army system. Many conscripts from a working class background had all too probably seized on at least some of the socialists’ anti-militaristic or even pacifistic agitation against armies in general and bourgeois cadre armies in particular. Neither could conscripts from the areas of society supporting the Agrarian Party be expected to arrive at the barracks unprejudiced and open-minded. Although conscripts from families who were small freeholders usually supported the Civil Guards, they were not necessarily positive about military service within the cadre army, especially during the first years of its existence. In consequence, a majority of the conscripts, particularly in the 1920’s, could be expected to have an “attitude problem”. Some of the greatest challenges facing the conscript army were therefore to prove its efficiency as a military training organisation, convince suspicious conscripts and doubtful voters of its commitment to democracy, and demonstrate its positive impact on conscripts.
Although it was often claimed that military training as such would foster mature and responsible citizens – giving the conscripts discipline, obedience and punctuality as well as instilling consideration for the collective interest – officers and pro-defence nationalists with educationalist inclinations did not place their trust in close-order drill and field exercises alone. More had to be done. From the point of view of army authorities and other circles supportive of the regular army, there was an urgent need to “enlighten” the conscript soldiers. They had to be “educated” into adopting a positive attitude towards not only military service and the cadre army system, but also towards their other civic duties within the new “white” national state. This Post examines the attempts of officers, military priests and educationalists to offer the conscripts images of soldiering that would not only make conscripts disciplined, motivated and efficient soldiers, but also help the conscript army overcome its “image problems” and help the nation overcome its internal divisions. The Post’s focus is therefore not on the methods or practices of the educational efforts directed at the conscripts in military training, but on the ideological contents of these efforts, mainly as manifested in the intertwined representations of soldiering and citizenship in the army’s magazine for soldiers Suomen Sotilas (Finland’s Soldier).
Civic education and the Suomen Sotilas magazine
The 1919 report produced by a committee appointed by the Commander of the Armed Forces to organise the “spiritual care” of the conscripted soldiers expressed both the concerns felt over the soldiers’ attitude towards their military service and the solutions envisioned. The report stressed the importance in modern war of “the civil merit of an army, its spiritual strength”. In the light of “recent events” the committee pointed to the risks of arming men without making sure that they had those civil merits – a reference to the Civil War, perhaps, or to the participation of conscripted soldiers in the recent communist revolutions in Russia, Germany and other Central European countries. The report stated, “the stronger the armed forces are technically, the greater the danger they can form to their own country in case of unrest, unless they are inspired by high patriotic and moral principles that prevent them from surrendering to support unhealthy movements within the people”. The committee members – two military priests, two Jäger officers and one elementary school inspector – saw the remedy as teaching the conscripts basic knowledge about the fatherland and its history, giving those who lacked elementary education basic skills in reading, writing and mathematics, and providing the soldiers with other “spiritual pursuits”, which mainly meant various religious services. Quoting the commander of the armed forces, General K.F. Wilkama, the committee supported the notion that the army should be a “true institution of civic education”. Its optimistic report expressed a remarkably strong faith in the educational potential of military service:
These educational aspirations should be seen not only within the framework of not only the military system, but also as a part of the ngoing concerns among the Finnish educated classes over the civic education and political loyalties of the working class ever since the end of the nineteenth century. Urbanisation, industrialisation and democratisation made the perceived “irrationality” and “uncivilised” state of the masses seem ever more threatening to the elite. In
face of the pressure towards “Russification” during the last decades of Russian rule, and the subsequent perceived threat from Soviet Russia, this anxiety over social upheaval was translated into an anxiety over national survival. Historian Pauli Arola has argued that the attempt by Finnish politicians to introduce compulsory elementary education in 1907 – after decades of political debate, but only one year after universal franchise was introduced – should be seen within the constory of these feelings of threat. Once the “common people” had the vote, educating them into “loyalty” in accordance with the upper classes’ notions of the “nation” and its existing social order became a priority. Resistance from imperial authorities stopped the undertaking in 1907, but Finnish educationalists continued to propagate for increased civic education through-out the school system.
The civil war only intensified the urgency of the educated elite’s agenda of educating the rebellious elements among the Finnish people. The intellectuals of “white” Finland described these as primitive, brutal, even bestial, hooligans who for lack of discipline and culture had become susceptible to Russian influences and given free rein to the worst traits in the Finnish national character. There was a special concern over children from socialist environments and the orphan children of red guardsmen who had died in the war or perished in the prison camps. When compulsory education was finally introduced in 1921, the curriculum for schools in rural districts, where most Finns then lived, was strongly intent on conserving the established social order. It idealised traditional country life in opposition to “unsound” urbanisation and emphasised the teaching of Christian religion and domestic history. In the same spirit, civic education was from the outset included in the training objectives of the conscript army. “Enlightenment lectures”, also called “citizen education”, were incorporated in the conscripts’ weekly programme. These lectures were sometimes given by officers, but mainly by military priests (who were also assigned the duty of teaching illiterate conscripts to read and write. As elementary schooling was only made compulsory in 1921, the army throughout the interwar period received conscripts who had never attended elementary school. The share of illiterate conscripts was however only 1–2%, peaking in 1923 and thereafter rapidly declining. Nevertheless, in 1924 elementary teaching still took up ten times as many working hours for the military priests as their “enlightenment work”). In 1925, the Commander of the armed forces issued a detailed schedule for these lectures. The conscripts should be given 45 hours of lectures on the “history of the fatherland”, 25 hours on civics, 12 hours on Finnish literary history and 10 hours of lectures on “temperance and morality”. Taken together, roughly two working weeks during the one-year military service were consequently allocated for civic education. In addition, the pastoral care of the soldiers, in the form of evening prayers and divine service both in the garrisons and training camps, was seen as an important part of “enlightening” soldiers. A consciousness of the nation’s past and religious piety were evidently een as the two main pillars of patriotism, law-abidingness and loyalty to the existing social order. (The dean of the military priests Artur Malin presented the ongoing civic education work in the army in an article in the Suomen Sotilas magazine in 1923. He listed the following subjects: reading, writing, mathematics, geography, history, civics, natural history, singing, handicraft and temperance education).
The Army’s Magazine for Soldiers
In most army garrisons and camps, local female volunteers provided a service club or “Soldiers’ home”. These establishments offered coffee, lemonade and bakeries, but also intellectual stimulus in the form of newspapers, magazines and small libraries. Any socialist or otherwise “unpatriotic” publications were unthinkable in these recreational areas where the conscripts spent much of their leisure hours. However, one of the publications the conscripts would most certainly find at the “Soldiers’ Home”, if it wasn’t already distributed to the barracks, was the weekly magazine Suomen Sotilas (Finland’s Soldier). This illustrated magazine contained a mixture of editorials on morality, military virtues and the dangers of Bolshevism, entertaining military adventure stories, and articles on different Finnish military units, sports within the armed forces, military history, weaponry and military technology. There were reviews on recommended novels and open letters from “concerned fathers” or “older soldiers”, exhorting the conscripts to exemplary behaviour, as well as a dedicated page for cartoons and jokes about military life. The interwar volumes of Suomen Sotilas serve as a good source on the “enlightenment” and “civic education” directed at the conscript soldiers within the military system. Through its writers, the magazine was intimately connected with the command of the armed forces, yet formally it was published by an independent private company.
The editors in chief were literary historian Ilmari Heikinheimo (1919–1922), student of law and later Professor of Law Arvo Sipilä (1922–1925), M.A. Emerik Olsoni (1926) and army chaplain, later Dean of the Army Chaplains Rolf Tiivola (1927–1943). Important writers who were also Jäger officers were Veikko Heikinheimo, military historian and Director of the Cadet School Heikki Nurmio, Army Chaplains Hannes Anttila and Kalervo Groundstroem, as well as Aarne Sihvo, Director of the Military Academy and later Commander of the Armed Forces. Articles on new weaponry and military technology were written by several Jäger officers in the first years the magazine was published; a.o. Lennart Oesch, Eino R. Forsman [Koskimies], Verner Gustafsson, Bertel Mårtensson, Väinö Palomäki, Lars Schalin, Arthur Stenholm [Saarmaa], Kosti Pylkkänen and Ilmari Järvinen. All of these officers had successful military careers, reaching the rank of Lieutenant Colonel or higher. In the last number of the first volume of 1919, the editors published the photographs of 13 of the magazine’s “most eager collaborators”. Out of these 13, nine were officers, five were Jäger officers. The five civilians were a Master of Arts, two Doctors of Philosophy and one clergyman.
The initiative for starting the magazine originally came from the war ministry and the contents of each number were initially examined before publication by ministry officials. In 1919–1921, the magazine was published by a small publishing house for popular enlightenment, Edistysseurojen (as this publisher went bankrupt in 1923, the editors formed a public limited company, ‘Kustannus Oy Suomen Mies’ (~Finland’s Man Publishing Company Ltd.) which took over the magazine. On the tenth anniversary of the magazine’s founding, its chief accountant complained that the state had not subsidised the magazine at all in 1919–1925 and then only granted a minimal subsidy) and regular writers were mostly nationalist officers of the younger generation, many of them either Jäger officers or military priests. Civilians – professional authors, historians, educators and clergymen – also wrote for the magazine, but usually more occasionally rather than regularly. In spite of different backgrounds and experiences, the contributors had a lot in common; they were generally educated middle-class men who shared a staunchly non-socialist and nationalist political outlook. Contributions from female authors were not unheard of, but rarely occurred. Although the magazine was meant to be published weekly, it was published fortnightly over several long periods. The support of private business was important for its economy, both through advertising revenue and gift subscriptions to the military units paid for by defence-friendly businessmen. The magazine started out with a circulation of 4 000 in 1919 and rose to over 12,000 by mid-1920. This caused the editors to proudly exclaim: “Now it can be said with certainty that Suomen Sotilas falls into the hands of every soldier and civil guardsman.” After the magazine’s first 18 months these rather frequent notices on the circulation ceased to appear, probably indicating that the circulation had started to decline. Originally aimed at a readership of both conscripts and civic guards, the magazine had to give in to the tough competition from other magazines for Suojeluskuntas readership after a few years. It then concentrated on being the army’s magazine for soldiers.
The contents of Suomen Sotilas not only express the hopes and objectives of some of the same people who were in charge of training and educating the conscripted soldiers, but also their concerns and fears with regard to conscripts. In its first number, the editors of Suomen Sotilas proclaimed that the ambition of the magazine was to “make the men in the ranks good human beings, good citizens and good soldiers”. Its writings should serve “general civic education and completely healthy spiritual development” and strive towards “the fatherland in its entirety becoming dear to and worth defending for our soldiers.” A concern about lacking patriotism or even hostility towards the national armed forces can, however, be read between these lines. This concern did not diminish much during the 1920’s, but was stated even more explicitly by the former editor-in-chief Arvo Sipilä (1898–1974) in the magazine’s tenth anniversary issue in
December 1928: “It is well known, that among the youths liable for military service there are quite a number of such persons for whom the cause of national defence has remained alien, not to speak of those, who have been exposed to influences from circles downright hostile to national defence. In this situation, it is the natural task of a soldiers’ magazine to guide these soldiers’ world of ideas towards a healthy national direction, in an objective and impartial way, to touch that part in their emotional life, which in every true Finnish heart is receptive to the concept of a common fatherland (…)”
The editors of Suomen Sotilas were painfully aware of the popular and leftist criticism of circumstances and abuses in the army throughout the 1920’s. In 1929 an editorial lamented, “the civilian population has become used to seeing the army simply as an apparatus of torture, the military service as both mentally and physically monotonous, the officers as beastlike, the [army’s] housekeeping and health care as downright primitive.” The same story greeted the recent PR drive of the armed forces, inviting the conscripts’ relatives into the garrisons for “family days”. There, the editorial claimed, they would see for themselves that circumstances were much better than rumour would have it. The initiative behind these “family days”, however, arose from the officers’ intense concerns over the popular image of the conscript army17 – concerns that were also mirrored in the pages of Suomen Sotilas (According to historian Veli-Matti Syrjö, the ”family days” was an initiative by Lieutenant-Colonel Eino R. Forsman. In his proposal, Forsman pointed out how an understanding between his regiment and the civilian population in its district was obstructed by popular ignorance).
Turning a Conscript into a Citizen-Soldier
In the autumn of 1922, the First Pioneer Battalion in the city of Viipuri arranged a farewell ceremony for those conscript soldiers who had served a full year and were now leaving the army. On this occasion, the top graduate of the Finnish Army’s civic education training gave an inspiring speech to his comrades. – At least, so it must have seemed to the officers listening to Pioneer Kellomäki’s address, since they had it printed in Suomen Sotilas for other soldiers around the country to meditate upon. This private told his comrades that the time they had spent together in the military might at times have felt arduous, yet “everything in life has its price, and this is the price a people has to pay for its liberty”. Moreover, he thought that military training had no doubt done the conscripts well, although it had often been difficult and disagreeable: “You leave here much more mature for life than you were when you arrived. Here, in a way, you have met the reality of life, which most of you knew nothing about as you grew up in your childhood homes. Here, independent action has often been demanded of you. You have been forced to rely on your own strengths and abilities. Thereby, your will has been fortified and your self-reliance has grown. In winning his own trust, a man wins a great deal. He wins more strength, more willpower and vigour, whereas doubt and shyness make a man weak and ineffective. You leave here both physically hardened and spiritually strengthened.” This talented young pioneer had managed to adopt a way of addressing his fellow soldiers that marked many ideological storys in Suomen Sotilas. He was telling them what they themselves had experienced and what it now meant to them, telling them who they were as citizens and soldiers. His speech made use of two paired concepts that often occurred in the interwar volumes of the magazine. He claimed that military education was a learning process where conscripts grew into maturity and furthermore, that the virtues of the good soldier, obtainable through military training, were also the virtues of a useful and successful citizen.
What supposedly happened to conscripts during their military service that made them “much more mature for life”? In the army, conscripts allegedly learned punctuality, obedience and order, “which is a blessing for all the rest of one’s life”. Sharing joys and hardships in the barracks taught equality and comradeship. “Here, there are no class differences.” The exercises, athletics and strict order in the military made the soldiers return “vigorous and polite” to their home districts, admired by other young people for their “light step and their vivid and attentive eye.” Learning discipline and obedience drove out selfishness from the young man and instilled in him a readiness to make sacrifices for the fatherland. The duress of military life hardened the soldier, strengthened his selfconfidence and made “mother’s boys into men with willpower and Stamina.” The thorough elementary and civic education in the army offered possibilities even for illiterates to succeed in life and climb socially (1929).24 The order, discipline, exactitude, cleanliness, considerateness, and all the knowledge and technical skills acquired in the military were a “positive capital” of “incalculable future benefit” for every conscript – there was “good reason to say that military service is the best possible school for every young man, it is a real school for men, as it has been called.” “If we had no military training, an immense number of our conscripts would remain good-for-nothings; slouching and drowsy beings hardly able to support themselves. [The army] is a good school and luckily every healthy young man has the opportunity to attend it.” (All quotes from various articles in Suomen Sotilas magazine).
It is noteworthy how the rhetoric in Suomen Sotilas about military service improving conscripts’s minds and bodies usually emphasised the civic virtues resulting from military training. Military education was said to develop characteristics in conscripts that were useful to themselves later in life and beneficial for civil society in general. Conscripts being discharged in 1922 were told that experience from the previous armed forces in Finland had proven that the sense of duty, exactitude and purposefulness in work learnt in military service ensured future success in civilian life as well. If the conscripts wanted to succeed in life, they should preserve the values and briskness they had learnt in the army, “in one word, you should still be soldiers”. Such rhetoric actually implied that the characteristics of a good soldier and a virtuous citizen were one and the same. As the recruit became a good soldier, he simultaneously developed into a useful patriotic citizen. The Finnish Army, an editorial in 1920 stated, “is an educational institution to which we send our sons with complete trust, in one of the decisive periods of their lives, to develop into good proper soldiers and at the same time honourable citizens. Because true military qualities are in most cases also most important civic qualities.” If the army fulfilled this high task well, the story continued, the millions spent in tax money and working hours withheld would not have been wasted, but would “pay a rich dividend.”
Storys in this vein were most conspicuous in Suomen Sotilas during the early 1920’s, as conscription was still a highly controversial issue and heated debates over the shaping of military service went on in parliament. In 1922, just when the new permanent conscription law was waiting for a final decision after the up-coming elections, an editorial in the magazine expressed great concerns over the possibly imminent shortening of military service. The editors blamed the “suspicious attitude” among the public towards the conscript army on negative prejudices caused by the old imperial Russian military. The contemporary military service, they claimed, was something quite different. It was a time when conscripts “become tame”, realised their duty as defenders of the fatherland, improved their behavior and were united across class borders as they came to understand and appreciate each other’s interests and opinions. All these positive expectations can be read as mirroring anxieties among the educated middle classes over continued class conflicts in the wake of the Civil War and the lack of patriotism and a “sense of duty” among conscripts in the working classes. The assurances that military service would inevitably induce the right, “white” kind of patriotism and civic virtue in conscripts and unite them in military comradeship appear to be fearful hopes in disguise.
As late as 1931, the conservative politician Paavo Virkkunen wrote in Suomen Sotilas that the bitterness “still smouldering in many people’s mind” after the events in 1918 had to give place for “positive and successful participation in common patriotic strivings”. He saw conscripts divided by political differences and hoped that they would be united by the common experience of military service, “a time of learning patriotic condition” and “a fertile period of brotherly
comradeship and spiritual confluence.”
(Image Sourced from http://www.eduskunta.fi/fakta/edustaja/kuvat/911749.jpg)
Paavo Virkkunen (27 September 1874, Pudasjärvi – 13 July 1959, Pälkäne) was a Finnish conservative politician. He was a member of the Finnish Party and was elected in the parliament in 1914, but joined the National Coalition Party (Kokoomus) in 1919. He was five times the Speaker of the Parliament. He became the chairman of the party in 1932 following the six year leadership of Kyösti Haataja.
Physical Education
Moral education and physical development were closely intertwined in the public portrayal of how military service improved conscripts. The military exercises, it was claimed, would make the conscripts’ bodies strong, healthy and proficient. In 1920, the committee for military matters in parliament made a statement about the importance for national security of physical education for conscripts. Pleading to the government to make greater efforts in this area, the committee pointed out how games, gymnastics and athletics not only generated the “urge for deeds, drive, toughness and readiness for military action” in the nation’s youth, but also developed discipline, self-restraint and a spirit of sacrifice. The conscript should be physically trained and prepared for a future war in the army, as well as being developed and disciplined into a moral, industrious and productive citizen. The militarily trained conscript, claimed Suomen Sotilas in 1920, was handsome and energetic, aesthetically balanced, harmonious, lithe and springy – unlike the purely civilian citizen, who was marked by clumsiness, stiff muscles and a shuffling gait.
According to Klaus U. Suomela, a leading figure in Finnish gymnastics writing in the magazine in 1923, the lack of proper military education and the hard toiling in agriculture and forestry had given many Finns a bad posture and unbalanced bodily proportions. Their arms, shoulders and backs were overdeveloped in relation to the lower extremities. Gymnastics to the pace of brisk commands as well as fast ball games and athletics would rectify these imperfections and force the Finns, “known to be sluggish in their thinking”, to speed up their mental activities, Suomela stated. He admitted that “the Finnish quarrelsomeness” would be worsened by individual sports, but this would be counteracted by group gymnastics and team games. Suomela seems to have viewed Finnish peasant boys from the vantage point of the athletic ideals of the educated classes, emphasising slenderness, agility and speed, and found them too “rough-hewn and marked by heavy labour”.
After independence and the Civil War, Finnish military and state authorities immediately saw a connection between security policy, public health and physical education. Officers and sports leaders debated how gymnastics and athletics formed the foundations for military education. Proposals to introduce military pre-education for boys in the school system were never realised, but physical education in elementary schools and the civil guards nonetheless emphasized competitive and physically tough sports in the 1920’s and 1930’. These “masculine” sports were thought to develop the strength and endurance needed for soldiering. Light gymnastics, on the other hand, were considered more appropriate for in schoolgirls, developing “feminine” characteristics such as bodily grace, nimbleness and adaptation to the surrounding group. Sports and athletics were given lavish attention in Suomen Sotilas.
The magazine reported extensively on all kinds of sports competitions within the armed forces, publishing detailed accounts and photographs of the victors. Sports were evidently assumed to interest the readership, but the editors also attached symbolical and political importance to sports as an arena of national integration. An editorial in 1920 claimed that in the army sports competitions, ”Finland’s men could become brothers” as officers and soldiers, workers and capitalists competed in noble struggle. “There is a miniature of Finland’s sports world such as we want to see it – man against man in comradely fight, forgetful of class barriers and class hate. May the soldiers take this true sporting spirit with them into civilian life when they leave military service.” Hopes were expressed that conscripts, permeated with a patriotic sense of duty after receiving their military education, would continue practicing sports and athletics in their home districts, not only to stay fit as soldiers and useful citizens, but also in order to spread models for healthy living and physical fitness among the whole people.
The Immaturity of Recruits
The rhetoric about the army as a place where boys became men and useful, responsible citizens required a denial of the maturity and responsibility of those who had not yet done their military service. The 21-year old recruits who arrived for military training, many of them after years of employment, often in physically demanding jobs requiring self-management and responsibility, were directly or indirectly portrayed as somehow less than men, as immature youngsters who had not yet developed either the physique or the mind of a real man. In this constory, the writers in Suomen Sotilas took the moral position of older and wiser men who implicitly claimed to possess the knowledge and power to judge young soldiers in this respect. Any critique or resistance against the methods of military service was dismissed and ridiculed as evidence of immaturity or lack of toughness. “You know very well that perpetual whining does not befit a man, only women do that”, wrote an anonymous “Reservist” in 1935 – i.e. somebody claiming to already have done his military training. An “Open letter to my discontented son who is doing his military service” in 1929 delivered a paternal dressing-down to any reluctant conscript, claiming that the only cause for discontent with army life was a complete lack of “sense of duty”. The military, however, provided a healthy education in orderliness and the fulfilling of one’s duties, taking one’s place in the line “like every honourable man”.
This immaturity of the Finnish conscript was sometimes described as not only a matter of individual development, but also associated with traits of backwardness in Finnish culture and society, which could, however, be compensated for both in individuals and the whole nation by the salubrious effects of military training. It was a recurring notion that Finns in layers of society without proper education had an inclination to tardiness, slackness and quarrelsomeness. This echoed concerns over negative traits in the Finnish national character that had increased ever since the nationalist mobilisation against the Russian “oppression” encountered popular indifference. The spread of socialism, culminating in the rebellion of 1918, made the Finnish people seem ever more undisciplined and inclined to envy, distrustfulness and deranged fanaticism in the eyes of the educated elites. In an article published in 1919, Arvi Korhonen (1897–1967), a history student and future professor who had participated in the Jäger movement as a recruiter, complained about the indolence and lack of proficiency and enterprise of people in the Finnish countryside.
(Source: http://www.hum.utu.fi/oppiaineet/yleine ... honen.jpeg)
Arvi Korhonen: History Student, History Professor and WW2 Intelligence Officer
Korhonen called for military discipline and order as a remedy for these cultural shortcomings. “Innumerable are those cases where military service has done miracles. Lazybones have returned to their home district as energetic men, and the bosses of large companies say they can tell just from work efficiency who has been a soldier.” Korhonen claimed that similar observations were common enough – he was evidently thinking of either experiences from the “old” conscript army in Finland or from other countries – to show that “the army’s educational importance is as great as its significance for national defence.” Another variation on this theme ascribed a kind of primordial and unrefined vitality to Finnish youngsters, which had to be shaped or hardened by military training in order to result in conduct and become useful for society. The trainer of the Finnish Olympic wrestling team Armas Laitinen wrote an article in this vein in 1923, explaining why the military service was a particularly suitable environment to introduce conscripts to wrestling: “Almost without exception, healthy conscripts arrive to the ranks and care of the army. The simple youngsters of backwoods villages arrive there to fulfil their civic duty, children of the wilds and remote hamlets, whose cradle stood in the middle of forests where they grew to men, healthy, rosy-cheeked and sparkling with zest for life. In the hard school of the army they are brought up to be men, in the true sense of the word, and that common Finnish sluggishness and listlessness is ground away. Swiftness, moderation and above all vigour are imprinted on these stiff tar stumps and knotty birch stocks. They gradually achieve their purpose – readiness. The army has done its great work. A simple child of the people has grown up to a citizen aware of his duty, in which the conscious love of nationalism has been rooted forever.”
Jäger lieutenant and student of theology Kalervo Groundstroem (1894–1966) was even less respectful towards the recruits when he depicted the personal benefits of military training in 1919. In the army, he wrote, everything is done rapidly and without any loitering, “which can feel strange especially for those from the inner parts of the country”.
(Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... alervo.jpg)
Jääkärikapteeni Kalervo Groundstroem: Lauri Kalervo Groundstroem myöh. Kurkiala (16. marraskuuta 1894 Längelmäki - 26. joulukuuta 1966.
“It is very salutary that many country boys, who all their lives have just been laying comfortably next to the fireplace, at last get a chance to rejuvenate and slim themselves. And we can only truly rejoice that numerous bookworms and spoilt, sloppy idlers get an airing by doing field service. Barracks life and the healthy influence of comradeship rub off smallmindedness, selfishness, vanity and other “sharp edges” in a young man’s character”, claimed Groundstroem. Military training is therefore “a useful preparation for future life.” Moving in step with others, the soldiers acquire a steady posture, their gaze is strengthened, their skin gets the right colour, they always have a healthy appetite, and flabby muscles are filled out and tightened. The finest result of this education, however, is the “unflinching sense of duty” it brings forth. The “sense of duty” mentioned in many of the quotes above stands out as the most important shared quality or virtue of the ideal soldier and citizen. From this military and civic virtue, the other characteristics of a good soldier and a good citizen quoted so far could be derived, such as self-restraint, a spirit of sacrifice, order and discipline, punctuality and exactitude in the performance of assigned tasks, unselfishness and submitting to the collective good, etc. The writers in Suomen Sotilas usually positioned themselves through their storys as superior to the readers in knowing what duty meant and hence entitled, indeed obliged, to educate the readers, who were positioned as thoughtless yet corrigible youngsters. In the constory of Suomen Sotilas, references to “a sense of duty” conveyed a message to the individual man that he needed to submit himself and his actions in the service of something higher and larger than his own personal desires and pleasures – submit to the army discipline and to the hardships and dangers of soldiering.
The Finnish Army faced enormous challenges in the interwar years. It was supposed to organise and prepare for defending the country against vastly superior Russian forces. It had to train whole generations of young Finnish men into skilled soldiers and equip them for combat. Furthermore, it was expected to turn these men into the kind of highly motivated, patriotic, self-motivated and self-sacrificing modern national warriors envisioned by the Jägers and other officers in the younger generation. The starting point was none too promising, due to the criticism and scepticism in the political arena towards protracted military service within the cadre army system. Many conscripts from a working class background had all too probably seized on at least some of the socialists’ anti-militaristic or even pacifistic agitation against armies in general and bourgeois cadre armies in particular. Neither could conscripts from the areas of society supporting the Agrarian Party be expected to arrive at the barracks unprejudiced and open-minded. Although conscripts from families who were small freeholders usually supported the Civil Guards, they were not necessarily positive about military service within the cadre army, especially during the first years of its existence. In consequence, a majority of the conscripts, particularly in the 1920’s, could be expected to have an “attitude problem”. Some of the greatest challenges facing the conscript army were therefore to prove its efficiency as a military training organisation, convince suspicious conscripts and doubtful voters of its commitment to democracy, and demonstrate its positive impact on conscripts.
Although it was often claimed that military training as such would foster mature and responsible citizens – giving the conscripts discipline, obedience and punctuality as well as instilling consideration for the collective interest – officers and pro-defence nationalists with educationalist inclinations did not place their trust in close-order drill and field exercises alone. More had to be done. From the point of view of army authorities and other circles supportive of the regular army, there was an urgent need to “enlighten” the conscript soldiers. They had to be “educated” into adopting a positive attitude towards not only military service and the cadre army system, but also towards their other civic duties within the new “white” national state. This Post examines the attempts of officers, military priests and educationalists to offer the conscripts images of soldiering that would not only make conscripts disciplined, motivated and efficient soldiers, but also help the conscript army overcome its “image problems” and help the nation overcome its internal divisions. The Post’s focus is therefore not on the methods or practices of the educational efforts directed at the conscripts in military training, but on the ideological contents of these efforts, mainly as manifested in the intertwined representations of soldiering and citizenship in the army’s magazine for soldiers Suomen Sotilas (Finland’s Soldier).
Civic education and the Suomen Sotilas magazine
The 1919 report produced by a committee appointed by the Commander of the Armed Forces to organise the “spiritual care” of the conscripted soldiers expressed both the concerns felt over the soldiers’ attitude towards their military service and the solutions envisioned. The report stressed the importance in modern war of “the civil merit of an army, its spiritual strength”. In the light of “recent events” the committee pointed to the risks of arming men without making sure that they had those civil merits – a reference to the Civil War, perhaps, or to the participation of conscripted soldiers in the recent communist revolutions in Russia, Germany and other Central European countries. The report stated, “the stronger the armed forces are technically, the greater the danger they can form to their own country in case of unrest, unless they are inspired by high patriotic and moral principles that prevent them from surrendering to support unhealthy movements within the people”. The committee members – two military priests, two Jäger officers and one elementary school inspector – saw the remedy as teaching the conscripts basic knowledge about the fatherland and its history, giving those who lacked elementary education basic skills in reading, writing and mathematics, and providing the soldiers with other “spiritual pursuits”, which mainly meant various religious services. Quoting the commander of the armed forces, General K.F. Wilkama, the committee supported the notion that the army should be a “true institution of civic education”. Its optimistic report expressed a remarkably strong faith in the educational potential of military service:
These educational aspirations should be seen not only within the framework of not only the military system, but also as a part of the ngoing concerns among the Finnish educated classes over the civic education and political loyalties of the working class ever since the end of the nineteenth century. Urbanisation, industrialisation and democratisation made the perceived “irrationality” and “uncivilised” state of the masses seem ever more threatening to the elite. In
face of the pressure towards “Russification” during the last decades of Russian rule, and the subsequent perceived threat from Soviet Russia, this anxiety over social upheaval was translated into an anxiety over national survival. Historian Pauli Arola has argued that the attempt by Finnish politicians to introduce compulsory elementary education in 1907 – after decades of political debate, but only one year after universal franchise was introduced – should be seen within the constory of these feelings of threat. Once the “common people” had the vote, educating them into “loyalty” in accordance with the upper classes’ notions of the “nation” and its existing social order became a priority. Resistance from imperial authorities stopped the undertaking in 1907, but Finnish educationalists continued to propagate for increased civic education through-out the school system.
The civil war only intensified the urgency of the educated elite’s agenda of educating the rebellious elements among the Finnish people. The intellectuals of “white” Finland described these as primitive, brutal, even bestial, hooligans who for lack of discipline and culture had become susceptible to Russian influences and given free rein to the worst traits in the Finnish national character. There was a special concern over children from socialist environments and the orphan children of red guardsmen who had died in the war or perished in the prison camps. When compulsory education was finally introduced in 1921, the curriculum for schools in rural districts, where most Finns then lived, was strongly intent on conserving the established social order. It idealised traditional country life in opposition to “unsound” urbanisation and emphasised the teaching of Christian religion and domestic history. In the same spirit, civic education was from the outset included in the training objectives of the conscript army. “Enlightenment lectures”, also called “citizen education”, were incorporated in the conscripts’ weekly programme. These lectures were sometimes given by officers, but mainly by military priests (who were also assigned the duty of teaching illiterate conscripts to read and write. As elementary schooling was only made compulsory in 1921, the army throughout the interwar period received conscripts who had never attended elementary school. The share of illiterate conscripts was however only 1–2%, peaking in 1923 and thereafter rapidly declining. Nevertheless, in 1924 elementary teaching still took up ten times as many working hours for the military priests as their “enlightenment work”). In 1925, the Commander of the armed forces issued a detailed schedule for these lectures. The conscripts should be given 45 hours of lectures on the “history of the fatherland”, 25 hours on civics, 12 hours on Finnish literary history and 10 hours of lectures on “temperance and morality”. Taken together, roughly two working weeks during the one-year military service were consequently allocated for civic education. In addition, the pastoral care of the soldiers, in the form of evening prayers and divine service both in the garrisons and training camps, was seen as an important part of “enlightening” soldiers. A consciousness of the nation’s past and religious piety were evidently een as the two main pillars of patriotism, law-abidingness and loyalty to the existing social order. (The dean of the military priests Artur Malin presented the ongoing civic education work in the army in an article in the Suomen Sotilas magazine in 1923. He listed the following subjects: reading, writing, mathematics, geography, history, civics, natural history, singing, handicraft and temperance education).
The Army’s Magazine for Soldiers
In most army garrisons and camps, local female volunteers provided a service club or “Soldiers’ home”. These establishments offered coffee, lemonade and bakeries, but also intellectual stimulus in the form of newspapers, magazines and small libraries. Any socialist or otherwise “unpatriotic” publications were unthinkable in these recreational areas where the conscripts spent much of their leisure hours. However, one of the publications the conscripts would most certainly find at the “Soldiers’ Home”, if it wasn’t already distributed to the barracks, was the weekly magazine Suomen Sotilas (Finland’s Soldier). This illustrated magazine contained a mixture of editorials on morality, military virtues and the dangers of Bolshevism, entertaining military adventure stories, and articles on different Finnish military units, sports within the armed forces, military history, weaponry and military technology. There were reviews on recommended novels and open letters from “concerned fathers” or “older soldiers”, exhorting the conscripts to exemplary behaviour, as well as a dedicated page for cartoons and jokes about military life. The interwar volumes of Suomen Sotilas serve as a good source on the “enlightenment” and “civic education” directed at the conscript soldiers within the military system. Through its writers, the magazine was intimately connected with the command of the armed forces, yet formally it was published by an independent private company.
The editors in chief were literary historian Ilmari Heikinheimo (1919–1922), student of law and later Professor of Law Arvo Sipilä (1922–1925), M.A. Emerik Olsoni (1926) and army chaplain, later Dean of the Army Chaplains Rolf Tiivola (1927–1943). Important writers who were also Jäger officers were Veikko Heikinheimo, military historian and Director of the Cadet School Heikki Nurmio, Army Chaplains Hannes Anttila and Kalervo Groundstroem, as well as Aarne Sihvo, Director of the Military Academy and later Commander of the Armed Forces. Articles on new weaponry and military technology were written by several Jäger officers in the first years the magazine was published; a.o. Lennart Oesch, Eino R. Forsman [Koskimies], Verner Gustafsson, Bertel Mårtensson, Väinö Palomäki, Lars Schalin, Arthur Stenholm [Saarmaa], Kosti Pylkkänen and Ilmari Järvinen. All of these officers had successful military careers, reaching the rank of Lieutenant Colonel or higher. In the last number of the first volume of 1919, the editors published the photographs of 13 of the magazine’s “most eager collaborators”. Out of these 13, nine were officers, five were Jäger officers. The five civilians were a Master of Arts, two Doctors of Philosophy and one clergyman.
The initiative for starting the magazine originally came from the war ministry and the contents of each number were initially examined before publication by ministry officials. In 1919–1921, the magazine was published by a small publishing house for popular enlightenment, Edistysseurojen (as this publisher went bankrupt in 1923, the editors formed a public limited company, ‘Kustannus Oy Suomen Mies’ (~Finland’s Man Publishing Company Ltd.) which took over the magazine. On the tenth anniversary of the magazine’s founding, its chief accountant complained that the state had not subsidised the magazine at all in 1919–1925 and then only granted a minimal subsidy) and regular writers were mostly nationalist officers of the younger generation, many of them either Jäger officers or military priests. Civilians – professional authors, historians, educators and clergymen – also wrote for the magazine, but usually more occasionally rather than regularly. In spite of different backgrounds and experiences, the contributors had a lot in common; they were generally educated middle-class men who shared a staunchly non-socialist and nationalist political outlook. Contributions from female authors were not unheard of, but rarely occurred. Although the magazine was meant to be published weekly, it was published fortnightly over several long periods. The support of private business was important for its economy, both through advertising revenue and gift subscriptions to the military units paid for by defence-friendly businessmen. The magazine started out with a circulation of 4 000 in 1919 and rose to over 12,000 by mid-1920. This caused the editors to proudly exclaim: “Now it can be said with certainty that Suomen Sotilas falls into the hands of every soldier and civil guardsman.” After the magazine’s first 18 months these rather frequent notices on the circulation ceased to appear, probably indicating that the circulation had started to decline. Originally aimed at a readership of both conscripts and civic guards, the magazine had to give in to the tough competition from other magazines for Suojeluskuntas readership after a few years. It then concentrated on being the army’s magazine for soldiers.
The contents of Suomen Sotilas not only express the hopes and objectives of some of the same people who were in charge of training and educating the conscripted soldiers, but also their concerns and fears with regard to conscripts. In its first number, the editors of Suomen Sotilas proclaimed that the ambition of the magazine was to “make the men in the ranks good human beings, good citizens and good soldiers”. Its writings should serve “general civic education and completely healthy spiritual development” and strive towards “the fatherland in its entirety becoming dear to and worth defending for our soldiers.” A concern about lacking patriotism or even hostility towards the national armed forces can, however, be read between these lines. This concern did not diminish much during the 1920’s, but was stated even more explicitly by the former editor-in-chief Arvo Sipilä (1898–1974) in the magazine’s tenth anniversary issue in
December 1928: “It is well known, that among the youths liable for military service there are quite a number of such persons for whom the cause of national defence has remained alien, not to speak of those, who have been exposed to influences from circles downright hostile to national defence. In this situation, it is the natural task of a soldiers’ magazine to guide these soldiers’ world of ideas towards a healthy national direction, in an objective and impartial way, to touch that part in their emotional life, which in every true Finnish heart is receptive to the concept of a common fatherland (…)”
The editors of Suomen Sotilas were painfully aware of the popular and leftist criticism of circumstances and abuses in the army throughout the 1920’s. In 1929 an editorial lamented, “the civilian population has become used to seeing the army simply as an apparatus of torture, the military service as both mentally and physically monotonous, the officers as beastlike, the [army’s] housekeeping and health care as downright primitive.” The same story greeted the recent PR drive of the armed forces, inviting the conscripts’ relatives into the garrisons for “family days”. There, the editorial claimed, they would see for themselves that circumstances were much better than rumour would have it. The initiative behind these “family days”, however, arose from the officers’ intense concerns over the popular image of the conscript army17 – concerns that were also mirrored in the pages of Suomen Sotilas (According to historian Veli-Matti Syrjö, the ”family days” was an initiative by Lieutenant-Colonel Eino R. Forsman. In his proposal, Forsman pointed out how an understanding between his regiment and the civilian population in its district was obstructed by popular ignorance).
Turning a Conscript into a Citizen-Soldier
In the autumn of 1922, the First Pioneer Battalion in the city of Viipuri arranged a farewell ceremony for those conscript soldiers who had served a full year and were now leaving the army. On this occasion, the top graduate of the Finnish Army’s civic education training gave an inspiring speech to his comrades. – At least, so it must have seemed to the officers listening to Pioneer Kellomäki’s address, since they had it printed in Suomen Sotilas for other soldiers around the country to meditate upon. This private told his comrades that the time they had spent together in the military might at times have felt arduous, yet “everything in life has its price, and this is the price a people has to pay for its liberty”. Moreover, he thought that military training had no doubt done the conscripts well, although it had often been difficult and disagreeable: “You leave here much more mature for life than you were when you arrived. Here, in a way, you have met the reality of life, which most of you knew nothing about as you grew up in your childhood homes. Here, independent action has often been demanded of you. You have been forced to rely on your own strengths and abilities. Thereby, your will has been fortified and your self-reliance has grown. In winning his own trust, a man wins a great deal. He wins more strength, more willpower and vigour, whereas doubt and shyness make a man weak and ineffective. You leave here both physically hardened and spiritually strengthened.” This talented young pioneer had managed to adopt a way of addressing his fellow soldiers that marked many ideological storys in Suomen Sotilas. He was telling them what they themselves had experienced and what it now meant to them, telling them who they were as citizens and soldiers. His speech made use of two paired concepts that often occurred in the interwar volumes of the magazine. He claimed that military education was a learning process where conscripts grew into maturity and furthermore, that the virtues of the good soldier, obtainable through military training, were also the virtues of a useful and successful citizen.
What supposedly happened to conscripts during their military service that made them “much more mature for life”? In the army, conscripts allegedly learned punctuality, obedience and order, “which is a blessing for all the rest of one’s life”. Sharing joys and hardships in the barracks taught equality and comradeship. “Here, there are no class differences.” The exercises, athletics and strict order in the military made the soldiers return “vigorous and polite” to their home districts, admired by other young people for their “light step and their vivid and attentive eye.” Learning discipline and obedience drove out selfishness from the young man and instilled in him a readiness to make sacrifices for the fatherland. The duress of military life hardened the soldier, strengthened his selfconfidence and made “mother’s boys into men with willpower and Stamina.” The thorough elementary and civic education in the army offered possibilities even for illiterates to succeed in life and climb socially (1929).24 The order, discipline, exactitude, cleanliness, considerateness, and all the knowledge and technical skills acquired in the military were a “positive capital” of “incalculable future benefit” for every conscript – there was “good reason to say that military service is the best possible school for every young man, it is a real school for men, as it has been called.” “If we had no military training, an immense number of our conscripts would remain good-for-nothings; slouching and drowsy beings hardly able to support themselves. [The army] is a good school and luckily every healthy young man has the opportunity to attend it.” (All quotes from various articles in Suomen Sotilas magazine).
It is noteworthy how the rhetoric in Suomen Sotilas about military service improving conscripts’s minds and bodies usually emphasised the civic virtues resulting from military training. Military education was said to develop characteristics in conscripts that were useful to themselves later in life and beneficial for civil society in general. Conscripts being discharged in 1922 were told that experience from the previous armed forces in Finland had proven that the sense of duty, exactitude and purposefulness in work learnt in military service ensured future success in civilian life as well. If the conscripts wanted to succeed in life, they should preserve the values and briskness they had learnt in the army, “in one word, you should still be soldiers”. Such rhetoric actually implied that the characteristics of a good soldier and a virtuous citizen were one and the same. As the recruit became a good soldier, he simultaneously developed into a useful patriotic citizen. The Finnish Army, an editorial in 1920 stated, “is an educational institution to which we send our sons with complete trust, in one of the decisive periods of their lives, to develop into good proper soldiers and at the same time honourable citizens. Because true military qualities are in most cases also most important civic qualities.” If the army fulfilled this high task well, the story continued, the millions spent in tax money and working hours withheld would not have been wasted, but would “pay a rich dividend.”
Storys in this vein were most conspicuous in Suomen Sotilas during the early 1920’s, as conscription was still a highly controversial issue and heated debates over the shaping of military service went on in parliament. In 1922, just when the new permanent conscription law was waiting for a final decision after the up-coming elections, an editorial in the magazine expressed great concerns over the possibly imminent shortening of military service. The editors blamed the “suspicious attitude” among the public towards the conscript army on negative prejudices caused by the old imperial Russian military. The contemporary military service, they claimed, was something quite different. It was a time when conscripts “become tame”, realised their duty as defenders of the fatherland, improved their behavior and were united across class borders as they came to understand and appreciate each other’s interests and opinions. All these positive expectations can be read as mirroring anxieties among the educated middle classes over continued class conflicts in the wake of the Civil War and the lack of patriotism and a “sense of duty” among conscripts in the working classes. The assurances that military service would inevitably induce the right, “white” kind of patriotism and civic virtue in conscripts and unite them in military comradeship appear to be fearful hopes in disguise.
As late as 1931, the conservative politician Paavo Virkkunen wrote in Suomen Sotilas that the bitterness “still smouldering in many people’s mind” after the events in 1918 had to give place for “positive and successful participation in common patriotic strivings”. He saw conscripts divided by political differences and hoped that they would be united by the common experience of military service, “a time of learning patriotic condition” and “a fertile period of brotherly
comradeship and spiritual confluence.”
(Image Sourced from http://www.eduskunta.fi/fakta/edustaja/kuvat/911749.jpg)
Paavo Virkkunen (27 September 1874, Pudasjärvi – 13 July 1959, Pälkäne) was a Finnish conservative politician. He was a member of the Finnish Party and was elected in the parliament in 1914, but joined the National Coalition Party (Kokoomus) in 1919. He was five times the Speaker of the Parliament. He became the chairman of the party in 1932 following the six year leadership of Kyösti Haataja.
Physical Education
Moral education and physical development were closely intertwined in the public portrayal of how military service improved conscripts. The military exercises, it was claimed, would make the conscripts’ bodies strong, healthy and proficient. In 1920, the committee for military matters in parliament made a statement about the importance for national security of physical education for conscripts. Pleading to the government to make greater efforts in this area, the committee pointed out how games, gymnastics and athletics not only generated the “urge for deeds, drive, toughness and readiness for military action” in the nation’s youth, but also developed discipline, self-restraint and a spirit of sacrifice. The conscript should be physically trained and prepared for a future war in the army, as well as being developed and disciplined into a moral, industrious and productive citizen. The militarily trained conscript, claimed Suomen Sotilas in 1920, was handsome and energetic, aesthetically balanced, harmonious, lithe and springy – unlike the purely civilian citizen, who was marked by clumsiness, stiff muscles and a shuffling gait.
According to Klaus U. Suomela, a leading figure in Finnish gymnastics writing in the magazine in 1923, the lack of proper military education and the hard toiling in agriculture and forestry had given many Finns a bad posture and unbalanced bodily proportions. Their arms, shoulders and backs were overdeveloped in relation to the lower extremities. Gymnastics to the pace of brisk commands as well as fast ball games and athletics would rectify these imperfections and force the Finns, “known to be sluggish in their thinking”, to speed up their mental activities, Suomela stated. He admitted that “the Finnish quarrelsomeness” would be worsened by individual sports, but this would be counteracted by group gymnastics and team games. Suomela seems to have viewed Finnish peasant boys from the vantage point of the athletic ideals of the educated classes, emphasising slenderness, agility and speed, and found them too “rough-hewn and marked by heavy labour”.
After independence and the Civil War, Finnish military and state authorities immediately saw a connection between security policy, public health and physical education. Officers and sports leaders debated how gymnastics and athletics formed the foundations for military education. Proposals to introduce military pre-education for boys in the school system were never realised, but physical education in elementary schools and the civil guards nonetheless emphasized competitive and physically tough sports in the 1920’s and 1930’. These “masculine” sports were thought to develop the strength and endurance needed for soldiering. Light gymnastics, on the other hand, were considered more appropriate for in schoolgirls, developing “feminine” characteristics such as bodily grace, nimbleness and adaptation to the surrounding group. Sports and athletics were given lavish attention in Suomen Sotilas.
The magazine reported extensively on all kinds of sports competitions within the armed forces, publishing detailed accounts and photographs of the victors. Sports were evidently assumed to interest the readership, but the editors also attached symbolical and political importance to sports as an arena of national integration. An editorial in 1920 claimed that in the army sports competitions, ”Finland’s men could become brothers” as officers and soldiers, workers and capitalists competed in noble struggle. “There is a miniature of Finland’s sports world such as we want to see it – man against man in comradely fight, forgetful of class barriers and class hate. May the soldiers take this true sporting spirit with them into civilian life when they leave military service.” Hopes were expressed that conscripts, permeated with a patriotic sense of duty after receiving their military education, would continue practicing sports and athletics in their home districts, not only to stay fit as soldiers and useful citizens, but also in order to spread models for healthy living and physical fitness among the whole people.
The Immaturity of Recruits
The rhetoric about the army as a place where boys became men and useful, responsible citizens required a denial of the maturity and responsibility of those who had not yet done their military service. The 21-year old recruits who arrived for military training, many of them after years of employment, often in physically demanding jobs requiring self-management and responsibility, were directly or indirectly portrayed as somehow less than men, as immature youngsters who had not yet developed either the physique or the mind of a real man. In this constory, the writers in Suomen Sotilas took the moral position of older and wiser men who implicitly claimed to possess the knowledge and power to judge young soldiers in this respect. Any critique or resistance against the methods of military service was dismissed and ridiculed as evidence of immaturity or lack of toughness. “You know very well that perpetual whining does not befit a man, only women do that”, wrote an anonymous “Reservist” in 1935 – i.e. somebody claiming to already have done his military training. An “Open letter to my discontented son who is doing his military service” in 1929 delivered a paternal dressing-down to any reluctant conscript, claiming that the only cause for discontent with army life was a complete lack of “sense of duty”. The military, however, provided a healthy education in orderliness and the fulfilling of one’s duties, taking one’s place in the line “like every honourable man”.
This immaturity of the Finnish conscript was sometimes described as not only a matter of individual development, but also associated with traits of backwardness in Finnish culture and society, which could, however, be compensated for both in individuals and the whole nation by the salubrious effects of military training. It was a recurring notion that Finns in layers of society without proper education had an inclination to tardiness, slackness and quarrelsomeness. This echoed concerns over negative traits in the Finnish national character that had increased ever since the nationalist mobilisation against the Russian “oppression” encountered popular indifference. The spread of socialism, culminating in the rebellion of 1918, made the Finnish people seem ever more undisciplined and inclined to envy, distrustfulness and deranged fanaticism in the eyes of the educated elites. In an article published in 1919, Arvi Korhonen (1897–1967), a history student and future professor who had participated in the Jäger movement as a recruiter, complained about the indolence and lack of proficiency and enterprise of people in the Finnish countryside.
(Source: http://www.hum.utu.fi/oppiaineet/yleine ... honen.jpeg)
Arvi Korhonen: History Student, History Professor and WW2 Intelligence Officer
Korhonen called for military discipline and order as a remedy for these cultural shortcomings. “Innumerable are those cases where military service has done miracles. Lazybones have returned to their home district as energetic men, and the bosses of large companies say they can tell just from work efficiency who has been a soldier.” Korhonen claimed that similar observations were common enough – he was evidently thinking of either experiences from the “old” conscript army in Finland or from other countries – to show that “the army’s educational importance is as great as its significance for national defence.” Another variation on this theme ascribed a kind of primordial and unrefined vitality to Finnish youngsters, which had to be shaped or hardened by military training in order to result in conduct and become useful for society. The trainer of the Finnish Olympic wrestling team Armas Laitinen wrote an article in this vein in 1923, explaining why the military service was a particularly suitable environment to introduce conscripts to wrestling: “Almost without exception, healthy conscripts arrive to the ranks and care of the army. The simple youngsters of backwoods villages arrive there to fulfil their civic duty, children of the wilds and remote hamlets, whose cradle stood in the middle of forests where they grew to men, healthy, rosy-cheeked and sparkling with zest for life. In the hard school of the army they are brought up to be men, in the true sense of the word, and that common Finnish sluggishness and listlessness is ground away. Swiftness, moderation and above all vigour are imprinted on these stiff tar stumps and knotty birch stocks. They gradually achieve their purpose – readiness. The army has done its great work. A simple child of the people has grown up to a citizen aware of his duty, in which the conscious love of nationalism has been rooted forever.”
Jäger lieutenant and student of theology Kalervo Groundstroem (1894–1966) was even less respectful towards the recruits when he depicted the personal benefits of military training in 1919. In the army, he wrote, everything is done rapidly and without any loitering, “which can feel strange especially for those from the inner parts of the country”.
(Source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... alervo.jpg)
Jääkärikapteeni Kalervo Groundstroem: Lauri Kalervo Groundstroem myöh. Kurkiala (16. marraskuuta 1894 Längelmäki - 26. joulukuuta 1966.
“It is very salutary that many country boys, who all their lives have just been laying comfortably next to the fireplace, at last get a chance to rejuvenate and slim themselves. And we can only truly rejoice that numerous bookworms and spoilt, sloppy idlers get an airing by doing field service. Barracks life and the healthy influence of comradeship rub off smallmindedness, selfishness, vanity and other “sharp edges” in a young man’s character”, claimed Groundstroem. Military training is therefore “a useful preparation for future life.” Moving in step with others, the soldiers acquire a steady posture, their gaze is strengthened, their skin gets the right colour, they always have a healthy appetite, and flabby muscles are filled out and tightened. The finest result of this education, however, is the “unflinching sense of duty” it brings forth. The “sense of duty” mentioned in many of the quotes above stands out as the most important shared quality or virtue of the ideal soldier and citizen. From this military and civic virtue, the other characteristics of a good soldier and a good citizen quoted so far could be derived, such as self-restraint, a spirit of sacrifice, order and discipline, punctuality and exactitude in the performance of assigned tasks, unselfishness and submitting to the collective good, etc. The writers in Suomen Sotilas usually positioned themselves through their storys as superior to the readers in knowing what duty meant and hence entitled, indeed obliged, to educate the readers, who were positioned as thoughtless yet corrigible youngsters. In the constory of Suomen Sotilas, references to “a sense of duty” conveyed a message to the individual man that he needed to submit himself and his actions in the service of something higher and larger than his own personal desires and pleasures – submit to the army discipline and to the hardships and dangers of soldiering.
ex Ngāti Tumatauenga ("Tribe of the Maori War God") aka the New Zealand Army
A Sense of History and a Spirit of Sacrifice
A Sense of History and a Spirit of Sacrifice
A vast array of storys and pictures in Suomen Sotilas were intent on conveying a sense of national history and military traditions to the readers. The magazine abounded with histories of Finnish military units and tales of battles and campaigns where Finns had fought, all the way from the times of the national epic Kalevala and the Iron Age up until the Liberation War and the Heimosodat (Kinship Wars) of 1918–1922. The stories of the hakkapeliitta Finnish cavalrymen of Gustavus II, the Finnish soldiers of Charles XII, the soldiers and officers of the Finnish War 1808–1809 as portrayed by Runeberg, and the Jägers and other heroes of 1918 were tirelessly retold. This national military heritage was iterated through different genres, both as factual military history and as fictional adventure stories. The recurrent theme was that Finns had always been good soldiers; strong, unyielding and fearless, who did not hesitate to sacrifice their lives for their military honour or their freedom.
According to Heikki Nurmio, who was a central figure both within military education and military historiography in the 1920’s, it was important to make the conscripts aware of these historical traditions since they were sources of “national military spirit and soldier virtues” for the young army. However, he balanced the glorification of Finnish soldierhood by pointing out that they illustrated both the strengths and the weaknesses of Finnish men as soldiers. In the same spirit, Olavi Uoma wrote that the 17th century hakkapeliitta cavalrymen had understood that the Finns’ many defeats in the border clashes with neighbouring peoples had derived from a spirit of passivity and defensiveness. For that reason the hakkapeliittas had assumed a “spirit of the offensive”, which they had left as an “invaluable heritage” to their descendants. “The smaller our number, the more ruthlessly we have to attack, if we want to pull through”, enjoined Uoma of the readers, obviously trying to prepare them for confronting a Soviet attack.
Recurring references to the Finnish “forefathers” upheld a historical myth where these anonymous forefathers for hundreds of years had not only fought Swedes and Russians, but also striven for an independent state. One typical such story from 1929 put conscription in the constory of Finnish men fighting and prevailing over superior forces throughout the centuries. It related the words of a grandfather, explaining to his grandson about how the men of their home village resisted the Russian Cossacks in the past. The old man urges the boy to remember that their village has been burnt dozens of times by the Eastern enemies, “… and you can count by many hundreds the men of your tribe who over the centuries have sacrificed their lives to drive out the oppressors from this neck of the woods. The land we call our own was bought with the heart-blood of our fathers. A Finnish man will not bear a foreign yoke and nothing but death breaks his perseverance. (…) You too, my boy, will grow up to be a man and then you should know what you are obliged to by the deeds of the fathers of your tribe. Foreign feet must not trample the land that for centuries has drunk the blood of men defending their freedom.”
Ardent Finnish nationalists in the interwar period thought Finland had now regained an independence lost in the dark Middle Ages to conquering Swedes and later Russians. For many zealots, “the political situation emerging in 1917–1918 was a return to an ancient, ethnic truth”. Although the idea of a Great National Past lost some of the heated intellectual topicality it had had during the decades before independence, it reached new levels of popularisation during the interwar period. Historical novels were a vogue in the 1930’s, accompanied by a multitude of new publications for boys presenting adventures in prehistorical and medieval Finland. The military aspects of the ancient Finns were made “a veritable trade mark of the republic” after independence. Warlikeness was made a predominant feature of ancient Finnish society in stories and visual representations in novels, magazines and even public monuments. The distant national past became “a fully militarised mirror of contemporary society” as the ancient Finns were portrayed as fighting the same battles that modern Finns were told to prepare themselves for. Incidentally, the magazine of the Lotta Svärd organisation contained similar representations of female heroes in the past (Seija-Leena Nevala, Lotta Svärd-aikakauslehti isänmaallisille naisille vuosina 1929–1939, Unpublished Master’s thesis).
Using history to challenge and encourage Conscripts
The militarised portrayal of the nation’s past was used to put the magazine’s readers under a moral obligation to honour their forefathers’ sacrifices by continuing their heroic struggle. Making a rather liberal interpretation of historical facts, Heikki Nurmio in 1924 portrayed the fight for national freedom as a historical mission, which had to be made clear to the conscripts through historical education: “With the roar of thunder, these [historical memories] speak immense volumes to us about Finland’s centuries-long struggle towards freedom and national independence, a struggle for which generation after generation, towns and countryside, noblemen, clergymen, peasants and the poorest tenant farmers and workmen of the backwoods in ancient times have uncompromisingly sacrificed everything they had. Those passed-away generations demand the same of the present generation and knowledge of their destiny is the best way of making clear the historical mission of the Finnish people.”
In the pages of Suomen Sotilas, this mission was naturally centred on the duty of conscripts to do their military service without complaint and prepare to go to war if needed. There was a “tax to be paid”, in the form of military service, to the fore-fathers who had toiled and suffered to make the barren land fruitful and prepare a way for Finland’s freedom. The debt to the men of the past could, however, also be used for other moral appeals, such as calling for national unity after the divisive events of 1918. The memory of the deaths of the heroes of 1918 “binds each and every one of us to take care that their sacrifice is not allowed to go to waste”, claimed an article in 1921 bearing the headline “The Memory of the Heroes of Liberty” – “The memories of the freedom fight are the most sacred memories our people have; they have to be cherished and left as our heritage to coming generations, who have to be taught their holy obligation to likewise sacrifice all their strength for preserving Finland’s independence and freedom.”
These articles in effect presented an implicit challenge to conscripts. In order to step into the timeless chain of Finnish history, they had to do what their fore-fathers had done, dare what they had dared, sacrifice what they had sacrificed. “Is the present military service really such a heavy burden that the present youth, parading its sports activities, cannot bear it upright, or were our fore-fathers after all of hardier stock in spite of the lack of sports?” scorned an “Uncle” in 1931. Through the portrayal of the forefathers as indomitable warriors, defending the land that they had cleared and tilled through tireless labour, a standard for “real” Finnish soldiers was set and the conscripts were challenged to demonstrate that they met this standard: “We read stories about men, who have died smiling knowing that they have done a service to the country they love. Conscripts! We don’t want to be inferior to them, because this land and this people are dear to us too. We do as our forefathers have done, like all real men in the world have done and always will do, we fight for the country and the people when it is in peril.
This standard was even sometimes given a name: “the spirit of the fathers”. A 1920 short story by Jäger Captain Kaarle Massinen told about an old man who gave a real scolding to the Red Guards confiscating his land during the Civil War. The old man called the guardsmen “sluggards” and stated that they never would have bothered to work those fields the way he had done. “The spirit of the fathers, the Finnish farmer who had always lived free from serfdom, had erupted like a volcano”, Massinen declared and suddenly turned to address the reader: “Finland’s soldier, you, who labour in the barracks, sometimes at your rifle, sometimes over a book, does the spirit of the fathers live in you?” Many of the stories about the forefathers’ valour and the spirit of the fathers also encouraged conscripts, assuring them that they did have what it took to be a warrior. The story quoted above, calling out to conscripts “we don’t want to be inferior to them”, actually continued by urging the reader to “let your best inner voice speak to you, let your natural, inherited instincts affect you”. Then, claims the author, you will “assuredly” find the courage and willingness to defend this country. The “spirit of the fathers” was thus portrayed as not only a model and example for present generations, but as somehow inherent in Finnish men.
An anonymous “Jäger”, writing an editorial for Suomen Sotilas in 1935, claimed that the “spirit of the fathers” had aroused the “mighty White Army” in 1918 and restored order, safety, legality and freedom to the country. He described this spirit as both “solemn and binding” and a “firm and lasting heritage”, descending all the way from the battles of the Thirty-Years War and the Great Nordic War, indeed from the distant battles of “the age of sagas”. Yet this spirit, he explained, was not only a military spirit, but also the spirit of the peaceful work that had built the country. “That work has asked for fitness and skill, manliness and grandness just as much as defending the country.” Again, we that the very same spirit that had made the forefathers such formidable warriors had allegedly also been their driving force as they cleared and built the land. The success of Finnish athletes on international sports arenas during the 1920’s and 1930’s were used in Suomen Sotilas in the same way as the feats of the mythic forefathers; to convey a sense of a national community characterised by the physical and psychic qualities demonstrated by these sports heroes. Niilo Sigell wrote that the Finnish athletes who won several medals in the Olympic Games in Antwerp in 1920 were expressions of “the toughness, endurance, strength and vigour of our tribe” and “the force and power of character that has transformed the grim wildernesses of the north into abodes of human cultivation and endured hard times of war, hunger and pestilence”. In these athletes, Sigell found the same national character that had manifested itself in the heroes of the Thirty Years War or the Liberation War.
A story about the Finnish achievements in the Olympics in 1924 pointed to the “healthy life in the countryside” where most Finns still resided and referred to the Finns as a people that had “toiled in woodlands and skied through wildernesses”. Connecting the Finnish nature, landscape and climate with the national character, sports achievements and military virtues, these writings evidently aimed at infusing the readers with pride and confidence in the inherent strength of their people, implying the Finns could fend off a quantitatively superior enemy by virtue of their superior quality as soldiers. Writer and historian Jalmari Finne even explained the extraordinary bravery of Finnish men in battle, throughout the centuries, as deriving from the tranquil life of a nation of farmers. The sedate life and taciturnity of the Finns, he explained, built up a storage of strength and energy waiting for a discharge. “An opportunity to fight has been like a relief. … Battle is the place where a Finn feels all his inner strength blossoming, a moment of rejoicing. … Bravery, the highest and most beautiful expression of manliness, is in the Finn’s blood and only needs an opportunity [to emerge] and then it seems to astonish other [peoples].”
When historian Einar Juvelius introduced a new series of articles on Finnish history in 1920, he expressed his hope that the commencing series would encourage young soldiers to acquaint themselves with their forefathers’ “unwavering readiness and irrepressible faith in the future – the same readiness and faith that the Fatherland now awaits from its every son.” And we have already seen the how the “spirit of the fathers”, “awakening” in 1918, was declared to be the same spirit that motivated the Finnish fore-fathers in ages long past. “Our military service is like children’s play compared to what the Jägers had to endure”, a conscripted probationary officer wrote in a letter to the magazine in 1931, “– although both are motivated by the same purpose, the same feeling, the same trend of ideas, the same call.”
Self-restraint and the terrible moral dangers of military life
Less than a year and a half had passed since the end of his campaigns as a Jäger, when second lieutenant and theology graduate Hannes Anttila published an article in Suomen Sotilas in the early autumn of 1919. The story, entitled “The enemy lurking in the dark”, opened with an eerie story about a soldier volunteering for night reconnaissance into enemy territory. It is his first patrol service, and as the soldiers move into the dark night, the protagonist is struck by terror. After a short struggle with himself, he manages to overcome his fear. “… I dare not go back now. I am a soldier, a Finnish soldier. Come injury, come death! Forward I will go, until the mission is accomplished! (…) And you went. And you returned, returned as a man in the eyes of your relatives and your fatherland. You did not shun the danger, even if it terrified you. You fulfilled your duty, even if it felt heavy. And that is why you did a man’s work.” At this point, Anttila’s story makes a sudden jump to an evening leave in a garrison town in peacetime. There too, we are told, an enemy is lurking in the dark: “the sin of immorality” and its consequences, venereal disease. Even if the incautious soldier would be lucky enough to not catch an infection, he will certainly “desecrate his soul” if he does not turn back in time. If you commit this sin, Anttila asks the reader, can you then look your mother, your sister, your wife or your fiancée in the eye with the same honesty as before? Anttila’s final appeal is written in the second person singular, addressing the reader like a priest in the pulpit addresses his congregation: “Are you, my reader, really so weak that you cannot restrain your own lusts? … Should you one day become the father of a family? Think what miserable creatures your children will be if you splurge the holy creative powers of your youth in the whirls of licentiousness … Mother Finland needs the stout arms of her every son to help her at this moment. Are you, my reader, a support and security to your fatherland or are you a burden and dead encumbrance? If you stray the city streets at nightfall with filthy thoughts in your mind, turn back, because that turning back is no shame to you but an honour! For he who conquers himself has won the greatest victory.”
“The enemy lurking in the dark” wove together a religiously conservative view of what was moral behavior together with a number of different images: the courageous warrior, the son, the brother, the husband, the father and the patriotic citizen. An analogy was made between the warrior overcoming his fear before battle and the young man struggling to overcome his carnal desires. Honour and manliness demanded facing the two kinds of danger with equal courage,
overcoming one’s instincts and emotions through willpower and a sense of duty.
Hannes Anttila and other “moralist” writers in Suomen Sotilas used a rhetorical technique associating unwanted behaviour with weakness and unmanliness, while the wished-for behaviour in conscripts was associated with image of the courageous warrior. They evidently did not think it would make a sufficient impression on the conscripts to tell them to behave in a certain manner because it was the “Christian” or “moral” thing to do. Instead, they tried to draw on the readers’ notions of manliness. They obviously thought that the threat of being labelled as weak in the eyes of their comrades would have a stronger effect on the rakes and lechers among the soldiers than just being branded as debauched. Perhaps they thought that “well-behaved” conscripts were best helped in the rough military environment if they were told that doing the morally right thing was also the mark of a true warrior. Such explicitly moralising storys, often but not always written by military priests, formed a significant subspecies among the rich variety of storys in Suomen Sotilas, especially during its first half-decade. Although these writings seldom referred explicitly to Christianity and religious decrees, they can nevertheless be associated with the trend of ‘muscular Christianity’ that arose towards the end of the nineteenth century in countries with an important cultural influence on Finland, such as England, Germany and Sweden. Muscular Christianity associated Christian morality was with strength and other stereotypical characteristics. This kind of rhetoric was also used by for example moral reformists in Finland opposing prostitution around the turn of the nineteenth century.
As we have seen, there were widespread moral concerns about the new military system in Finland, even in circles far removed from socialist antimilitarism. Drinking and sexual contacts with women in the garrison towns, behaviours which from a strictly military point of view were health hazards rather than anything else, were more profoundly worrying from a religious perspective, as were the rude language and indecent marching songs favoured not only by the rank-and-file but many officers as well. In Great Britain, Germany and Sweden, Christian revivalists founded recreation centres for soldiers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, an era of expanding mass armies and international armaments race, not least out of concern over the sinfulness spreading in the military training centres. The “old” Finnish Army’s magazine for soldiers in the Russian era, the bilingual Lukemisia Suomen Sotamiehille/Läsning för den Finske Soldaten (Readings for the Finnish Soldier, 1888–1902) contained writings depicting the barracks of the Finnish conscripted troops as places where innocent conscripts from the countryside were introduced to all kinds of vices. These moral concerns resurfaced when conscription was reintroduced in 1918-1919. For example, the dean of the military priests received a letter in 1921from the vicar of a rural congregation where worried parents had held a meeting to discuss the immoral influence of army life on their boys. Swearing, drinking, prostitutes roaming the garrison areas, and “the great dangers of immorality and the corruption of morals in bodily and spiritual respect” were mentioned in the letter.
The military priests, responsible for both the moral and civic education of the conscripts, shared the popular view of military life as potentially debauching conscripts. According to Regiment Pastor Verneri Louhivuori, ”that roughness which is characteristic to men” was multiplied in military life due to the absence of softening “counter-forces”. The military environment, he wrote, could become an ordeal for those who did not want to be brutalised. Jäger officer and theology student Kalervo Groundstroem warned of the “dangers of barracks life” in 1919. The military comradeship, which he himself in the previous article had celebrated as “a good educator”, could also be a breeding ground of “all things base and infamous”, Groundstroem wrote, hinting at soldiers’ contacts with prostitutes. The recruit, new to these surroundings, was especially susceptible to bad influences. These moralists evidently espoused the contemporary middle-class notions of morality.
The year spent in all-male company during the military service was supposed to make men out of boys and teach them to function as part of a group. Yet even in the army’s own magazine, the single-sex environment was at the same time seen as potentially detrimental to conscripts’s moral and ultimately their physical health – especially in a largely still rural country where country boys for the first time moved to live in a larger city, with all its temptations. In the voew of the “moralists,” the celebrated military comradeship could suddenly be seen in terms of a worrying tendency of conscripts to go with the crowd – a moral weakness that was contrasted to the lonely but champions of righteousness among the soldiers.
The Virtue of Self-Restraint
Towards the early 1930’s, the number of explicitly moralising writings diminished in Suomen Sotilas. Such storys were usually no longer published as editorials, but appeared in less prominent sections of the magazine, such as the Letters to the Editor pages. This could be an indication of sentiments calming down, as the conscript army slowly became established. Alternately, it could indicate a rhetorical shift where the older and somewhat condescending moral exhortations came to be understood as old-fashioned or counterproductive. What did not change in the “moral” agenda of Suomen Sotilas throughout the period, however, was the focus on the allegedly virtue of self-restraint. The emphasis on self-control is familiar from nineteenth century western bourgeois moralising. In Swedish nineteenth century self-improvement books for bourgeois youngsters and autobiographies by old bourgeois men, building astrong character was offered as the proper road towards manliness and the only way for a young man to avoid the pitfalls of his passions. Character, a vague term equivalent to moral principles in general, was in these moralizing works seen as a hidden potentiality in all men; part of the true individual and the effect of hard, enduring work. The “moralists” claimed that conscripts must withstand the passions and temptations of youth and build a strong character in order to become successful.
In the moral teachings of Suomen Sotilas, however, character, or the idea of having or striving for a permanent strength of will and morals, was not a central concept. Instead, morality and self-restraint were mostly discussed in terms of a continuous fight and struggle, a battle that a man must ceaselessly wage against immorality, both in the society around him and within himself. There does not seem to be a notion of this struggle having a terminus in a strong character achieved once and for all. The moral struggle is rather portrayed as a life-long condition. A useful citizen had to live his whole life fighting against “viciousness, drunkenness and the bestiality hidden in human nature”; without continuous moral struggle “the core of national life” would eventually be corrupted by immorality. The reason for this might be the strong connection of Suomen Sotilas to Christian theology. If Suomen Sotilas is compared with its nineteenth century predecessor, Lukemisia Suomen Sotamiehille, one can certainly see that Christian ideals such as submissiveness, humility and repentance, predominant in the older magazine, are played down. In the interwar period, moral virtue is recast in terms of will-power and self-restraint, reflecting an ideal soldier who is also an enfranchised citizen and thus more “adult” and autonomous in comparison to the ideal humble imperial subject of the nineteenth century. God and religion as the foundations of moral behaviour in the nineteenth century magazine are largely replaced with appeals to the readers’ patriotism in the 1920’s and 1930’s.
Nevertheless, through the prominence of military priests among the magazine’s writers, Christian religion still runs like a thin but everpresent thread through Suomen Sotilas. Religion intertwines with patriotism as the basis of the Finnish citizen-soldier’s morality and virtue. It is a defining difference between the righteous Finnish nation-in-arms and its adversary, the godless Bolsheviks. This strong presence of Christian ideals and influences is also one reason why the ideal images of Finnish soldiers in Suomen Sotilas almost never become aggressive, but retain a “softness” almost surprising for a military magazine from the heydays of Finnish nationalism. Throughout the period the images of soldering in Suomen Sotilas and its portrayal of the military retain an aura of moral purity and noble-mindedness that certainly served to camouflage the ugly realities of militarisation, military life and modern warfare. At the same time, these images and ideology were strikingly different from the contemporary fascist movements in Europe.
The Military as “Protectors of the Finnish Nation”
Military educators writing in Suomen Sotilas tried to construct an ideal image of the military centred on a sense of duty, a spirit of sacrifice, and self-restraint. An important element in all these constructions, hidden in expressions such as “every decent man” or “like our fathers before us”, was an imagined sameness and community among all Finns, who did “what a man had to do” and valorously defended their country. To the extent that this brotherhood-in-arms was made up of a special category of people, united around and through their shared membership of the military, the citizen-soldiers’ conceptualized themselves as a group within the Finnish people, the “Protectors of the Finnish Nation.” This conceptualization was a central piece of the military’s self-image. Firstly, a great part of the Finnish nation was deemed incapable of bearing arms and therefore in need of the soldiers’ protection: women, the old and the young. Secondly, there were those who threatened the Finnish nation from outside, namely the Russians and Bolsheviks. Thirdly, a heterogeneous group of Finnish men was deemed capable of bearing arms, yet for varying reasons failed to fulfil this duty and therefore threatened the nation from the inside.
The relationship between the conscript and those he was to protect was usually depicted in terms of the obligations of a good son towards his parents, sisters and younger siblings, not in terms of a father and husband protecting the members of his household. This was perhaps natural, as the intended readership, the conscripts, were only 20–22 years old. However, it gives a particular flavour to the relationship between the citizen-soldier and those it was his duty to protect and die for. In storys about the “fathers” and “fore-fathers” in Suomen Sotilas it is the mature man, master of his house and household, who goes to war. In storys directly addressing the readers as conscripts, however, they are spoken to as sons of either their physical parents or the abstract nation – “the Fatherland” or “Mother Finland” – who only pass over the threshold to real manhood by preparing to go to war. In relation to those incapable of bearing arms, the conscripted soldier does not fight and die to defend his property and his own patriarchal position, but to serve his family and his society. He is motivated but also bound by filial obedience, love and gratitude. He essentially sets out to defend a power structure that is not dominated by him and his comrades but by their fathers. In those rather few instances where individual fathers appear in the magazine, they are often stern, rebuking or commanding figures, such as the “father” quoted above writing an open letter to his “discontented son” in military service, telling him he must develop a sense of duty to become a man. This is a father figure in front of which the young conscripted man is supposed to be ashamed to show himself “soft”, complaining about treatment in the army and of withdrawing from his civic duty.
The images of mothers in Suomen Sotilas, however, are more ambiguous. Mothers are always depicted as loving their sons immensely. Mostly, this love is depicted as good, selfless and beautiful. The iconic mother is a moral educator and the ideal soldier is bound to her by love, gratitude and filial duty. He wants to protect her and he wants her to be proud of him. Drawing on this particular mother-son relationship, Finland as a nation is sometimes referred to as Suomi-äiti, Mother Finland, signalling that the relationship of the soldier to the nation should be that of a loving son to his mother. In some other instances, however, mothers are criticised for spoiling their sons by being too pampering or too dominant. Being a “mother’s boy” was presented as shameful for a man, and a great deal of the blame was directed at the mother. The border line was thus subtle and sometimes blurred between the good mother, who educated and motivated the citizen-soldier, and the bad mother, who detained her son in infancy, prevents him from stepping into manhood and thus reverses the relationship between protector and protected.
Women as girlfriends, fiancées or wives of soldiers rarely appear in Suomen Sotilas. The writers apparently did not expect the 21–22 year-old conscript to have a girlfriend, fiancée or wife waiting at home. Neither did they want him to think much about how soldiering related to his future relationships with women. In some fictional short stories a woman as a potential future lover and wife appears a motivating force for the soldier, spurring the hesitant soldier into battle, giving him a reason to resist the vices of garrison towns, or punishing the coward or traitor by refusing him her love. In general, however, the absence of female characters in the magazine’s pages is remarkable. It seems to underline the moral and religious beliefs of the writers for Suomen Sotilas, with the absence and exclusion of women from the writers perception of everyday life of conscripted soldiers in the garrisons reflecting what they wanted to believe, rather than what was more likely the reality of garrison life (soldiers being soldiers….).
Other than as mothers, women mostly appear in Suomen Sotilas as Lotta Svärd volunteers, working hard, bravely and patriotically for the common task of national defence with women’s chores: cooking, nursing and clothing the soldiers. These women were on the one hand active agents, but on the other hand confined to the feminine sphere of admiring and taking care of the military heroes. The image of female volunteers within the military system was certainly always positive; they were needed and useful and could be portrayed as courageous, even heroic in their own manner. Yet the division of labour was immovable, and the portrayal of women in Suomen Sotilas, as mothers, lovers or Lottas all conveyed the implicit message that armed defence and the fighting itself was the preserve of men. When there had been some letters to the editor of a Finnish newspaper in 1930 concerning conscription and military training for women, the editors of Suomen Sotilas only observed that the idea had been refuted by “many valid arguments”. They chose to comment on it themselves in the form of a photograph showing female members of the Russian Red Army among their male comrades, all looking relaxed and cheerful. “A repulsive sight”, the editors curtly noted.
Russians as Countertypes to Finns
“Countertypes” as a contrast to the Finnish ideal are a theme that runs through Suomen Sotilas through the 1920’s and 1930’s. Early countertypes were social outsiders such as Jews, Gypsies, vagrants, habitual criminals and the insane, all characterised by ugliness, restlessness, and a lack of self-control. A rather different kind of countertype emerges in nineteenth century self-help books for conscripts. There, un-men were not clearly demarcated social groups completely outside “normal” society, but gamblers and drunkards, ordinary men who had failed, made the wrong choices and therefore “fallen” into vice. These countertypes had a different functionality from “permanent outsiders”. The young man could not find easy self-assurance in feeling superior to the countertype, but was threatened by the possibility that he might become one of them if he did not heed the moralists’ advice. “Because men could fall, any middle-class man ran the risk of becoming that Other.”
The countertypes more commonly seen in Suomen Sotilas are the images of Russians, especially Russian Bolsheviks. In those instances where Russians were described in more detail it is obvious that they serve as a foil to Finnishness. A portrayal of Russian revolutionary soldiers stationed in Finland in 1917–1918 illustrates this: “Those loitering good-for-nothings slouching around in their down at heel boots and their stinking, dirty and shabby uniforms called themselves soldiers! Well, it certainly was the time of svaboda [freedom] – who would then care about such trivial things as washing his face or mending his trousers! (…) The outer appearance of those Russian squaddies was an excellent image of the confusion of their mental life (…).” These countertypes indirectly underline the importance of a Finnish soldier being clean and tidy, his outer appearance expressing a rational and virtuous mind; otherwise, he is no true Finnish soldier. Bolsheviks were portrayed as lazy and thievish people who shunned work and preferred confiscating goods from good thrifty people – marking the importance of honesty and industry in Finnish national character.
Two longer storys on the national character of the Russian people in 1932 explained that due to centuries of oppression by the Orthodox Church and the tsars, and in the absence of both individual freedom and religious and moral education, the Russians had developed into purely emotional beings, governed by impulses and temporary moods. A Russian could therefore at anytime contradict his own actions. He was unreliable, deceitful, completely unconcerned about lying and thieving, and lacked a sense of justice. Because he was a fatalist and did not think he could influence his own destiny or wellbeing, he lacked diligence and a sense of responsibility. He preferred talking to acting. He did not care about punctuality or efficiency. He treated a woman more like beast of draught than as his wife. As soldiers, Russians were intrepid but mentally slow, lacking in independence and perseverance. Finally, the author pointed to the eradication of the educated classes and the prohibition against religious education as the main obstacles for societal progress in Russia; “Without religion nothing lasting can be achieved!”
A Finnish soldier, one can derive from this description of the enemy, should be rational and always preserve his sang-froid; be principled and honest, treat women with respect, work hard and be the architect of his own fortune. He should also appreciate his individual freedom as well as the importance of Lutheran religious education and the leadership of the educated classes for Finland’s progress and prosperity. Due to the Russian’s weaknesses as soldiers, the Finnish Army could be victorious if its soldiers were quick-minded, self-propelled and persistent. On the whole, however, Russians were seldom described as individuals or as a people with certain characteristics. Russians in general and Russian Bolsheviks in particular were mostly referred to as an almost dehumanized force of evil, chaos and destruction, a threat against everything valuable in Finnish society and everything specific for the Finnish nation. Russia was “Asianness” threatening to destroy the entire Western culture. Russia meant “hunger for land, bestiality and deceit” and Bolshevism meant slavery as opposed to Finnish freedom. Russia was the Enemy, in an almost absolute sense.
Finnish Countertypes: the Dissolute and the Politically Deluded
Those Finnish men who were considered outsiders to the community of soldiers, consisted of the morally dissolute, the politically deluded, and the simpletons. Of these, only the morally dissolute can easily be labelled as countertypes. As we have seen, dissolute men were depicted as weak since they were incapable of self-restraint, e.g. in relation to alcohol, and lived “at the command of the whims, lusts and desires of the moment”. They were not free, but slaves to their passions and served to underline the virtues of moral purity, abstinence and self-control. Both physically and morally weakened by their vices, the morally dissolute as countertypes displayed how immorality destroyed the soldier’s fitness to fight and how true patriotism therefore demanded continence and clean living. On the whole, however, these countertypes are not very prominent in Suomen Sotilas, and where they appear they are seldom described in any graphic detail. If there was any concern over Finnish men degenerating into unmanliness and effeminacy through over-civilisation, similar to concerns in the large industrial nations before the Great War, it does not show in the pages of Suomen Sotilas. Given the very low degree of urbanisation and industrialisation in interwar Finland it is perhaps not surprising that military educators were not less concerned over the enfeeblement of their conscripts as over the relative strength and vigour of conscripts with the “wrong” political outlook.
Finnish socialists and pacifists who resisted conscription or even worked at undermining the Finnish armed forces were depicted as more threatening to the military nation than the morally dissolute and the temptations of vice. These politically “deluded” men had a kind of borderline status as both outsiders and insiders to the community of Finnish men. They were not usually depicted as weak or cowardly men, although they deliberately refused or resisted the duty of fighting for the nation. They presented a real and tangible political opposition and challenge to the political establishment and military system. They certainly were contrasted to “proper”, patriotic conscripts in Suomen Sotilas. However, military educators could not just comfortably single them out as social outcasts, contraposing them to the deal military conscript and be assured of the readers’ sympathy. Socialists, according to the magazine, failed to put the fatherland and the nation above all else, and instead promoted either their selfish class-interest and party ambitions or the “fantasy of internationalism, so manifestly indicating [mental] morbidity”. In 1924, an editorial warned of the dangers of socialist teachings and the “irresponsible” work of communist “moles” and infiltrators in the armed forces, “agents of the Russians selected and bought among the most morally spineless elements”, trying to incite
conscripts into treason to their country. Communists were people who wanted to “deprive us of our freedom and put Russian slavery in its stead, in order to ensure the wellbeing of a few traitors”. Understood as countertypes, socialists were used to emboss the difference between driving special interests and putting the common good of the whole nation above all else; between unscrupulous people allying themselves with hostile forces abroad, to achieve their own goals, and selfless people who understood that when the country was threatened from the outside, all internal strife must be set aside. This contrast associated patriotism with unselfishness, loyalty and solidarity.
Pacifists were the objects of several articles especially around the turn of the decade 1930. The attention given in the magazine to refuting pacifism was due, among other things, to two anti-militaristic books that attracted much attention in Finland around this time; Erik Maria Remarque's internationally acclaimed Im Westen Nichts Neues [All Quiet on the Western Front] (1929) and Pentti Haanpää's Kenttä ja kasarmi [Fields and Barracks] (1928). There was also the cause célèbre of Arndt Pekurinen, a Finnish unconditional conscientious objector who was imprisoned several times between 1929–1932. The editors of Suomen Sotilas underlined that they loved peace just as the whole of the Finnish people did. Since the Finnish armed forces were purely defensive, the Finnish pacifists were barking up the wrong tree: the Bolsheviks were the ones threatening the peace, not the Finnish Army. Jäger General Major Aarne Sihvo, then Commander of the Armed Forces, complained in the Christmas issue of Suomen Sotilas 1929 that any attempts at strengthening nationalism and patriotism were met by a “war-cry in the name of pacifism swinging the flags of international brotherhood”. Sihvo wondered whether the pacifists obstructed nationalism out of true internationalism, thoughtlessness or indifference, or if they intentionally wanted to weaken and cause disunion in the country.
In association with the case of Arndt Pekurinen, the editors of Suomen Sotilas stated that they agreed completely with him in that war was cruel and brutal. It should be eradicated from the face of the earth since it caused such suffering. They claimed to have depicted all the afflictions of war in their magazine and warned against talking lightly about war. They expressed their sympathy towards all strivings for peace. However, “we cannot make such a stupid and ill-advised conclusion from this conviction as Pekurinen and his kindred spirits.” In the present international situation and with the Soviet Union agitating world revolution, “one must be stupid and blind at the same time to not understand, to one’s regret, that we constantly live in the midst of the dangers of war.” Pacifists were thus naive idealists, as opposed to the sober realism of those receiving military training. The editors claimed that “all of us” – a ‘we’ obviously encompassing the reader – despised killing, but that we could not “passively watch and helplessly wait for the final blow, like Pekurinen the day the oppressor attacks our country. “We, who love peace and despise war, will fight to our last drop of blood on the fateful day for our homes, parents, sisters, brothers, and our whole people and its freedom.” There is an
unmistakable hint that Pekurinen was no normal, decent man, as he was willing to passively let himself be butchered and everything that he should love and protect be destroyed.
Simpletons as ambiguous others
Possibly the most intriguing and ambiguous other to the military nation was, finally, the simpleton. Various descriptions of funny oafs arriving to do their military service, and of all their hardships as they tried to get through recruit training, was a popular theme of humorous short stories in Suomen Sotilas. Several of these made explicit reference to the poem ‘Sven Dufva’ by J. L. Runeberg, included in the Tales of Ensign Stål cycle (1848). Runeberg’s Sven Dufva was a half-witted but good-natured and above all brave-hearted young soldier in the Finnish War of 1808–1809, who did everything the wrong way around. In a tight spot, he turned out to be the only one staying his ground to heroically fight off the Russians, defending a narrow bridge all by himself. In Suomen Sotilas, the common denominator in these kind of stories was that the protagonist was kind and dutiful yet somehow considered an “impossible” soldier on arrival for military training. He was too stupid to learn close-order drill or saluting superiors correctly, physically clumsy or slow, made fun of by the other soldiers, and brought the training officers to despair. Yet at the end of these stories, the Sven Dufva character always turned out to be either unusually brave in battle or skilled at something particular such as skiing, sharpshooting, making shoes or taking care of horses. The most obvious message in these stories would seem to be that the army has a use for every man (who is physically fit enough to pass the medical exam), no matter how simple or uneducated he is. Courage, obedience and good will compensate for insufficient intelligence or proficiency.
The Sven Dufva stories always end by the protagonist becoming an accepted member of the community. Sven Dufva represents an inferior archtype, yet in these particular narratives even his limited skills and virtues are acknowledged. As a soldier, he acquires a certain social recognition in the military system that he might not get elsewhere in society – as long as he partakes to his best ability in the common duty of all men. His admission to the military community is, however, no matter of course. It is open to doubt until he demonstrates his valour or usefulness through some dramatic episode, such as refusing to abandon his watch in a burning building until his officer arrives to give the order; or getting the best score in the company in the first shooting exercises. Yet the Sven Dufva character does not seem to have been intended mainly as a positive model for unintelligent readers to identify with. As the authors half-benevolently, half-condescendingly invite the reader to laugh along with them at the funny Sven Dufvas, they rather incite the “normal” readers to tolerate these characters and accept them as comrades. In a sense, Sven Dufva is a countertype to the “normal” conscript, who is supposed to be smart, nimble and quick to learn, work well with the group and not stand out as odd and different. The popularity of the Sven Dufva character probably to some extent reflect the amusement with which Finnish officers from the educated classes sometimes regarded soldiers from “uncultured” rustic areas. In some cases, however, pretending to be a fool can have been a form of popular resistance against the social arrogance of these officers. As a cultural image, however, the Sven Dufva character can also be seen as a projection of many men’s fear of becoming the laughing stock of other men in the military world. Laughing at the stories about Sven Dufva in Suomen Sotilas would then mainly be a laughter of relief: thank God I am not like that.
Conclusion: The Image of the Military
In many ways, the images of soldiering and the objects of identification offered to conscripts in Suomen Sotilas correspond to the “new” military agenda outlined by the young nationalist officers who envisioned a “new” kind of self-disciplined soldier. This should be no surprise, as the people drafting that agenda were also important writers for the magazine. This particular military image, centred on a sense of duty, a spirit of sacrifice and self-restraint, was offered to the conscripts with a promise of reward. The dutiful national warrior would not only serve the nation as a useful citizen in both war and peace, but also enjoy ensured individual success and prestige in peacetime society. This part of the “civic education” in Suomen Sotilas is remarkably similar to nineteenth-century Prussian military propaganda described by Ute Frevert. Prussian military authorities, Frevert writes, were intent on counteracting socialism among the conscripts and educating them into a what was seen as the “correct” conscript image – emphasizing physical fitness, courage, self-assurance, loyalty, obedience, comradeship, anti-individualism, discipline and belief in the authorities. Prussian conscription was legitimised by claims that only military training brought youths into full manhood. Military service, it was said, prepared the soldier not only for war, but also for life as a civilian. The army claimed to be a “school of manhood” bringing forth patriotic “sons of the fatherland”, industrious and steady men, stern fathers who took their civic duties seriously and were prepared to sacrifice themselves for king and country.
It seems evident that the German models inspired those Finnish military educators with cultural and professional connections to Germany. However, Prussian military propagandists in the nineteenth century had to motivate conscripts to fight for a monarchy under which they had only limited political rights. The Finnish military educationalists writing in Suomen Sotilas could in theory have taken full advantage of the fact that Finland was a democratic republic. However, it is striking how Suomen Sotilas practically never places military service in connection with universal suffrage or the democratic nature of the new Finnish state. Citizenship was usually referred to in terms of the individual’s duty to be a useful member of society, prepared to sacrifice himself for the larger whole, and not in terms of political rights and freedoms worth defending. This could possibly be attributed to storyual models from the German empire, but it might also betray a certain lack of enthusiasm about parliamentary democracy among the magazine’s editors and contributors. Nonetheless, the Finnish interwar military propaganda appears less authoritarian in spirit than its German predecessors as described by Frevert. Against the background of the insurgency and civil war of 1918, it is actually surprising that submission and discipline were not emphasised more in Suomen Sotilas. Its nineteenth century predecessor, the magazine for soldiers in the “old” Finnish conscript army, tended to cast the relationship between soldiers and officers in paternalist terms of love, trust and obedience, reminiscent of the relationship of plucky boy scouts to their senior leaders.
In comparison, Suomen Sotilas has remarkably little to say about the relationship between soldier and officer. The magazine’s articles centre on the image of an autonomous citizen-soldier, in the sense that this soldier must be morally self-disciplined, self-propelled and self-controlled. The humility and obedience emphasised in the nineteenth century soldiers’ magazine give place to an emphasis on will-power and a sense of duty. In spite of the many condescending and admonitory passages quoted above, the images of the citizen-soldier in Suomen Sotilas are actually more austere and adult compared to corresponding images before national independence. This is in keeping with the pedagogic agenda of educating a “new” kind of self-propelled soldier. It might also, after all, reflect an awareness that the reader to be addressed no longer the humble and obedient subject of the Russian emperor but the free citizen of a democratic Finnish republic. The conscripts would soon be entitled to vote at age 24. Countering the widespread scepticism against the cadre army system, the authors seem to have been intent on displaying the citizen-soldier submitting to the army discipline out of his own free will and going to war for his own, his families and people’s sake – not for his officers or political leaders.
In general, it is striking how little was written in the magazine about groups outside the community of men in arms. Women and civilians certainly played an implicit role as one reason why men had to be soldiers, but they were not given much attention and were seldom mentioned. Soldiering was defined and depicted within a male military community. The focus was on the conscripts’s development and maturing in the company and under the guidance of other soldiers and with other soldiers as their models. Not even the countertypes of the military image among Finnish men were particularly salient. The magazine was more intent on displaying positive instances of the military than on using the threat of countertypes to make the readers step in line. Nevertheless, rhetoric explicitly drawing on the military duties of citizenship seems to have been most forcefully used where military educators sensed the strongest challenges against their views. It was forcefully used to justify military training in a cadre army in the early 1920’s, when parties of the left and centre called into question the whole justification of such a training.
The image of the valorous citizen-soldier protecting his country was an image that the military educators thought every man would like to identify with, no matter which political opinions he held. They thus hoped soldiering would work as a cement holding men and through them society together, coating the fissures and conflict lines in the social fabric. The storys of Suomen Sotilas offered identities and recognition in exchange for submitting to certain duties and obligations. However, the archived volumes of the magazines themselves still tell us as little about how they were read and received. Did the readers accept the call and submit their destinies to the nation, in order to be recognised as virtuous citizens? Were they attracted by the offering of guidance towards status and prestige in return for obedience and selfdiscipline? Did they refuse the call – or simply ignore it? Those with military service will certainly have some idea of how “official” military papers and magazines are viewed, and as a result and given the distance in time, the real effects and impact on the readers are difficult to estimate and should probably not be exaggerated.
How a story will be read and what meanings it will carry for different readers is by no means fixed or limited by the author’s intentions. Yet from a historical point of view, these magazines probably tell us more about the people who wrote them than the people who read them. The people who toiled, often in their spare time, to fill issue after issue of Suomen Sotilas with articles obviously did have motives and purposes for their work. It remains interesting and relevant to ask why they wrote at all, and why they wrote the way they did. Some of the writers, especially the military priests among them, had obvious intentions to exercise a moral authority. They wanted to reshape the values and behaviour of the conscripts, make them submit to military discipline, motivate them to exercise self-discipline, and infuse them with Christian-patriotic morality. Others, such as the authors of adventure stories, possibly only wanted to support national defence by entertaining the conscripts and keeping them in a good humour – although even the most entertaining pieces in the magazine often had a rather obtrusive sens moral and a conspicuous eagerness to show military life in a positive light. Few of the authors would have agreed or admitted that the storys they wrote were intended at portraying the authors themselves as legitimate holders of power and influence – yet that is often what they did. Suomen Sotilas can be read in the same way as nineteenth century handbooks for conscripts; as a way for middle-class and middle-age authors to legitimate their own power and authority in society. The men writing for Suomen Sotilas wielded – or at least tried hard to wield – a certain authority and power in relation to their readers, who were placed in the position of the disciple, the young man who is to be guided by older, wiser and more experienced men on the path towards adult citizenship. However, we should not see the men writing for Suomen Sotilas as somehow above or outside the ideologies and power structures they supported or advocated. They themselves lived in the ideological reality that they wanted their readers to enter; in a sense, they were its products. It is important to take these men seriously and understand how they were passionate about the Finnish nation and protecting its independence. Partly as an extension of their nationalism, it is evident that many of them had a true and deep-felt concern for conscripts and their development. Their storys should certainly be read with an acute sense for the power mechanisms at work, but also for the genuine hopes and desires, fears and anxieties they express.
To illuminate this concluding point, the writers of Suomen Sotilas regularly espouse the expression “spirit of the fathers”, which some of them were so fond of. It originated in J.L. Runeberg’s poem ‘The Veteran’ from the aforementioned Tales of Ensign Stål (1848). This poem tells the story of an old veteran living in great poverty who one day dons his old uniform and walks down to the church green to watch a battle between Finnish and Russian troops during the Finnish War of 1808–1809. He longs to “hear the clashing/ of sword-blades yet once more”, recall the memories of the strength and courage of his youth and see the new generation of fighters, “the courage of its blood”. Calmly, he sits through the raging battle, in the midst of bullets whizzing by and soldiers falling next to him, his countenance beaming “as if transfigured”. Late in the day, the Finnish troops are victorious. As the last Finnish detachment is about to leave the battlefield, the veteran stands up and calls out to them:
“Ye sons of our own country,
So youthful and so bold,
Is there one here who values
The words of warrior old?
“Great thanks to you he renders
For this illustrious day;
For no more glorious combat
Did e’er his eye survey.
To God be praise and glory
We triumph yet again;
Still lives our father’s spirit,
And still our land has men!”
Did the writers of Suomen Sotilas think this was excellent propaganda and a superb toolkit for the manipulation of unsuspecting conscripts? Or were they, rather, deeply touched by the poem themselves? If the latter was the case, exactly what in the poem was so touching to them? Was it the image evoked of a community of Finnish men down through the ages, of oneself belonging to a national brotherhood-in-arms, united over the abyss of temporal distance through the same destiny to be warriors, the same continued fight? Was it the way it struck a chord in their personal experience of fighting the “Liberation War” – or rather, a chord in how they wanted to remember that experience – as a way of gaining recognition from their fathers, or forefathers, or the entire world; recognition as men and members of a nation, not the browbeaten lapdogs of foreign masters? These are speculative questions, but the possibility is compelling that the talk about the forefathers, citizenship and morality in Suomen Sotilas should be understood not only as disciplinary power mechanisms, but also as an attempt on part of the authors to convey something positive to the readers. An attempt to let them feel the gratification of being hailed and recognised through the ideology of nationalism, of being able to triumphantly answer to the call, “You, young valiant son of our native soil!” – “Yes! Yes, that is me, that is who I am!”
A vast array of storys and pictures in Suomen Sotilas were intent on conveying a sense of national history and military traditions to the readers. The magazine abounded with histories of Finnish military units and tales of battles and campaigns where Finns had fought, all the way from the times of the national epic Kalevala and the Iron Age up until the Liberation War and the Heimosodat (Kinship Wars) of 1918–1922. The stories of the hakkapeliitta Finnish cavalrymen of Gustavus II, the Finnish soldiers of Charles XII, the soldiers and officers of the Finnish War 1808–1809 as portrayed by Runeberg, and the Jägers and other heroes of 1918 were tirelessly retold. This national military heritage was iterated through different genres, both as factual military history and as fictional adventure stories. The recurrent theme was that Finns had always been good soldiers; strong, unyielding and fearless, who did not hesitate to sacrifice their lives for their military honour or their freedom.
According to Heikki Nurmio, who was a central figure both within military education and military historiography in the 1920’s, it was important to make the conscripts aware of these historical traditions since they were sources of “national military spirit and soldier virtues” for the young army. However, he balanced the glorification of Finnish soldierhood by pointing out that they illustrated both the strengths and the weaknesses of Finnish men as soldiers. In the same spirit, Olavi Uoma wrote that the 17th century hakkapeliitta cavalrymen had understood that the Finns’ many defeats in the border clashes with neighbouring peoples had derived from a spirit of passivity and defensiveness. For that reason the hakkapeliittas had assumed a “spirit of the offensive”, which they had left as an “invaluable heritage” to their descendants. “The smaller our number, the more ruthlessly we have to attack, if we want to pull through”, enjoined Uoma of the readers, obviously trying to prepare them for confronting a Soviet attack.
Recurring references to the Finnish “forefathers” upheld a historical myth where these anonymous forefathers for hundreds of years had not only fought Swedes and Russians, but also striven for an independent state. One typical such story from 1929 put conscription in the constory of Finnish men fighting and prevailing over superior forces throughout the centuries. It related the words of a grandfather, explaining to his grandson about how the men of their home village resisted the Russian Cossacks in the past. The old man urges the boy to remember that their village has been burnt dozens of times by the Eastern enemies, “… and you can count by many hundreds the men of your tribe who over the centuries have sacrificed their lives to drive out the oppressors from this neck of the woods. The land we call our own was bought with the heart-blood of our fathers. A Finnish man will not bear a foreign yoke and nothing but death breaks his perseverance. (…) You too, my boy, will grow up to be a man and then you should know what you are obliged to by the deeds of the fathers of your tribe. Foreign feet must not trample the land that for centuries has drunk the blood of men defending their freedom.”
Ardent Finnish nationalists in the interwar period thought Finland had now regained an independence lost in the dark Middle Ages to conquering Swedes and later Russians. For many zealots, “the political situation emerging in 1917–1918 was a return to an ancient, ethnic truth”. Although the idea of a Great National Past lost some of the heated intellectual topicality it had had during the decades before independence, it reached new levels of popularisation during the interwar period. Historical novels were a vogue in the 1930’s, accompanied by a multitude of new publications for boys presenting adventures in prehistorical and medieval Finland. The military aspects of the ancient Finns were made “a veritable trade mark of the republic” after independence. Warlikeness was made a predominant feature of ancient Finnish society in stories and visual representations in novels, magazines and even public monuments. The distant national past became “a fully militarised mirror of contemporary society” as the ancient Finns were portrayed as fighting the same battles that modern Finns were told to prepare themselves for. Incidentally, the magazine of the Lotta Svärd organisation contained similar representations of female heroes in the past (Seija-Leena Nevala, Lotta Svärd-aikakauslehti isänmaallisille naisille vuosina 1929–1939, Unpublished Master’s thesis).
Using history to challenge and encourage Conscripts
The militarised portrayal of the nation’s past was used to put the magazine’s readers under a moral obligation to honour their forefathers’ sacrifices by continuing their heroic struggle. Making a rather liberal interpretation of historical facts, Heikki Nurmio in 1924 portrayed the fight for national freedom as a historical mission, which had to be made clear to the conscripts through historical education: “With the roar of thunder, these [historical memories] speak immense volumes to us about Finland’s centuries-long struggle towards freedom and national independence, a struggle for which generation after generation, towns and countryside, noblemen, clergymen, peasants and the poorest tenant farmers and workmen of the backwoods in ancient times have uncompromisingly sacrificed everything they had. Those passed-away generations demand the same of the present generation and knowledge of their destiny is the best way of making clear the historical mission of the Finnish people.”
In the pages of Suomen Sotilas, this mission was naturally centred on the duty of conscripts to do their military service without complaint and prepare to go to war if needed. There was a “tax to be paid”, in the form of military service, to the fore-fathers who had toiled and suffered to make the barren land fruitful and prepare a way for Finland’s freedom. The debt to the men of the past could, however, also be used for other moral appeals, such as calling for national unity after the divisive events of 1918. The memory of the deaths of the heroes of 1918 “binds each and every one of us to take care that their sacrifice is not allowed to go to waste”, claimed an article in 1921 bearing the headline “The Memory of the Heroes of Liberty” – “The memories of the freedom fight are the most sacred memories our people have; they have to be cherished and left as our heritage to coming generations, who have to be taught their holy obligation to likewise sacrifice all their strength for preserving Finland’s independence and freedom.”
These articles in effect presented an implicit challenge to conscripts. In order to step into the timeless chain of Finnish history, they had to do what their fore-fathers had done, dare what they had dared, sacrifice what they had sacrificed. “Is the present military service really such a heavy burden that the present youth, parading its sports activities, cannot bear it upright, or were our fore-fathers after all of hardier stock in spite of the lack of sports?” scorned an “Uncle” in 1931. Through the portrayal of the forefathers as indomitable warriors, defending the land that they had cleared and tilled through tireless labour, a standard for “real” Finnish soldiers was set and the conscripts were challenged to demonstrate that they met this standard: “We read stories about men, who have died smiling knowing that they have done a service to the country they love. Conscripts! We don’t want to be inferior to them, because this land and this people are dear to us too. We do as our forefathers have done, like all real men in the world have done and always will do, we fight for the country and the people when it is in peril.
This standard was even sometimes given a name: “the spirit of the fathers”. A 1920 short story by Jäger Captain Kaarle Massinen told about an old man who gave a real scolding to the Red Guards confiscating his land during the Civil War. The old man called the guardsmen “sluggards” and stated that they never would have bothered to work those fields the way he had done. “The spirit of the fathers, the Finnish farmer who had always lived free from serfdom, had erupted like a volcano”, Massinen declared and suddenly turned to address the reader: “Finland’s soldier, you, who labour in the barracks, sometimes at your rifle, sometimes over a book, does the spirit of the fathers live in you?” Many of the stories about the forefathers’ valour and the spirit of the fathers also encouraged conscripts, assuring them that they did have what it took to be a warrior. The story quoted above, calling out to conscripts “we don’t want to be inferior to them”, actually continued by urging the reader to “let your best inner voice speak to you, let your natural, inherited instincts affect you”. Then, claims the author, you will “assuredly” find the courage and willingness to defend this country. The “spirit of the fathers” was thus portrayed as not only a model and example for present generations, but as somehow inherent in Finnish men.
An anonymous “Jäger”, writing an editorial for Suomen Sotilas in 1935, claimed that the “spirit of the fathers” had aroused the “mighty White Army” in 1918 and restored order, safety, legality and freedom to the country. He described this spirit as both “solemn and binding” and a “firm and lasting heritage”, descending all the way from the battles of the Thirty-Years War and the Great Nordic War, indeed from the distant battles of “the age of sagas”. Yet this spirit, he explained, was not only a military spirit, but also the spirit of the peaceful work that had built the country. “That work has asked for fitness and skill, manliness and grandness just as much as defending the country.” Again, we that the very same spirit that had made the forefathers such formidable warriors had allegedly also been their driving force as they cleared and built the land. The success of Finnish athletes on international sports arenas during the 1920’s and 1930’s were used in Suomen Sotilas in the same way as the feats of the mythic forefathers; to convey a sense of a national community characterised by the physical and psychic qualities demonstrated by these sports heroes. Niilo Sigell wrote that the Finnish athletes who won several medals in the Olympic Games in Antwerp in 1920 were expressions of “the toughness, endurance, strength and vigour of our tribe” and “the force and power of character that has transformed the grim wildernesses of the north into abodes of human cultivation and endured hard times of war, hunger and pestilence”. In these athletes, Sigell found the same national character that had manifested itself in the heroes of the Thirty Years War or the Liberation War.
A story about the Finnish achievements in the Olympics in 1924 pointed to the “healthy life in the countryside” where most Finns still resided and referred to the Finns as a people that had “toiled in woodlands and skied through wildernesses”. Connecting the Finnish nature, landscape and climate with the national character, sports achievements and military virtues, these writings evidently aimed at infusing the readers with pride and confidence in the inherent strength of their people, implying the Finns could fend off a quantitatively superior enemy by virtue of their superior quality as soldiers. Writer and historian Jalmari Finne even explained the extraordinary bravery of Finnish men in battle, throughout the centuries, as deriving from the tranquil life of a nation of farmers. The sedate life and taciturnity of the Finns, he explained, built up a storage of strength and energy waiting for a discharge. “An opportunity to fight has been like a relief. … Battle is the place where a Finn feels all his inner strength blossoming, a moment of rejoicing. … Bravery, the highest and most beautiful expression of manliness, is in the Finn’s blood and only needs an opportunity [to emerge] and then it seems to astonish other [peoples].”
When historian Einar Juvelius introduced a new series of articles on Finnish history in 1920, he expressed his hope that the commencing series would encourage young soldiers to acquaint themselves with their forefathers’ “unwavering readiness and irrepressible faith in the future – the same readiness and faith that the Fatherland now awaits from its every son.” And we have already seen the how the “spirit of the fathers”, “awakening” in 1918, was declared to be the same spirit that motivated the Finnish fore-fathers in ages long past. “Our military service is like children’s play compared to what the Jägers had to endure”, a conscripted probationary officer wrote in a letter to the magazine in 1931, “– although both are motivated by the same purpose, the same feeling, the same trend of ideas, the same call.”
Self-restraint and the terrible moral dangers of military life
Less than a year and a half had passed since the end of his campaigns as a Jäger, when second lieutenant and theology graduate Hannes Anttila published an article in Suomen Sotilas in the early autumn of 1919. The story, entitled “The enemy lurking in the dark”, opened with an eerie story about a soldier volunteering for night reconnaissance into enemy territory. It is his first patrol service, and as the soldiers move into the dark night, the protagonist is struck by terror. After a short struggle with himself, he manages to overcome his fear. “… I dare not go back now. I am a soldier, a Finnish soldier. Come injury, come death! Forward I will go, until the mission is accomplished! (…) And you went. And you returned, returned as a man in the eyes of your relatives and your fatherland. You did not shun the danger, even if it terrified you. You fulfilled your duty, even if it felt heavy. And that is why you did a man’s work.” At this point, Anttila’s story makes a sudden jump to an evening leave in a garrison town in peacetime. There too, we are told, an enemy is lurking in the dark: “the sin of immorality” and its consequences, venereal disease. Even if the incautious soldier would be lucky enough to not catch an infection, he will certainly “desecrate his soul” if he does not turn back in time. If you commit this sin, Anttila asks the reader, can you then look your mother, your sister, your wife or your fiancée in the eye with the same honesty as before? Anttila’s final appeal is written in the second person singular, addressing the reader like a priest in the pulpit addresses his congregation: “Are you, my reader, really so weak that you cannot restrain your own lusts? … Should you one day become the father of a family? Think what miserable creatures your children will be if you splurge the holy creative powers of your youth in the whirls of licentiousness … Mother Finland needs the stout arms of her every son to help her at this moment. Are you, my reader, a support and security to your fatherland or are you a burden and dead encumbrance? If you stray the city streets at nightfall with filthy thoughts in your mind, turn back, because that turning back is no shame to you but an honour! For he who conquers himself has won the greatest victory.”
“The enemy lurking in the dark” wove together a religiously conservative view of what was moral behavior together with a number of different images: the courageous warrior, the son, the brother, the husband, the father and the patriotic citizen. An analogy was made between the warrior overcoming his fear before battle and the young man struggling to overcome his carnal desires. Honour and manliness demanded facing the two kinds of danger with equal courage,
overcoming one’s instincts and emotions through willpower and a sense of duty.
Hannes Anttila and other “moralist” writers in Suomen Sotilas used a rhetorical technique associating unwanted behaviour with weakness and unmanliness, while the wished-for behaviour in conscripts was associated with image of the courageous warrior. They evidently did not think it would make a sufficient impression on the conscripts to tell them to behave in a certain manner because it was the “Christian” or “moral” thing to do. Instead, they tried to draw on the readers’ notions of manliness. They obviously thought that the threat of being labelled as weak in the eyes of their comrades would have a stronger effect on the rakes and lechers among the soldiers than just being branded as debauched. Perhaps they thought that “well-behaved” conscripts were best helped in the rough military environment if they were told that doing the morally right thing was also the mark of a true warrior. Such explicitly moralising storys, often but not always written by military priests, formed a significant subspecies among the rich variety of storys in Suomen Sotilas, especially during its first half-decade. Although these writings seldom referred explicitly to Christianity and religious decrees, they can nevertheless be associated with the trend of ‘muscular Christianity’ that arose towards the end of the nineteenth century in countries with an important cultural influence on Finland, such as England, Germany and Sweden. Muscular Christianity associated Christian morality was with strength and other stereotypical characteristics. This kind of rhetoric was also used by for example moral reformists in Finland opposing prostitution around the turn of the nineteenth century.
As we have seen, there were widespread moral concerns about the new military system in Finland, even in circles far removed from socialist antimilitarism. Drinking and sexual contacts with women in the garrison towns, behaviours which from a strictly military point of view were health hazards rather than anything else, were more profoundly worrying from a religious perspective, as were the rude language and indecent marching songs favoured not only by the rank-and-file but many officers as well. In Great Britain, Germany and Sweden, Christian revivalists founded recreation centres for soldiers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, an era of expanding mass armies and international armaments race, not least out of concern over the sinfulness spreading in the military training centres. The “old” Finnish Army’s magazine for soldiers in the Russian era, the bilingual Lukemisia Suomen Sotamiehille/Läsning för den Finske Soldaten (Readings for the Finnish Soldier, 1888–1902) contained writings depicting the barracks of the Finnish conscripted troops as places where innocent conscripts from the countryside were introduced to all kinds of vices. These moral concerns resurfaced when conscription was reintroduced in 1918-1919. For example, the dean of the military priests received a letter in 1921from the vicar of a rural congregation where worried parents had held a meeting to discuss the immoral influence of army life on their boys. Swearing, drinking, prostitutes roaming the garrison areas, and “the great dangers of immorality and the corruption of morals in bodily and spiritual respect” were mentioned in the letter.
The military priests, responsible for both the moral and civic education of the conscripts, shared the popular view of military life as potentially debauching conscripts. According to Regiment Pastor Verneri Louhivuori, ”that roughness which is characteristic to men” was multiplied in military life due to the absence of softening “counter-forces”. The military environment, he wrote, could become an ordeal for those who did not want to be brutalised. Jäger officer and theology student Kalervo Groundstroem warned of the “dangers of barracks life” in 1919. The military comradeship, which he himself in the previous article had celebrated as “a good educator”, could also be a breeding ground of “all things base and infamous”, Groundstroem wrote, hinting at soldiers’ contacts with prostitutes. The recruit, new to these surroundings, was especially susceptible to bad influences. These moralists evidently espoused the contemporary middle-class notions of morality.
The year spent in all-male company during the military service was supposed to make men out of boys and teach them to function as part of a group. Yet even in the army’s own magazine, the single-sex environment was at the same time seen as potentially detrimental to conscripts’s moral and ultimately their physical health – especially in a largely still rural country where country boys for the first time moved to live in a larger city, with all its temptations. In the voew of the “moralists,” the celebrated military comradeship could suddenly be seen in terms of a worrying tendency of conscripts to go with the crowd – a moral weakness that was contrasted to the lonely but champions of righteousness among the soldiers.
The Virtue of Self-Restraint
Towards the early 1930’s, the number of explicitly moralising writings diminished in Suomen Sotilas. Such storys were usually no longer published as editorials, but appeared in less prominent sections of the magazine, such as the Letters to the Editor pages. This could be an indication of sentiments calming down, as the conscript army slowly became established. Alternately, it could indicate a rhetorical shift where the older and somewhat condescending moral exhortations came to be understood as old-fashioned or counterproductive. What did not change in the “moral” agenda of Suomen Sotilas throughout the period, however, was the focus on the allegedly virtue of self-restraint. The emphasis on self-control is familiar from nineteenth century western bourgeois moralising. In Swedish nineteenth century self-improvement books for bourgeois youngsters and autobiographies by old bourgeois men, building astrong character was offered as the proper road towards manliness and the only way for a young man to avoid the pitfalls of his passions. Character, a vague term equivalent to moral principles in general, was in these moralizing works seen as a hidden potentiality in all men; part of the true individual and the effect of hard, enduring work. The “moralists” claimed that conscripts must withstand the passions and temptations of youth and build a strong character in order to become successful.
In the moral teachings of Suomen Sotilas, however, character, or the idea of having or striving for a permanent strength of will and morals, was not a central concept. Instead, morality and self-restraint were mostly discussed in terms of a continuous fight and struggle, a battle that a man must ceaselessly wage against immorality, both in the society around him and within himself. There does not seem to be a notion of this struggle having a terminus in a strong character achieved once and for all. The moral struggle is rather portrayed as a life-long condition. A useful citizen had to live his whole life fighting against “viciousness, drunkenness and the bestiality hidden in human nature”; without continuous moral struggle “the core of national life” would eventually be corrupted by immorality. The reason for this might be the strong connection of Suomen Sotilas to Christian theology. If Suomen Sotilas is compared with its nineteenth century predecessor, Lukemisia Suomen Sotamiehille, one can certainly see that Christian ideals such as submissiveness, humility and repentance, predominant in the older magazine, are played down. In the interwar period, moral virtue is recast in terms of will-power and self-restraint, reflecting an ideal soldier who is also an enfranchised citizen and thus more “adult” and autonomous in comparison to the ideal humble imperial subject of the nineteenth century. God and religion as the foundations of moral behaviour in the nineteenth century magazine are largely replaced with appeals to the readers’ patriotism in the 1920’s and 1930’s.
Nevertheless, through the prominence of military priests among the magazine’s writers, Christian religion still runs like a thin but everpresent thread through Suomen Sotilas. Religion intertwines with patriotism as the basis of the Finnish citizen-soldier’s morality and virtue. It is a defining difference between the righteous Finnish nation-in-arms and its adversary, the godless Bolsheviks. This strong presence of Christian ideals and influences is also one reason why the ideal images of Finnish soldiers in Suomen Sotilas almost never become aggressive, but retain a “softness” almost surprising for a military magazine from the heydays of Finnish nationalism. Throughout the period the images of soldering in Suomen Sotilas and its portrayal of the military retain an aura of moral purity and noble-mindedness that certainly served to camouflage the ugly realities of militarisation, military life and modern warfare. At the same time, these images and ideology were strikingly different from the contemporary fascist movements in Europe.
The Military as “Protectors of the Finnish Nation”
Military educators writing in Suomen Sotilas tried to construct an ideal image of the military centred on a sense of duty, a spirit of sacrifice, and self-restraint. An important element in all these constructions, hidden in expressions such as “every decent man” or “like our fathers before us”, was an imagined sameness and community among all Finns, who did “what a man had to do” and valorously defended their country. To the extent that this brotherhood-in-arms was made up of a special category of people, united around and through their shared membership of the military, the citizen-soldiers’ conceptualized themselves as a group within the Finnish people, the “Protectors of the Finnish Nation.” This conceptualization was a central piece of the military’s self-image. Firstly, a great part of the Finnish nation was deemed incapable of bearing arms and therefore in need of the soldiers’ protection: women, the old and the young. Secondly, there were those who threatened the Finnish nation from outside, namely the Russians and Bolsheviks. Thirdly, a heterogeneous group of Finnish men was deemed capable of bearing arms, yet for varying reasons failed to fulfil this duty and therefore threatened the nation from the inside.
The relationship between the conscript and those he was to protect was usually depicted in terms of the obligations of a good son towards his parents, sisters and younger siblings, not in terms of a father and husband protecting the members of his household. This was perhaps natural, as the intended readership, the conscripts, were only 20–22 years old. However, it gives a particular flavour to the relationship between the citizen-soldier and those it was his duty to protect and die for. In storys about the “fathers” and “fore-fathers” in Suomen Sotilas it is the mature man, master of his house and household, who goes to war. In storys directly addressing the readers as conscripts, however, they are spoken to as sons of either their physical parents or the abstract nation – “the Fatherland” or “Mother Finland” – who only pass over the threshold to real manhood by preparing to go to war. In relation to those incapable of bearing arms, the conscripted soldier does not fight and die to defend his property and his own patriarchal position, but to serve his family and his society. He is motivated but also bound by filial obedience, love and gratitude. He essentially sets out to defend a power structure that is not dominated by him and his comrades but by their fathers. In those rather few instances where individual fathers appear in the magazine, they are often stern, rebuking or commanding figures, such as the “father” quoted above writing an open letter to his “discontented son” in military service, telling him he must develop a sense of duty to become a man. This is a father figure in front of which the young conscripted man is supposed to be ashamed to show himself “soft”, complaining about treatment in the army and of withdrawing from his civic duty.
The images of mothers in Suomen Sotilas, however, are more ambiguous. Mothers are always depicted as loving their sons immensely. Mostly, this love is depicted as good, selfless and beautiful. The iconic mother is a moral educator and the ideal soldier is bound to her by love, gratitude and filial duty. He wants to protect her and he wants her to be proud of him. Drawing on this particular mother-son relationship, Finland as a nation is sometimes referred to as Suomi-äiti, Mother Finland, signalling that the relationship of the soldier to the nation should be that of a loving son to his mother. In some other instances, however, mothers are criticised for spoiling their sons by being too pampering or too dominant. Being a “mother’s boy” was presented as shameful for a man, and a great deal of the blame was directed at the mother. The border line was thus subtle and sometimes blurred between the good mother, who educated and motivated the citizen-soldier, and the bad mother, who detained her son in infancy, prevents him from stepping into manhood and thus reverses the relationship between protector and protected.
Women as girlfriends, fiancées or wives of soldiers rarely appear in Suomen Sotilas. The writers apparently did not expect the 21–22 year-old conscript to have a girlfriend, fiancée or wife waiting at home. Neither did they want him to think much about how soldiering related to his future relationships with women. In some fictional short stories a woman as a potential future lover and wife appears a motivating force for the soldier, spurring the hesitant soldier into battle, giving him a reason to resist the vices of garrison towns, or punishing the coward or traitor by refusing him her love. In general, however, the absence of female characters in the magazine’s pages is remarkable. It seems to underline the moral and religious beliefs of the writers for Suomen Sotilas, with the absence and exclusion of women from the writers perception of everyday life of conscripted soldiers in the garrisons reflecting what they wanted to believe, rather than what was more likely the reality of garrison life (soldiers being soldiers….).
Other than as mothers, women mostly appear in Suomen Sotilas as Lotta Svärd volunteers, working hard, bravely and patriotically for the common task of national defence with women’s chores: cooking, nursing and clothing the soldiers. These women were on the one hand active agents, but on the other hand confined to the feminine sphere of admiring and taking care of the military heroes. The image of female volunteers within the military system was certainly always positive; they were needed and useful and could be portrayed as courageous, even heroic in their own manner. Yet the division of labour was immovable, and the portrayal of women in Suomen Sotilas, as mothers, lovers or Lottas all conveyed the implicit message that armed defence and the fighting itself was the preserve of men. When there had been some letters to the editor of a Finnish newspaper in 1930 concerning conscription and military training for women, the editors of Suomen Sotilas only observed that the idea had been refuted by “many valid arguments”. They chose to comment on it themselves in the form of a photograph showing female members of the Russian Red Army among their male comrades, all looking relaxed and cheerful. “A repulsive sight”, the editors curtly noted.
Russians as Countertypes to Finns
“Countertypes” as a contrast to the Finnish ideal are a theme that runs through Suomen Sotilas through the 1920’s and 1930’s. Early countertypes were social outsiders such as Jews, Gypsies, vagrants, habitual criminals and the insane, all characterised by ugliness, restlessness, and a lack of self-control. A rather different kind of countertype emerges in nineteenth century self-help books for conscripts. There, un-men were not clearly demarcated social groups completely outside “normal” society, but gamblers and drunkards, ordinary men who had failed, made the wrong choices and therefore “fallen” into vice. These countertypes had a different functionality from “permanent outsiders”. The young man could not find easy self-assurance in feeling superior to the countertype, but was threatened by the possibility that he might become one of them if he did not heed the moralists’ advice. “Because men could fall, any middle-class man ran the risk of becoming that Other.”
The countertypes more commonly seen in Suomen Sotilas are the images of Russians, especially Russian Bolsheviks. In those instances where Russians were described in more detail it is obvious that they serve as a foil to Finnishness. A portrayal of Russian revolutionary soldiers stationed in Finland in 1917–1918 illustrates this: “Those loitering good-for-nothings slouching around in their down at heel boots and their stinking, dirty and shabby uniforms called themselves soldiers! Well, it certainly was the time of svaboda [freedom] – who would then care about such trivial things as washing his face or mending his trousers! (…) The outer appearance of those Russian squaddies was an excellent image of the confusion of their mental life (…).” These countertypes indirectly underline the importance of a Finnish soldier being clean and tidy, his outer appearance expressing a rational and virtuous mind; otherwise, he is no true Finnish soldier. Bolsheviks were portrayed as lazy and thievish people who shunned work and preferred confiscating goods from good thrifty people – marking the importance of honesty and industry in Finnish national character.
Two longer storys on the national character of the Russian people in 1932 explained that due to centuries of oppression by the Orthodox Church and the tsars, and in the absence of both individual freedom and religious and moral education, the Russians had developed into purely emotional beings, governed by impulses and temporary moods. A Russian could therefore at anytime contradict his own actions. He was unreliable, deceitful, completely unconcerned about lying and thieving, and lacked a sense of justice. Because he was a fatalist and did not think he could influence his own destiny or wellbeing, he lacked diligence and a sense of responsibility. He preferred talking to acting. He did not care about punctuality or efficiency. He treated a woman more like beast of draught than as his wife. As soldiers, Russians were intrepid but mentally slow, lacking in independence and perseverance. Finally, the author pointed to the eradication of the educated classes and the prohibition against religious education as the main obstacles for societal progress in Russia; “Without religion nothing lasting can be achieved!”
A Finnish soldier, one can derive from this description of the enemy, should be rational and always preserve his sang-froid; be principled and honest, treat women with respect, work hard and be the architect of his own fortune. He should also appreciate his individual freedom as well as the importance of Lutheran religious education and the leadership of the educated classes for Finland’s progress and prosperity. Due to the Russian’s weaknesses as soldiers, the Finnish Army could be victorious if its soldiers were quick-minded, self-propelled and persistent. On the whole, however, Russians were seldom described as individuals or as a people with certain characteristics. Russians in general and Russian Bolsheviks in particular were mostly referred to as an almost dehumanized force of evil, chaos and destruction, a threat against everything valuable in Finnish society and everything specific for the Finnish nation. Russia was “Asianness” threatening to destroy the entire Western culture. Russia meant “hunger for land, bestiality and deceit” and Bolshevism meant slavery as opposed to Finnish freedom. Russia was the Enemy, in an almost absolute sense.
Finnish Countertypes: the Dissolute and the Politically Deluded
Those Finnish men who were considered outsiders to the community of soldiers, consisted of the morally dissolute, the politically deluded, and the simpletons. Of these, only the morally dissolute can easily be labelled as countertypes. As we have seen, dissolute men were depicted as weak since they were incapable of self-restraint, e.g. in relation to alcohol, and lived “at the command of the whims, lusts and desires of the moment”. They were not free, but slaves to their passions and served to underline the virtues of moral purity, abstinence and self-control. Both physically and morally weakened by their vices, the morally dissolute as countertypes displayed how immorality destroyed the soldier’s fitness to fight and how true patriotism therefore demanded continence and clean living. On the whole, however, these countertypes are not very prominent in Suomen Sotilas, and where they appear they are seldom described in any graphic detail. If there was any concern over Finnish men degenerating into unmanliness and effeminacy through over-civilisation, similar to concerns in the large industrial nations before the Great War, it does not show in the pages of Suomen Sotilas. Given the very low degree of urbanisation and industrialisation in interwar Finland it is perhaps not surprising that military educators were not less concerned over the enfeeblement of their conscripts as over the relative strength and vigour of conscripts with the “wrong” political outlook.
Finnish socialists and pacifists who resisted conscription or even worked at undermining the Finnish armed forces were depicted as more threatening to the military nation than the morally dissolute and the temptations of vice. These politically “deluded” men had a kind of borderline status as both outsiders and insiders to the community of Finnish men. They were not usually depicted as weak or cowardly men, although they deliberately refused or resisted the duty of fighting for the nation. They presented a real and tangible political opposition and challenge to the political establishment and military system. They certainly were contrasted to “proper”, patriotic conscripts in Suomen Sotilas. However, military educators could not just comfortably single them out as social outcasts, contraposing them to the deal military conscript and be assured of the readers’ sympathy. Socialists, according to the magazine, failed to put the fatherland and the nation above all else, and instead promoted either their selfish class-interest and party ambitions or the “fantasy of internationalism, so manifestly indicating [mental] morbidity”. In 1924, an editorial warned of the dangers of socialist teachings and the “irresponsible” work of communist “moles” and infiltrators in the armed forces, “agents of the Russians selected and bought among the most morally spineless elements”, trying to incite
conscripts into treason to their country. Communists were people who wanted to “deprive us of our freedom and put Russian slavery in its stead, in order to ensure the wellbeing of a few traitors”. Understood as countertypes, socialists were used to emboss the difference between driving special interests and putting the common good of the whole nation above all else; between unscrupulous people allying themselves with hostile forces abroad, to achieve their own goals, and selfless people who understood that when the country was threatened from the outside, all internal strife must be set aside. This contrast associated patriotism with unselfishness, loyalty and solidarity.
Pacifists were the objects of several articles especially around the turn of the decade 1930. The attention given in the magazine to refuting pacifism was due, among other things, to two anti-militaristic books that attracted much attention in Finland around this time; Erik Maria Remarque's internationally acclaimed Im Westen Nichts Neues [All Quiet on the Western Front] (1929) and Pentti Haanpää's Kenttä ja kasarmi [Fields and Barracks] (1928). There was also the cause célèbre of Arndt Pekurinen, a Finnish unconditional conscientious objector who was imprisoned several times between 1929–1932. The editors of Suomen Sotilas underlined that they loved peace just as the whole of the Finnish people did. Since the Finnish armed forces were purely defensive, the Finnish pacifists were barking up the wrong tree: the Bolsheviks were the ones threatening the peace, not the Finnish Army. Jäger General Major Aarne Sihvo, then Commander of the Armed Forces, complained in the Christmas issue of Suomen Sotilas 1929 that any attempts at strengthening nationalism and patriotism were met by a “war-cry in the name of pacifism swinging the flags of international brotherhood”. Sihvo wondered whether the pacifists obstructed nationalism out of true internationalism, thoughtlessness or indifference, or if they intentionally wanted to weaken and cause disunion in the country.
In association with the case of Arndt Pekurinen, the editors of Suomen Sotilas stated that they agreed completely with him in that war was cruel and brutal. It should be eradicated from the face of the earth since it caused such suffering. They claimed to have depicted all the afflictions of war in their magazine and warned against talking lightly about war. They expressed their sympathy towards all strivings for peace. However, “we cannot make such a stupid and ill-advised conclusion from this conviction as Pekurinen and his kindred spirits.” In the present international situation and with the Soviet Union agitating world revolution, “one must be stupid and blind at the same time to not understand, to one’s regret, that we constantly live in the midst of the dangers of war.” Pacifists were thus naive idealists, as opposed to the sober realism of those receiving military training. The editors claimed that “all of us” – a ‘we’ obviously encompassing the reader – despised killing, but that we could not “passively watch and helplessly wait for the final blow, like Pekurinen the day the oppressor attacks our country. “We, who love peace and despise war, will fight to our last drop of blood on the fateful day for our homes, parents, sisters, brothers, and our whole people and its freedom.” There is an
unmistakable hint that Pekurinen was no normal, decent man, as he was willing to passively let himself be butchered and everything that he should love and protect be destroyed.
Simpletons as ambiguous others
Possibly the most intriguing and ambiguous other to the military nation was, finally, the simpleton. Various descriptions of funny oafs arriving to do their military service, and of all their hardships as they tried to get through recruit training, was a popular theme of humorous short stories in Suomen Sotilas. Several of these made explicit reference to the poem ‘Sven Dufva’ by J. L. Runeberg, included in the Tales of Ensign Stål cycle (1848). Runeberg’s Sven Dufva was a half-witted but good-natured and above all brave-hearted young soldier in the Finnish War of 1808–1809, who did everything the wrong way around. In a tight spot, he turned out to be the only one staying his ground to heroically fight off the Russians, defending a narrow bridge all by himself. In Suomen Sotilas, the common denominator in these kind of stories was that the protagonist was kind and dutiful yet somehow considered an “impossible” soldier on arrival for military training. He was too stupid to learn close-order drill or saluting superiors correctly, physically clumsy or slow, made fun of by the other soldiers, and brought the training officers to despair. Yet at the end of these stories, the Sven Dufva character always turned out to be either unusually brave in battle or skilled at something particular such as skiing, sharpshooting, making shoes or taking care of horses. The most obvious message in these stories would seem to be that the army has a use for every man (who is physically fit enough to pass the medical exam), no matter how simple or uneducated he is. Courage, obedience and good will compensate for insufficient intelligence or proficiency.
The Sven Dufva stories always end by the protagonist becoming an accepted member of the community. Sven Dufva represents an inferior archtype, yet in these particular narratives even his limited skills and virtues are acknowledged. As a soldier, he acquires a certain social recognition in the military system that he might not get elsewhere in society – as long as he partakes to his best ability in the common duty of all men. His admission to the military community is, however, no matter of course. It is open to doubt until he demonstrates his valour or usefulness through some dramatic episode, such as refusing to abandon his watch in a burning building until his officer arrives to give the order; or getting the best score in the company in the first shooting exercises. Yet the Sven Dufva character does not seem to have been intended mainly as a positive model for unintelligent readers to identify with. As the authors half-benevolently, half-condescendingly invite the reader to laugh along with them at the funny Sven Dufvas, they rather incite the “normal” readers to tolerate these characters and accept them as comrades. In a sense, Sven Dufva is a countertype to the “normal” conscript, who is supposed to be smart, nimble and quick to learn, work well with the group and not stand out as odd and different. The popularity of the Sven Dufva character probably to some extent reflect the amusement with which Finnish officers from the educated classes sometimes regarded soldiers from “uncultured” rustic areas. In some cases, however, pretending to be a fool can have been a form of popular resistance against the social arrogance of these officers. As a cultural image, however, the Sven Dufva character can also be seen as a projection of many men’s fear of becoming the laughing stock of other men in the military world. Laughing at the stories about Sven Dufva in Suomen Sotilas would then mainly be a laughter of relief: thank God I am not like that.
Conclusion: The Image of the Military
In many ways, the images of soldiering and the objects of identification offered to conscripts in Suomen Sotilas correspond to the “new” military agenda outlined by the young nationalist officers who envisioned a “new” kind of self-disciplined soldier. This should be no surprise, as the people drafting that agenda were also important writers for the magazine. This particular military image, centred on a sense of duty, a spirit of sacrifice and self-restraint, was offered to the conscripts with a promise of reward. The dutiful national warrior would not only serve the nation as a useful citizen in both war and peace, but also enjoy ensured individual success and prestige in peacetime society. This part of the “civic education” in Suomen Sotilas is remarkably similar to nineteenth-century Prussian military propaganda described by Ute Frevert. Prussian military authorities, Frevert writes, were intent on counteracting socialism among the conscripts and educating them into a what was seen as the “correct” conscript image – emphasizing physical fitness, courage, self-assurance, loyalty, obedience, comradeship, anti-individualism, discipline and belief in the authorities. Prussian conscription was legitimised by claims that only military training brought youths into full manhood. Military service, it was said, prepared the soldier not only for war, but also for life as a civilian. The army claimed to be a “school of manhood” bringing forth patriotic “sons of the fatherland”, industrious and steady men, stern fathers who took their civic duties seriously and were prepared to sacrifice themselves for king and country.
It seems evident that the German models inspired those Finnish military educators with cultural and professional connections to Germany. However, Prussian military propagandists in the nineteenth century had to motivate conscripts to fight for a monarchy under which they had only limited political rights. The Finnish military educationalists writing in Suomen Sotilas could in theory have taken full advantage of the fact that Finland was a democratic republic. However, it is striking how Suomen Sotilas practically never places military service in connection with universal suffrage or the democratic nature of the new Finnish state. Citizenship was usually referred to in terms of the individual’s duty to be a useful member of society, prepared to sacrifice himself for the larger whole, and not in terms of political rights and freedoms worth defending. This could possibly be attributed to storyual models from the German empire, but it might also betray a certain lack of enthusiasm about parliamentary democracy among the magazine’s editors and contributors. Nonetheless, the Finnish interwar military propaganda appears less authoritarian in spirit than its German predecessors as described by Frevert. Against the background of the insurgency and civil war of 1918, it is actually surprising that submission and discipline were not emphasised more in Suomen Sotilas. Its nineteenth century predecessor, the magazine for soldiers in the “old” Finnish conscript army, tended to cast the relationship between soldiers and officers in paternalist terms of love, trust and obedience, reminiscent of the relationship of plucky boy scouts to their senior leaders.
In comparison, Suomen Sotilas has remarkably little to say about the relationship between soldier and officer. The magazine’s articles centre on the image of an autonomous citizen-soldier, in the sense that this soldier must be morally self-disciplined, self-propelled and self-controlled. The humility and obedience emphasised in the nineteenth century soldiers’ magazine give place to an emphasis on will-power and a sense of duty. In spite of the many condescending and admonitory passages quoted above, the images of the citizen-soldier in Suomen Sotilas are actually more austere and adult compared to corresponding images before national independence. This is in keeping with the pedagogic agenda of educating a “new” kind of self-propelled soldier. It might also, after all, reflect an awareness that the reader to be addressed no longer the humble and obedient subject of the Russian emperor but the free citizen of a democratic Finnish republic. The conscripts would soon be entitled to vote at age 24. Countering the widespread scepticism against the cadre army system, the authors seem to have been intent on displaying the citizen-soldier submitting to the army discipline out of his own free will and going to war for his own, his families and people’s sake – not for his officers or political leaders.
In general, it is striking how little was written in the magazine about groups outside the community of men in arms. Women and civilians certainly played an implicit role as one reason why men had to be soldiers, but they were not given much attention and were seldom mentioned. Soldiering was defined and depicted within a male military community. The focus was on the conscripts’s development and maturing in the company and under the guidance of other soldiers and with other soldiers as their models. Not even the countertypes of the military image among Finnish men were particularly salient. The magazine was more intent on displaying positive instances of the military than on using the threat of countertypes to make the readers step in line. Nevertheless, rhetoric explicitly drawing on the military duties of citizenship seems to have been most forcefully used where military educators sensed the strongest challenges against their views. It was forcefully used to justify military training in a cadre army in the early 1920’s, when parties of the left and centre called into question the whole justification of such a training.
The image of the valorous citizen-soldier protecting his country was an image that the military educators thought every man would like to identify with, no matter which political opinions he held. They thus hoped soldiering would work as a cement holding men and through them society together, coating the fissures and conflict lines in the social fabric. The storys of Suomen Sotilas offered identities and recognition in exchange for submitting to certain duties and obligations. However, the archived volumes of the magazines themselves still tell us as little about how they were read and received. Did the readers accept the call and submit their destinies to the nation, in order to be recognised as virtuous citizens? Were they attracted by the offering of guidance towards status and prestige in return for obedience and selfdiscipline? Did they refuse the call – or simply ignore it? Those with military service will certainly have some idea of how “official” military papers and magazines are viewed, and as a result and given the distance in time, the real effects and impact on the readers are difficult to estimate and should probably not be exaggerated.
How a story will be read and what meanings it will carry for different readers is by no means fixed or limited by the author’s intentions. Yet from a historical point of view, these magazines probably tell us more about the people who wrote them than the people who read them. The people who toiled, often in their spare time, to fill issue after issue of Suomen Sotilas with articles obviously did have motives and purposes for their work. It remains interesting and relevant to ask why they wrote at all, and why they wrote the way they did. Some of the writers, especially the military priests among them, had obvious intentions to exercise a moral authority. They wanted to reshape the values and behaviour of the conscripts, make them submit to military discipline, motivate them to exercise self-discipline, and infuse them with Christian-patriotic morality. Others, such as the authors of adventure stories, possibly only wanted to support national defence by entertaining the conscripts and keeping them in a good humour – although even the most entertaining pieces in the magazine often had a rather obtrusive sens moral and a conspicuous eagerness to show military life in a positive light. Few of the authors would have agreed or admitted that the storys they wrote were intended at portraying the authors themselves as legitimate holders of power and influence – yet that is often what they did. Suomen Sotilas can be read in the same way as nineteenth century handbooks for conscripts; as a way for middle-class and middle-age authors to legitimate their own power and authority in society. The men writing for Suomen Sotilas wielded – or at least tried hard to wield – a certain authority and power in relation to their readers, who were placed in the position of the disciple, the young man who is to be guided by older, wiser and more experienced men on the path towards adult citizenship. However, we should not see the men writing for Suomen Sotilas as somehow above or outside the ideologies and power structures they supported or advocated. They themselves lived in the ideological reality that they wanted their readers to enter; in a sense, they were its products. It is important to take these men seriously and understand how they were passionate about the Finnish nation and protecting its independence. Partly as an extension of their nationalism, it is evident that many of them had a true and deep-felt concern for conscripts and their development. Their storys should certainly be read with an acute sense for the power mechanisms at work, but also for the genuine hopes and desires, fears and anxieties they express.
To illuminate this concluding point, the writers of Suomen Sotilas regularly espouse the expression “spirit of the fathers”, which some of them were so fond of. It originated in J.L. Runeberg’s poem ‘The Veteran’ from the aforementioned Tales of Ensign Stål (1848). This poem tells the story of an old veteran living in great poverty who one day dons his old uniform and walks down to the church green to watch a battle between Finnish and Russian troops during the Finnish War of 1808–1809. He longs to “hear the clashing/ of sword-blades yet once more”, recall the memories of the strength and courage of his youth and see the new generation of fighters, “the courage of its blood”. Calmly, he sits through the raging battle, in the midst of bullets whizzing by and soldiers falling next to him, his countenance beaming “as if transfigured”. Late in the day, the Finnish troops are victorious. As the last Finnish detachment is about to leave the battlefield, the veteran stands up and calls out to them:
“Ye sons of our own country,
So youthful and so bold,
Is there one here who values
The words of warrior old?
“Great thanks to you he renders
For this illustrious day;
For no more glorious combat
Did e’er his eye survey.
To God be praise and glory
We triumph yet again;
Still lives our father’s spirit,
And still our land has men!”
Did the writers of Suomen Sotilas think this was excellent propaganda and a superb toolkit for the manipulation of unsuspecting conscripts? Or were they, rather, deeply touched by the poem themselves? If the latter was the case, exactly what in the poem was so touching to them? Was it the image evoked of a community of Finnish men down through the ages, of oneself belonging to a national brotherhood-in-arms, united over the abyss of temporal distance through the same destiny to be warriors, the same continued fight? Was it the way it struck a chord in their personal experience of fighting the “Liberation War” – or rather, a chord in how they wanted to remember that experience – as a way of gaining recognition from their fathers, or forefathers, or the entire world; recognition as men and members of a nation, not the browbeaten lapdogs of foreign masters? These are speculative questions, but the possibility is compelling that the talk about the forefathers, citizenship and morality in Suomen Sotilas should be understood not only as disciplinary power mechanisms, but also as an attempt on part of the authors to convey something positive to the readers. An attempt to let them feel the gratification of being hailed and recognised through the ideology of nationalism, of being able to triumphantly answer to the call, “You, young valiant son of our native soil!” – “Yes! Yes, that is me, that is who I am!”
ex Ngāti Tumatauenga ("Tribe of the Maori War God") aka the New Zealand Army
Question on Conscript Training in the 1920's and 1930's
Does anyone have any photos of conscript training in the 1920's and/or 1930's that you could post online (or know of any websites with photos that you could provide links to). Or even suggestions on what Finnish words I should use to search with online.
I'm doing a writeup on Conscript training memories and experiences from the 1920s and 1930s based on the Anders Ahlback thesis I'm taki'ng all this stuff from, but I'd like to include photos of actual training and conscripts and I'm finding it difficult to track these down - probably because where there are photos they're on Finnish websites and listed by Finnish names / descriptions and I'm not using the right words for my Google Searchs. Any and all help would be appreciated
Basically, I'm looking for photos on:
- conscripts in training (marching, parades, phsyical training, running, rifle training, anything physical)
- barracks life (barrack buildings, bunkrooms, meals, guard duty, ...anything garrison related)
- field exercises, parades,
Kiitos...........Nigel
I'm doing a writeup on Conscript training memories and experiences from the 1920s and 1930s based on the Anders Ahlback thesis I'm taki'ng all this stuff from, but I'd like to include photos of actual training and conscripts and I'm finding it difficult to track these down - probably because where there are photos they're on Finnish websites and listed by Finnish names / descriptions and I'm not using the right words for my Google Searchs. Any and all help would be appreciated
Basically, I'm looking for photos on:
- conscripts in training (marching, parades, phsyical training, running, rifle training, anything physical)
- barracks life (barrack buildings, bunkrooms, meals, guard duty, ...anything garrison related)
- field exercises, parades,
Kiitos...........Nigel
ex Ngāti Tumatauenga ("Tribe of the Maori War God") aka the New Zealand Army
Re: (Permanent) Army Training leading up to the Winter War?
Hastily: in...
Hi Nigel et al.
This could be a good source to photos about the asked. Its the since 1959 in many editins published "The Finnish defence forces now and then" wich is mainly a photo history of the FDF since the war of Liberation and to present day, so I suggest anyone interested to try to find some of the editons of mentoned work, latest edition (if Im correct) is:
Suomen puolustusvoimat ennen ja nyt / Ed: Eero Elfvengren. Helsinki : WSOY, 2006, ISBN: 951-0-28151-4.
Best regards
Esa K
...and: out.
Hi Nigel et al.
This could be a good source to photos about the asked. Its the since 1959 in many editins published "The Finnish defence forces now and then" wich is mainly a photo history of the FDF since the war of Liberation and to present day, so I suggest anyone interested to try to find some of the editons of mentoned work, latest edition (if Im correct) is:
Suomen puolustusvoimat ennen ja nyt / Ed: Eero Elfvengren. Helsinki : WSOY, 2006, ISBN: 951-0-28151-4.
Best regards
Esa K
...and: out.
-
Philip S. Walker
- Member
- Posts: 1113
- Joined: 06 Jan 2011, 18:44
Re: (Permanent) Army Training leading up to the Winter War?
Well, since no one else seems to find it appropriate to thank CanKiwi for his incredible work here to the benefit of everyone, let me do it: Thanks, Nigel, what you have done and achieved here is nothing short of astonishing! For an outsider to show such interest and insight in a Nordic nation is a great honor to us and much appreciated.
Re: (Permanent) Army Training leading up to the Winter War?
Thx Esa - trying to track down a copy - it's listed on amazon but none available, working my way thru used book websites now. I'm sure I'll find it. Actually, just searching on "puolustusvoimat" led me to quite a few images online on different sites, which was useful all by itself.Esa K wrote:This could be a good source to photos about the asked. Its the since 1959 in many editins published "The Finnish defence forces now and then" wich is mainly a photo history of the FDF since the war of Liberation and to present day, so I suggest anyone interested to try to find some of the editons of mentoned work, latest edition (if Im correct) is:
Suomen puolustusvoimat ennen ja nyt / Ed: Eero Elfvengren. Helsinki : WSOY, 2006, ISBN: 951-0-28151-4.
Best regards
Esa K
What would be really useful is if someone could post some Finnish one word terms related to conscript training that I could search on. It's hard for me to know whether I'm using the right words.....
Hey Phil - no worries mate, there've been more than a few responses and feedback and I'm not out for applause. I find this extremely interesting and if anyone else enjoys it or finds it useful, that's a pure bonus. That said, all I'm really redoing for the last few posts is editing someone elses thesis and inserting a few photos and comments. The real credit goes to the guy that wrote it - Anders Ahlback. He did some excellent research. After I finish with his thesis, my next little project is to work thru Malkki's book
and hopefully do an intelligible translation in English - there's an English summary at the back of the book but it's a little ..... grammatically curious, is the way I'd put it.And I still have that book on the Heimosodat to work thru as well. It's a shame there's not a bigger English-language market for these books, they're really interesting.
Cheers..........Nigel
ex Ngāti Tumatauenga ("Tribe of the Maori War God") aka the New Zealand Army
Re: (Permanent) Army Training leading up to the Winter War?
A period book with IIRC rather good photos was Suomen Puolustusvoimat ; WSOY 1931 [416 pages]. Another possibility Suomen Sotaväki; WSOY 1936, 1937 & 1938.
Markus
Markus
Re: (Permanent) Army Training leading up to the Winter War?
Kiitos Markus, I'll check out Suomen Sotaväki as well.peeved wrote:A period book with IIRC rather good photos was Suomen Puolustusvoimat ; WSOY 1931 [416 pages]. Another possibility Suomen Sotaväki; WSOY 1936, 1937 & 1938.
Markus
ex Ngāti Tumatauenga ("Tribe of the Maori War God") aka the New Zealand Army
Training the Conscript Citizen-Soldier (in the 1920’s)
Stories and Memories of Conscript Soldiering in the 1920’s
At the age of 61, Lauri Mattila wrote down his memories of military training in a garrison in Helsinki forty years earlier. Mattila, a farmer from a rural municipality in Western Finland, was evidently carried away by his reminiscences, since he wrote almost 200 pages. The resulting narrative is a fascinating depiction of both the dark and the bright sides of military service in interwar Finland.1 Recalling his service in 1931–1932 from the vantage point of the early 1970’s, Mattila underlined that he had a positive attitude to the army as a young man and reported for duty “full of the eagerness of youth and military spirit”. In his memories, he marked his loyalty with “white” Finland. However, the conditions of military training he described are in many places shocking to read. He remembered recruit training as characterised not least by the insulting language of superiors: “The training style of the squad leaders was to bawl, accuse and shame the recruit. A conscripted corporal could give instructions like the following when he instructed a recruit [in close-order drill]. Lift your head, here you don’t dangle your head like an old nag. You have a stomach like a pregnant hag, pull it in. Now there I’ve got a man, who doesn’t know what is left and what is right. Tomorrow you will get yourself some litter to put in your right pocket – and hay from the stables to put in your left pocket, then you can be commanded to turn towards the litter or turn towards hay. Maybe then you will understand the commands.”
The recruits’ carefully made beds were ruined daily, “blown up” by inspecting officers, and Mattila had all the meticulously arranged equipment in his locker heaved out onto the floor because his spoon was lying “in the wrong direction.” As he moved on from recruit training to NCO training, he and the other NCO pupils were virtually persecuted by squad leaders who punished them at every step they took, incessantly making them drop to a prone position, crawl, get up again, run around the lavatories, clean the rifles, polish the squad leaders’ boots etc. The squad leaders cut the buttons of their tunics off almost daily and the pupils had to spend their evenings sewing them back on. The squad leaders could humiliate soldiers by making them kneel before them. In one instance a soldier was forced to lick a squad leader’s boot. According to Mattila, all this passed with the silent consent of the NCO school’s sadistic director, a Jäger Major. Yet Mattila also remembered training officers who were excellent educators, especially one lieutenant who always had surprises in his training programme, trained the men’s power of observation and always rewarded good achievements. The sergeant major of Mattila’s recruit training unit who had terrified the recruits on their first days of duty is later in the narrative described as a basically kind-hearted man, bellowing at the soldiers “always tongue in cheek”.
Mattila recalled his platoon’s ambition of always being the best unit in the company with apparent pride, as well as his regiment’s self-understanding of being an elite corps superior to other military units in the area. He wrote about how he acquired new acquaintances and friends during his service and how he would sit around with them in the service club, discussing “religion, patriotism, theatre, opera, we sometimes visited them (…) and yes we talked about women and it can be added that we visited them too.” After his NCO training, Mattila was assigned to be a squad leader in the main guard. He lyrically depicted the daily changing of the guard, the military band playing and the sidewalks filled with townspeople never growing tired of watching the spectacle. “Whoever has marched in that parade, will remember it with nostalgia for the rest of his life”, he wrote. As he reached the end of his long account, Lauri Mattila summed up what the military training had meant for him: “I was willing to go to [the military] and in spite of all the bullying I did not experience the army as a disagreeable compulsion, but as a duty set by the fatherland, a duty that was meaningful to fulfil. Moreover, it was a matter of honour for a Finnish man. My opinion about the mission of the armed forces and their educational significance has not changed. For this reason, I do not understand this present direction that the soldiers’ position becomes ever more civilian-like and that it becomes unclear who is in command, the soldier or the officer. The barracks must not become a resting home spoiling the inmates.”
The memories of this farmer in his old-age recount a unique individual experience. Yet they also contain many elements typical of reminiscences of military training in the interwar period: the shock of arrival in an entirely different social world; the harshness of recruit training; the complex relationships between soldiers and their superiors; the comradeship between soldiers and the perceived adventurousness of any contacts with women of their own age; the slowly ameliorating conditions as disbandment day grew closer; and the final assessment of military training as a necessary duty and its hardships as a wholesome experience for conscripts. In a sense, this Post moves on from the rhetoric of politics, hero myths and army propaganda into the “real world” of garrisons, barracks and training fields, as that world was described by “ordinary” conscripts – not only educated, middle-class politicians, officers or educationalists, but also
men of the lower classes. This however, is not to investigate what “actually happened” in military training, or what the conscripts “really experienced”, but to study the images of conscript soldiering that arose from story-telling about military training. The post studies stories about the social reality of interwar military training, both as written in the period and as memories written down decades later.
The civic education and “enlightenment” propaganda, analysed in the previous posts, powerfully propagated the notion that it was in the environment of military service that a boy or youngster was transformed and somehow reached full and real adult citizenship. The army was “a school for men” or “the place where men were made”. It was never stated in military rhetoric of the era that learning the technical use of weapons or elementary combat tactics was in itself what made men into boys. Instead, this transformation was, by implication, brought about by the shared experience of living in the military environment and coping with the demands put on the conscripts by their superiors and by the collective of military comrades. On the other hand, there was also, as we have seen, vivid and outspoken political criticism of military training within the confinements of a cadre army, as well as loud-spoken moral concerns that this same environment would damage conscripts. In this critical debate, the relationships both to superiors and to “comrades” debased the young man, the former through brutalising him and the latter through morally corrupting him. The conscripts were all exposed to the army’s “enlightenment” efforts, but it cannot be taken for granted that they subscribed to their contents any more than it can be assumed that men from a working class background espoused socialist anti-militarism. Whether they embraced or rejected the idea of military training as a place “where men were made”, it is significant in how they depicted the social relationships among men in the military and how they saw the military as changing them through the shared experience that all conscripts wnt through.
To the extent that soldiering became a crucial part of Finnish society in the interwar period, stories about what military service was“really like” conveyed messages to its audiences – and to the narrators themselves – about what it meant to be a Finn. How did army stories depict what happened as conscripts arrived for their military training? How did they describe the experience of entering the military world, with its social relationships, practices and ideological environment? How did different stories about personal experiences of military training relate to contemporary notions of soldiering? This Post emphasises how many men talked about the hardships, harshness and even brutality of military training – images of soldiering largely contradicting the pro-defence debate studied in the two previous posts. The proportion of stories about the austerity and severity of military discipline and of abuses and bullying does not prove whether this was a defining feature of Finnish military training at any particular point in time – in some conscript’s experience it was, in others’ it was not. Many men certainly had largely positive memories, emphasising good relationships with superiors, tolerable conditions and supportive comradeship. Yet even these narrators appear conscious of the powerful presence in popular culture of a “dark side” to the practices of military training that they were anxious
to refute.
Perhaps one reason why the narrators – including some of those who underline that they got on well in the military and even enjoyed themselves – chose to narrate and highlight stories about forced subordination and bullying was because these stories referred to a contradiction between the actual experience of life as a conscript and the public image of the military. This derived from the tensions between relationships in the military, where the conscripts experienced the contradiction between the idea of equal citizenship inherent in a modern “citizens’ army” vs the conflicting military logic of absolute obedience. The complete and unquestioning obedience demanded in the interwar Finnish conscript army, and the oftentimes humiliating methods used to bring it about, meant a loss of control for the conscript. He was defencelessly exposed to potential abuse. This contradicted the concept of soldiers as warriors and the army as a place “where boys become men” or “where men are made”. It also contradicted the contemporary nationalist defence rhetoric of self-restraint, a sense of duty and a spirit of sacrifice, since the bullied conscript was under external compulsion, forced forward not by internal motivation but by force of violence and the threat of even worse punishments. Moreover, the relationships among the rank-and-file conscripts were run through with informal hierarchies actively upheld by the soldiers themselves. The authors Pentti Haanpää and Mika Waltari addressed this major contradiction in the army books they published around 1930 – each in his fashion.
The historicity of Experiences and Memories
Here, we will go on to analyse two groups of sources depicting experiences of military service in the interwar period; Pentti Haanpää’s Fields and Barracks (1928) and Mika Waltari’s Where Men Are Made (1931) on the one hand, and a collection of autobiographical reminiscences on the other.
Pentti Haanpää (October 14, 1905, Pulkkila - September 30, 1955 Pyhäntä) was a Finnish novelist and a masterful short story writer whose father, Mikko Haanpää, and grandfather, Juho Haanpää, who was a senator, were also published authors. They were both socially and politically active in their home region.His mother, Maria Susanna (Keckman) Haanpää, was born in Haapavesi and came from a farming family. At school in Leskelä, Haanpää was a good student. After finishing elementary school, he began to contribute from 1921 on to the magazine Pääskynen, At the same time, he was also very active in sports. In 1923 Haanpää joined the literary association Nuoren Voiman Liitto and continued to write for its magazine Nuori Voima. Haanpää's first book, MAANTIETÄ PITKIN (1925), appeared when he was 20. It was well received by critics, who made special note of Haanpää's skillful use of language. A few years later the story was translated into Swedish under the title “Hemfolk och Strykare”. After this successful debut, Haanpää decided to devote himself entirely to writing.
He served in the army from 1925-26 and in 1927 published TUULI KÄY HEIDÄN YLITSEEN, a collection of short stories. It was followed by KENTTÄ JA KASARMI (1928), which portrayed the army as a closed system, working under its own rules. In the promilitary atmosphere of the time, the book generated heated discussion. Among the critics was Olavi Paavolainen, the spiritual leader of the new generation of writers, who had reviewed Haanpää's earlier debut novel positively, and praised his straightforward and self-assured expression. Kenttä Ja Kasarmi was the first work in which Haanpää drew on his own unpleasant experiences in the army. Unable to adjust himself to military life, he felt that he had wasted a year of his life in "the straitjacket of a soldier." Haanpää's description of the brutal training methods and ugliness of the authoritarian military system upset patriotic reviewers so that for the next seven years no publisher would touch Haanpää's manuscripts.
Haanpää became best known for two controversial books that he wrote during this period of enforced silence. The first of these was the socialistically orientated “Noitaympyr” (1931) in which he examined the conflict between a misfit and his unbearable surroundings. At the end of the story Pate Teikka, the protagonist, chooses Communism instead of Western democracy and leaves Finland for an unknown future – he walks over the border into the Soviet Union. The second was “Vääpeli Sadon Tapaus” (1935), a bitter criticism of army life and brutality, dealing with the sadism of petty authority. The central characters are Simo Kärnä, a recruit and later corporal, and the psychopathic sergeant-major Sato, the embodiment of sadistic militarism. After repeated humiliations, Kärnä uses his intelligence and Sato's wife to gain his revenge, but eventually realizes that he has been as brutal as his enemy. Haanpää's other published works from the 1930s include ISÄNNÄT JA ISÄNTIEN VARJOT (1935), TAIVALVAARAN NÄYTTELJÄ (1938), and IHMISELON KARVAS IHANUUS (1939). Isännät ja isäntien varjot was published by Kirjailijain Kustannusliike, founded by Erkki Vala. The company was closely associated with the literary group Kiila (Wedge), whose members favored radical free verse and were more or less Marxists. Haanpää was among Kiila's best-known writers, along with such names as Arvo Turtiainen, Katri Vala, Viljo Kajava, and Elvi Sinervo. Suffice it to say that his anti-militarism and Marxist leanings in the 1920s and 1930s were not received with enthusiasm by right wing critics. Haanpää created his literary reputation chiefly with his short stories, of which he published twelve collections.
During the Winter War (1939-40), Haanpää served in the army. He was in the front line in Lapland. In 1940 while on leave he married Aili Karjalainen, a dairymaid whom he had met in the late 1930s. Haanpää utilized his war experiences in the story 'Sallimuksen Sormi', in which an exhausted infantry company, quartered in a church, is attacked by enemy aircraft. In the Continuation War (1941-44) Haanpää served in the service troops in the Kiestinki and Untua area. Haanpää's war novel KORPISOTAA (1940) was translated into French under the title Guerre Dans le Désert Blanc by M. Aurelien Sauvageot. The Austrian publishing company Karl H. Bischoff Verlag also planned to translate the work; one of Haanpää's short stories, 'Siipirikko', had already appeared in the German magazine Das Reich. However, German publishers did not consider Korpisotaa positive enough for the war effort. NYKYAIKAA (1942), a collection of short stories, reflected Haanpää's bitterness and disillusionment.
After the wars Haanpää wrote some of his best works, among them YHDEKSÄN MIEHEN SAAPPAAT (1945), a war novel, in which the same pair of boots passes from one trooper to another, and JAUHOT (1949), based on a historical event when peasants seized a government granary during the great famine of 1867-68. Haanpää's journey in 1953 to China with a delegation of Finnish writers inspired KIINALAISET JUTUT (1954). Although Haanpää had earlier condemned restrictions on free speech in the Soviet Union, he kept silent on this matter in his book on China, expressing an admiration for the spirit of change which had seized the country. "Kiinanmaassa tuoksahti joku merkillinen muuttumisen, uudistumisen ja kasvamisen ihme. Se oli jotakin ainutlaatuista ja muukalainen ei hevillä saane siitä täyttä käsitystä. Aavisteli, että kiinalaiset itse ällistelivät muuttuvaa maataan ja muuttuvaa elämäänsä ja kutsuivat siitä syystä ihmisiä maapallon toiselta puolelta näkemään, mitä heille tapahtui..." (from Kiinalaiset jutut). ATOMINTUTKIJA (1950) received good reviews by the right-wing columnist and critic Kauko Kare in the journal Suomalainen Suomi. Haanpää drowned on a fishing trip on September 30, 1955, two weeks before his 50th birthday. His last novel, PUUT, a story of a socialist who becomes a non-socialist, was left unfinished. Haanpää's collected works appeared in 1956 (10 vols.), and then in 1976 (8 vols.). Haanpää's notes from 1925 to 1939 were published in 1976 under the title MUISTIINMERKINTÖJÄ. Taivalvaaran näyttelijä was reprinted in 1997. 'Haanpää monument' (1996), made by the sculptor Tapio Junno, is situated in Leskelä, Piippola.
Mika Waltari (1908 – 1979), Finnish author
Mika Waltari (1908 – 1979) was born in Helsinki and lost his father, a Lutheran pastor, at the age of five. As a boy, he witnessed the Finnish Civil War in Helsinki. Later he enrolled in the University of Helsinki as a theology student, following his mother's wishes, but soon abandoned theology in favour of philosophy, aesthetics and literature, graduating in 1929. While studying, he contributed to various magazines, wrote poetry and stories and had his first book published in 1925 (at the age of 17). In 1927 he went to Paris where he wrote his first major novel Suuri Illusioni ('The Grand Illusion'), a story of bohemian life. Waltari also was, for a while, a member of the liberal literary movement Tulenkantajat, though his political and social views later turned conservative. He was married in 1931 and had a daughter, Satu, who also became a writer.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Waltari worked as a journalist and critic, writing for a number of newspapers and magazines and travelling widely in Europe. He was Editor for the magazine Suomen Kuvalehti. At the same time, he kept writing books in many genres, moving easily from one literary field to another. He participated, and often succeeded, in literary competitions to prove the quality of his work to critics. One of these competitions gave rise to one of his most popular characters, Inspector Palmu, a gruff detective of the Helsinki police department, who starred in three mystery novels, all of which were filmed (a fourth one was made without Waltari involved). Waltari also scripted the popular cartoon Kieku ja Kaiku and wrote Aiotko Kirjailijaksi, a guidebook for aspiring writers that influenced many younger writers such as Kalle Päätalo.
During the Winter War (1939–1940) and the Continuation War (1941–1944), Waltari worked in the government information center, placing his literary skills at the service of the government to produce political propaganda. 1945 saw the publication of Waltari's first and most successful historical novel, The Egyptian. The book became an international bestseller, serving as the basis of the 1954 Hollywood movie of the same name. Waltari wrote seven more historical novels, placed in various ancient cultures, among others The Dark Angel, set during the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. Waltari was one of the most prolific Finnish writers. He wrote at least 29 novels, 15 novellas, 6 collections of stories or fairy-tales, 6 collections of poetry and 26 plays, as well as screenplays, radioplays, non-fiction, translations, and hundreds of reviews and articles. Internationally he is probably the best-known Finnish writer, with his works translated into more than 40 languages.
Haanpää and Waltari wrote their army books during or immediately after they went through military training, whereas the autobiographical stories were written down much later, in response to an ethnological collection of memories of military training carried out in 1972–1973. The two books are the testimonies of only two single individuals, but immediately reached large national audiences and thus made the images they conveyed available for others to re-use, confirm or criticise. The collections of reminiscences, on the other hand, contains the stories of hundreds of former soldiers, most of whom probably never published a story or took part in public debate. These sources are compared and contrasted in this Post in order to bring out both their similarities and differences and to discuss how the narrators’ class, age, and political outlook informed depictions of the actual experience of interwar military training. Both the literary works and the reminiscences are, however, highly complicated historical sources in terms of what they actually carry information about. When, how, and why they were written is essential for what stories they tell and for how they craft experiences and memories into stories. They are shaped by cultural notions, political issues, and the historically changing contents of individual and collective commemoration. It is therefore necessary to discuss the circumstances in which these sources were created, and the problems of source criticism associated with them, before entering their narrative world.
Two Authors, Two Worlds
Pentti Haanpää’s collection of short stories, Kenttä Ja Kasarmi: Kertomuksia Tasavallan Armeijasta (Fields and Barracks: Tales from the Republic’s Army, 1928), and Mika Waltari’s Siellä Missä Miehiä Tehdään (Where Men Are Made, 1931) are the best-known and most widely read literary works of the interwar period depicting the life of conscripts’ doing their military service. In addition to these two books, only a few short stories and causerie-like military farces on the subject were published in the period. Three motion pictures about the conscript army were also produced 1929–1934. These films were made in close cooperation between the film company and the armed forces. The images of soldiering they conveyed was of a similar kind to those in military propaganda materials such as Suomen Sotilas. The films became a success with the public and were followed by no less than four military farces, premiering in cinemas in 1938–1939. The first feature film about the conscript army, ‘Our Boys’ (Meidän Poikamme, 1929), was released in the wake of Fields and Barracks. The film was first advertised as both more objective and truthful, and later as more patriotic in its supportive attitude to the armed forces and a strong national defence than Fields and Barracks – which demonstrates the impact of Haanpää’s work.
Pentti Haanpää (1905–1955) was born into a family of “educated peasants” in rural Northern Finland. His grandfather had been a representative of the peasantry (rural smallholders) in the Finnish Diet in the nineteenth century and was the author of books of moral tales. His father and two uncles were also both politically active in their local community and amateur writers. Yet Haanpää did not go through any higher education as a young man. He took occasional employment in farming and forestry and went on living on his family’s farm far into adult age. When he made his literary debut in 1925, the cultural establishment in Helsinki greeted him as a ‘man of nature’; a lumberjack and log rafter from the deep forests; a narrator brought forth from the depths of the true Finnish folk soul. His three first books received enthusiastic reviews in 1925–1927 and critics labelled him the new hope of national literature. All this only made the shock the greater for the nationalist and bourgeois-minded cultural establishment when Haanpää published Fields and Barracks in November 1928.
Haanpää had done his military service in the “wilderness garrison” of Kivimäki on the Karelian Isthmus, close to the Russian border, in 1925-1926. Since he lacked formal academic education, he served in the rank-and-file. During his time in the Kivimäki garrison, he developed a deeply felt indignation towards the army’s educational methods. He wrote the short stories of Fields and Barracks during the year after his completion of conscript service. They were fictional stories, but set in the contemporary Finnish conscript army and written in a style combining expressionism with psychological realism. They depicted military life as a time of gruesome hardships, sadism and violence that appeared meaningless to the conscripts and frustrated officers to the point of desperation. Haanpää’s regular publishers considered some sections portraying the soldiers’ uninhibited joking and partying so indecent that they wanted them to be left out. Haanpää refused to make even minor omissions and took his manuscript to a small socialist publishing house, which published it unaltered. The book aroused great controversy in Finland in the autumn of 1928 because of its hostility to both the military training system and the official pro-defence rhetoric. It was discussed in editorials as well as book reviews. There were demands for all copies to be confiscated and many bookshops did not dare put the book openly at display. The book was nevertheless a small commercial success – four new editions were swiftly printed. Yet Haanpää became an outcast in the mainstream cultural scene for several years.
Mika Waltari (1908–1979) was born into a family of priests and public servants. According to his memoirs, a Christian, bourgeois and patriotic “white” spirit permeated his childhood home. He attended an elite school for the sons of the Finnish-nationalist bourgeoisie, the Finnish Lyceum ‘Norssi’ in Helsinki, and was a member of the YMCA and the Christian Students’ Association. He emerged as a prolific author from age 17 and published several novels and collections of short stories and poems between 1926–1930. Entering the University of Helsinki as a student of theology, he switched to the science of religion and literary studies after three terms. He socialised in young artists’ circles, most importantly the famous ‘Torch Bearers’ (Tulenkantajat) group that combined Finnish nationalism with internationalism and optimistic modernism. The great success of his bestselling first novel, ‘The Great Illusion’ (Suuri Illusiooni) in 1928 helped him take the leap of giving up his plans to become a priest and committing himself to a writer’s career.
Waltari partly wrote Where Men Are Made, which is almost in the form of a diary, during his military service. In the book, he actually depicted how he managed to get access to the company office’s typewriter and an allowance to write on his manuscripts during his recruit training. Where Men Are Made is literary reportage, written from Waltari’s first person perspective, describing his everyday life as a conscript in a very positive tenor. Published only two years after the scandal surrounding Haanpää’s work, Waltari’s army book was received and read as a response to Fields and the Barracks. It is nonetheless important to keep in mind that Haanpää’s was not the only negative depiction of army life in circulation after the fierce anti-militarist campaigns of 1917. Waltari’s book probably would have been written even if Haanpää had never published his. The press reactions it received were, however, muted in comparison to the furore around Fields and Barracks; it was greeted with satisfaction by some of Haanpää’s critics, but not celebrated as a major literary work.
Both Haanpää and Waltari obviously wanted to have an impact on how the Finnish public conceived of the conscript army. Yet Fields and Barracks and Where Men Are Made are also works of art, intended to convey aesthetic impressions, ideological messages, and and understanding of human feelings and motives. One might ask to what extent they may be said to mirror the attitudes and understandings of larger groups rather than only the original and imaginative vision of two artistic individuals. All that aside, Haanpää’s and Waltari’s army depictions are valuable sources to the cultural imagery surrounding conscription in the interwar period. In their books there are echoes of contemporary opinion and views about class, conscription, military training and the cadre army, which are familiar from the materials examined in previous Posts. Although Haanpää and Waltari were talented writers, they also had to make sense of what they experienced in the military through relating it to previous cultural knowledge. Their works were products of the creative imagination, yet no doubt were influenced by the forms and contents of stories about army life and political debates over conscription they had themselves heard and read. Their stories, in turn, provided frames of reference for their readers’ subsequent stories about military training; models for emplotment and evaluation to either embrace or reject.
Memories of Military Training
The collection of autobiographical reminiscences, which is studied in this Post parallel with Haanpää’s and Waltari’s literary depictions, resulted from a writing competition arranged by the Ethnology Department at the University of Turku in 1972–1973. Conscripts into the armed forces of independent Finland were asked to write down and send in their memories of military training in the peacetime army. In addition to using the department’s network of regular informants, the competition was advertised in a brochure about voluntary defence work that was distributed to every household in Finland in the autumn of 1972. The 10 best contributions would be rewarded and the first prize was an award of 500 marks (equivalent to about 500 Euros at present). Those who entered their names for the collection were sent a very detailed questionnaire by mail. The response was unusually strong for an inquiry of this kind. The Ethnology Department received almost 700 answers, which altogether comprised almost 30 000 pages (A5), both handwritten and typed. Many men who had served in the Army evidently felt a great desire to recount their army memories.
However, the accounts of military training they wrote probably tell us more about how old men in the 1970’s made sense of experiences in their youth than about how they might have articulated those experiences at the time. As historians using interviews with contemporary witnesses have increasingly stressed since the late 1970’s, oral testimony – what people tell an interviewer about their memories, or equally what they write down from memory in response to a questionnaire – cannot be read as direct evidence of factual events or even the “original” subjective experiences of those events. Experiences and memories are marked by historicity: they are dynamic and changing. Memories are fleeting and fragmentary and only take solid form as mental images or articulated stories in a specific act of recollection that always takes place in the present. What an individual considers it relevant to remember, in the sense of telling others about his or her past, changes over time. How an individual experiences military training when he is in the midst of it, how he talks about it when just returned to civilian life, and how he remembers it as an old man, can produce three very different stories. More than a source of history, these reminiscences are a kind of history writing in themselves, where contemporary witnesses become their own historians, constructing and narrating their own version of history.
Academic oral history since the 1980’s, writes Ronald J. Grele, has been “predicated upon the proposition that oral history, while it does tell us about how people lived in the past, also, and maybe more importantly, tells us about how the past lives on into and informs the present”. The author’s original reason for using the collection of reminiscences from the 1970’s was a desire to grasp what “ordinary” men without higher education told friends and family about their own experiences of conscripted soldiering. He wanted to contrast the images of soldiering in the political sphere, military propaganda, and the “high culture” of literary works by esteemed authors to the “low culture” of popular oral culture. However, this oral culture has not been recorded in contemporary sources. It can be very faintly discerned in press reports and parliamentary debates on the scandalous treatment of conscripts outlined in an earlier Post. Some of its elements can be guessed at from criticisms of “old-fashioned” training methods in storys on military philosophy, the rhetoric of civic education directed at soldiers, or the literary imagery produced by Mika Waltari and Pentti Haanpää. As such, however, the auhor estimated that no other available corpus of sources bears witness to it more closely than the 1972–1973 collection of memories, which is very comprehensive and multifaceted. It contains the stories of hundreds of men from the lower classes, whose voices are not present in the written historical sources from the interwar period. Almost 300 of the answers entered for the writing competition depicted military training in the interwar period. The author of these thesis (Anders Ahlack) used a sample of 56 stories, comprising 4213 pages, including a random sample as well as all the stories exceeding 100 pages, because of their relative richness of detail. The sample was made only among those men who had served in the infantry, since this was by far the largest branch of the armed forces and overwhelmingly dominated the public image of “the army”. Among the authors in the sample are twelve farmers, nine workers in industry, crafts and forestry (three carpenters, two masons, an engine-man, a sheet metal worker, a sawmill worker and a lumberjack), and four men who worked or had worked in the service sector (two office clerks, a policeman and an engine driver). Five men obviously had had a higher education, although this was not asked in the questionnaire, as they stated folk school teacher (2), agronomist (2) or bank manager to be their occupation. Five further men were or had been in managerial positions that did not necessarily require higher education: a district headman at a sawmill, a head of a department (unspecified), a shop manager and a stores manager. Four had been regular officers or non-commissioned officers. Twelve men did not state their occupation.
Researchers of memory knowledge within folklore studies and oral history greatly emphasise the specific situation where experiences and memories are articulated into stories. The Finnish folklorist Jyrki Pöysä points out that a “collection” of reminiscences never actually consists in gathering something pre-existing that is “out there”, waiting for the researcher to come and collect it. Instead, it is a creative activity, where memories, stories and folklore are produced in cooperation between the informants and the scholars. The questions asked, and how they are put, make the informant intuitively feel that certain stories are expected of him and he thus may recall only certain things in memory and not others. The 1972-73 collection of memories of military training was executed in a manner that signalled approval and appreciation of conscription and the Finnish armed forces. The brochure that was the main advertising channel for the writing competition propagated voluntary civic work for supporting national defence. The ingress of the questionnaire connected the history of universal conscription and the national armed forces with “over fifty years of Finnish independence”. It further claimed that “every Finnish man has learnt the art of defending the country” in those forces, thus recycling old phrases from nationalist defence rhetoric. It was also pointed out in the first section that the collection of reminiscences was realised in “collaboration with the General Staff”. All this might have influenced who participated in the collection and who shunned it, as well as the informants’ notions of what kind of narration was expected of them.
Juha Mälkki, who has worked with all the answers from the interwar period surmises that the informants might represent mainly those with positive attitudes to the army. It is impossible to know which voices might be missing, yet in the author’s opinion the collected material offers a broad spectrum of experiences and attitudes, including significant numbers of very negative images of military service. The questionnaire, worked out by the ethnologists at the University of Turku, contained almost 230 different questions, grouped under 40 numbered topics, ranging from material culture, such as clothing, food and buildings, to military folklore, in the form of jokes and marching songs, and to the relationships between men and officers and among the soldiers themselves. The meticulous list of questions was evidently based on a very detailed and specific pre-understanding of the social ”morphology” of military life; notions of how military life is organised and structured and what social and cultural phenomena are specific to it. For example, regarding leaves of absence the questionnaire asked: “What false reasons were used when applying for leaves, or what stories were told about such attempts? Was it difficult to actually obtain leave when there was a real need, or were there suspicions that the reasons were falsified? What kinds of men were the most skilled in getting leave?” The questions asked were ways of helping the informants remember, but directed their recollections towards certain topics, excluding others. Many informants wrote at length about the first questions in the questionnaire, but further on answered more briefly and started skipping questions, apparently exhausted by the long list of questions and the cumbersomeness of writing. On the other hand, several informants chose to tell “their story”, largely ignoring the questions asked.
The ensuing stories have to be read with sensitivity as to how they are written in response to specific questions, at particular stages in their authors’ lives, and in a particular historical situation. The Finnish men writing for the collection in 1972–1973 were born into, grew up, and did their military service in the same mental and political landscape as Mika Waltari and Pentti Haanpää. Yet by the time they wrote down their memories of military training they had also experienced a world war and Finland’s military defeat in 1944, which against all odds secured Finland’s survival as an independent nation. They had heard the resurgent Finnish communists criticise the interwar period as one of Finnish militarism and characterize the Finnish war efforts as aggression. They had witnessed the official pact of “friendship and mutual assistance” between Finland and their former foe, the Soviet Union. They had recently observed the emergence of a youth revolt in the 1960’s with its anti-authoritarianism and critical stance towards the nationalist and moral values of previous generations. All of this was present in their “space of experience”, illuminating and giving new meanings to their own experiences of military training as conscripts. Individual memories overlap and connect with other people’s memories and images of the past, shared by larger collectives, such as generations or nations. This can provide social support for individual memories, increasing their coherence and credibility through linguistic interaction with other people. It can also, however, result in people confusing their own personal memories with things that happened to other people that they have only heard or read about. Historian Christof Dejung points out how the informants he interviewed about their memories of the Second World War in Switzerland had re-interpreted, re-shaped and rearticulated their memories since the war under the influence of political debates on Swiss history, stories they had been told, books about the war years they had read, and films they had seen. Individual memories, Dejung summarises, are parts of collective patterns of interpretation that originate both in the past and the present.
The oral historian Alistair Thomson stresses the psychological motives at work in the process where memories are constructed and articulated. People compose or construct memories using the public languages and meanings of their culture, but they do it in such a way as to help them feel relatively comfortable with their lives and identities. In Thomson’s words, we want to remember the past in a way that gives us “a feeling of composure” and ensures that our memories fit with what is publicly acceptable. When we remember, we seek the affirmation and recognition of others for our memories and our personal identities. Still, the thesis’ author finds that a radical scepticism regarding memories as evidence of the past would be an erroneous conclusion. As many oral historians have pointed out, distortions due to distance from events, class bias and ideology, as well as uncertainty regarding the absolute accuracy of factual evidence are not unique to oral evidence or reminiscences, but characteristic of many historical sources. For example, court records are based on oral testimony that has often been re-articulated and summarised by the recording clerks. Newspaper reports are usually based on the oral testimony of interviewed people that has been evaluated, condensed and re-narrated by journalists. The historian always has to make a critical assessment of his sources in the light of other sources as well as theories and assumptions about human motives and behaviour. In this respect, memories are not different in kind from most other historical source materials. The literary historian Alessandro Portelli, famous for his oral history work, writes that oral sources tell us less about events than about their meaning, about how events were understood and experienced and what role they came to play in the informant’s life. Still, he underlines that the reminiscences told by people in oral history interviews often reveal unknown events or unknown aspects of known events. They always cast light on the everyday life of the lower, “non-hegemonic” social classes that have left few traces in public archives. Oral sources might compensate chronological distance with much closer personal involvement. Portelli claims that in his experience, narrators are often capable of reconstructing their past attitudes even when they no longer coincide with present ones. They are able to make a distinction between past and present self and to objectify the past self as other than the present one.
Neither can memories be held as the product of the interview situation alone. The oral historian Luisa Passerini points out that when someone is asked for his or her life-story, this person’s memory draws on pre-existing storylines and ways of telling stories, even if these are in part modified by the circumstances. According to the oral historian Paul Thompson, the encapsulation of earlier attitudes in a story is a protection, which makes them less likely to represent a recent reformulation. Recurrent story telling can thus preserve memories, but if there is a strong “public memory” of the events in question, it can also distort personal recollections. In interviews with Australian veterans from the First World War, conducted in the 1980’s, Alistair Thomson found that memories of the post-war period, that had rarely been the focus of conversation and storytelling, seemed more fresh and less influenced by public accounts than the stories about the war years. Thomson connects this with the powerful presence in Australian culture of an “official”, nationalist commemoration of the Australian war experience. He describes a process where the diverse and even contradictory experiences of Australians at war were narrated through a public war legend, a compelling narrative that smoothed the sharp edges of individual experiences and constructed a homogenous veteran identity defined in terms of national ideals. Nonetheless, Thomson found that oral testimony collected in the 1980’s still indicated the variety of the Australian veterans’ experiences. Many of the veterans Thomson interviewed had preserved a distance from the nationalist myths about the war experience. The influence of the public legend depended on each veteran’s original experience of the war, on the ways he had previously composed his war remembering, and on the social and emotional constory of old age. In the case of the Swiss commeration of the Second World War, Christof Dejung points out that in spite of strong national myths about the defence of Switzerland, the political left, women, and the Jewish community have maintained diverging memory cultures that were ignored in official commemoration until recently. In the final analysis, Alistair Thomson concludes from his study that there is plentiful evidence in oral testimony to make for histories representing the range and complexity of Australian experiences of war. The use of soldier’s testimony should, however, be sensitive to the ways in which such testimony is articulated in relation to public stories and personal identities.
I think we can assume that certain parts of the memories of militarytraining in the Finnish conscript army were formed and influenced by decades of the informants telling and listening to army stories together with other men. Many of their elements have probably been told and retold many times since the interwar period. An informant might be prone to include a story that has been successful with his previous audiences – comrades, colleagues, and family members – in his answer to the writing competition. Just as Haanpää and Waltari were using and commenting on contemporary popular traditions and political debates, the men composing their memories in the 1970’s certainly borrowed elements and narrative forms from literary and oral traditions in depicting military life. However, comparisons with the critical press reports and parliamentary debates on the treatment of conscripts as well as with Pentti Haanpää’s and Mika Waltari’s army books, reveal that essential narrative elements in their reminiscences were already in public circulation in the interwar period. In comparison to the cultural images of the Finnish front-line experience in the Second World War, there was by far no such equally powerful “official” commemoration or nationalist legend about interwar military training in post-war society, prescribing how one was supposed to remember it. However, historian Juha Mälkki assumes that the experiences of fighting the Second World War were formative for how pre-war military training was remembered and narrated. Mälkki has used the 1972–1973 collection for a study of the emergence of the particular military culture making possible Finland’s relatively successful defence against the Soviet Union in 1939–1940. He reckons that the informants’ notions of which military skills and modes of functioning turned out useful or even life-saving in the Winter War informed their evaluation of their peacetime military training, which was in retrospect seen essentially as a preparation for the war experience.
This is an important observation. However, we must not presume that the informants’ war experiences had a uniform impact on all of them. The thesis’ author finds significant and wants to stress not only the similarities, but also the differences among the different voices and stories in the collection. The ways experiences are articulated are never completely determined by culture, public memory or even personal history. There are always different and mutually contradictory models of interpretation circulating in a culture. Despite their elements of collective tradition, the variation among the memories display how conscripts were influenced by their varying sociocultural backgrounds and political stances, both in how they experienced military training in their youth and in how they reproduced or re-assessed their experiences during their later lives. It also bears witness to how not only self-reflection, but also factors as difficult to capture as what we call personality, temperament and genuine innovativeness make human experience richer and more unpredictable than any social theory can fully fathom.
At the age of 61, Lauri Mattila wrote down his memories of military training in a garrison in Helsinki forty years earlier. Mattila, a farmer from a rural municipality in Western Finland, was evidently carried away by his reminiscences, since he wrote almost 200 pages. The resulting narrative is a fascinating depiction of both the dark and the bright sides of military service in interwar Finland.1 Recalling his service in 1931–1932 from the vantage point of the early 1970’s, Mattila underlined that he had a positive attitude to the army as a young man and reported for duty “full of the eagerness of youth and military spirit”. In his memories, he marked his loyalty with “white” Finland. However, the conditions of military training he described are in many places shocking to read. He remembered recruit training as characterised not least by the insulting language of superiors: “The training style of the squad leaders was to bawl, accuse and shame the recruit. A conscripted corporal could give instructions like the following when he instructed a recruit [in close-order drill]. Lift your head, here you don’t dangle your head like an old nag. You have a stomach like a pregnant hag, pull it in. Now there I’ve got a man, who doesn’t know what is left and what is right. Tomorrow you will get yourself some litter to put in your right pocket – and hay from the stables to put in your left pocket, then you can be commanded to turn towards the litter or turn towards hay. Maybe then you will understand the commands.”
The recruits’ carefully made beds were ruined daily, “blown up” by inspecting officers, and Mattila had all the meticulously arranged equipment in his locker heaved out onto the floor because his spoon was lying “in the wrong direction.” As he moved on from recruit training to NCO training, he and the other NCO pupils were virtually persecuted by squad leaders who punished them at every step they took, incessantly making them drop to a prone position, crawl, get up again, run around the lavatories, clean the rifles, polish the squad leaders’ boots etc. The squad leaders cut the buttons of their tunics off almost daily and the pupils had to spend their evenings sewing them back on. The squad leaders could humiliate soldiers by making them kneel before them. In one instance a soldier was forced to lick a squad leader’s boot. According to Mattila, all this passed with the silent consent of the NCO school’s sadistic director, a Jäger Major. Yet Mattila also remembered training officers who were excellent educators, especially one lieutenant who always had surprises in his training programme, trained the men’s power of observation and always rewarded good achievements. The sergeant major of Mattila’s recruit training unit who had terrified the recruits on their first days of duty is later in the narrative described as a basically kind-hearted man, bellowing at the soldiers “always tongue in cheek”.
Mattila recalled his platoon’s ambition of always being the best unit in the company with apparent pride, as well as his regiment’s self-understanding of being an elite corps superior to other military units in the area. He wrote about how he acquired new acquaintances and friends during his service and how he would sit around with them in the service club, discussing “religion, patriotism, theatre, opera, we sometimes visited them (…) and yes we talked about women and it can be added that we visited them too.” After his NCO training, Mattila was assigned to be a squad leader in the main guard. He lyrically depicted the daily changing of the guard, the military band playing and the sidewalks filled with townspeople never growing tired of watching the spectacle. “Whoever has marched in that parade, will remember it with nostalgia for the rest of his life”, he wrote. As he reached the end of his long account, Lauri Mattila summed up what the military training had meant for him: “I was willing to go to [the military] and in spite of all the bullying I did not experience the army as a disagreeable compulsion, but as a duty set by the fatherland, a duty that was meaningful to fulfil. Moreover, it was a matter of honour for a Finnish man. My opinion about the mission of the armed forces and their educational significance has not changed. For this reason, I do not understand this present direction that the soldiers’ position becomes ever more civilian-like and that it becomes unclear who is in command, the soldier or the officer. The barracks must not become a resting home spoiling the inmates.”
The memories of this farmer in his old-age recount a unique individual experience. Yet they also contain many elements typical of reminiscences of military training in the interwar period: the shock of arrival in an entirely different social world; the harshness of recruit training; the complex relationships between soldiers and their superiors; the comradeship between soldiers and the perceived adventurousness of any contacts with women of their own age; the slowly ameliorating conditions as disbandment day grew closer; and the final assessment of military training as a necessary duty and its hardships as a wholesome experience for conscripts. In a sense, this Post moves on from the rhetoric of politics, hero myths and army propaganda into the “real world” of garrisons, barracks and training fields, as that world was described by “ordinary” conscripts – not only educated, middle-class politicians, officers or educationalists, but also
men of the lower classes. This however, is not to investigate what “actually happened” in military training, or what the conscripts “really experienced”, but to study the images of conscript soldiering that arose from story-telling about military training. The post studies stories about the social reality of interwar military training, both as written in the period and as memories written down decades later.
The civic education and “enlightenment” propaganda, analysed in the previous posts, powerfully propagated the notion that it was in the environment of military service that a boy or youngster was transformed and somehow reached full and real adult citizenship. The army was “a school for men” or “the place where men were made”. It was never stated in military rhetoric of the era that learning the technical use of weapons or elementary combat tactics was in itself what made men into boys. Instead, this transformation was, by implication, brought about by the shared experience of living in the military environment and coping with the demands put on the conscripts by their superiors and by the collective of military comrades. On the other hand, there was also, as we have seen, vivid and outspoken political criticism of military training within the confinements of a cadre army, as well as loud-spoken moral concerns that this same environment would damage conscripts. In this critical debate, the relationships both to superiors and to “comrades” debased the young man, the former through brutalising him and the latter through morally corrupting him. The conscripts were all exposed to the army’s “enlightenment” efforts, but it cannot be taken for granted that they subscribed to their contents any more than it can be assumed that men from a working class background espoused socialist anti-militarism. Whether they embraced or rejected the idea of military training as a place “where men were made”, it is significant in how they depicted the social relationships among men in the military and how they saw the military as changing them through the shared experience that all conscripts wnt through.
To the extent that soldiering became a crucial part of Finnish society in the interwar period, stories about what military service was“really like” conveyed messages to its audiences – and to the narrators themselves – about what it meant to be a Finn. How did army stories depict what happened as conscripts arrived for their military training? How did they describe the experience of entering the military world, with its social relationships, practices and ideological environment? How did different stories about personal experiences of military training relate to contemporary notions of soldiering? This Post emphasises how many men talked about the hardships, harshness and even brutality of military training – images of soldiering largely contradicting the pro-defence debate studied in the two previous posts. The proportion of stories about the austerity and severity of military discipline and of abuses and bullying does not prove whether this was a defining feature of Finnish military training at any particular point in time – in some conscript’s experience it was, in others’ it was not. Many men certainly had largely positive memories, emphasising good relationships with superiors, tolerable conditions and supportive comradeship. Yet even these narrators appear conscious of the powerful presence in popular culture of a “dark side” to the practices of military training that they were anxious
to refute.
Perhaps one reason why the narrators – including some of those who underline that they got on well in the military and even enjoyed themselves – chose to narrate and highlight stories about forced subordination and bullying was because these stories referred to a contradiction between the actual experience of life as a conscript and the public image of the military. This derived from the tensions between relationships in the military, where the conscripts experienced the contradiction between the idea of equal citizenship inherent in a modern “citizens’ army” vs the conflicting military logic of absolute obedience. The complete and unquestioning obedience demanded in the interwar Finnish conscript army, and the oftentimes humiliating methods used to bring it about, meant a loss of control for the conscript. He was defencelessly exposed to potential abuse. This contradicted the concept of soldiers as warriors and the army as a place “where boys become men” or “where men are made”. It also contradicted the contemporary nationalist defence rhetoric of self-restraint, a sense of duty and a spirit of sacrifice, since the bullied conscript was under external compulsion, forced forward not by internal motivation but by force of violence and the threat of even worse punishments. Moreover, the relationships among the rank-and-file conscripts were run through with informal hierarchies actively upheld by the soldiers themselves. The authors Pentti Haanpää and Mika Waltari addressed this major contradiction in the army books they published around 1930 – each in his fashion.
The historicity of Experiences and Memories
Here, we will go on to analyse two groups of sources depicting experiences of military service in the interwar period; Pentti Haanpää’s Fields and Barracks (1928) and Mika Waltari’s Where Men Are Made (1931) on the one hand, and a collection of autobiographical reminiscences on the other.
Pentti Haanpää (October 14, 1905, Pulkkila - September 30, 1955 Pyhäntä) was a Finnish novelist and a masterful short story writer whose father, Mikko Haanpää, and grandfather, Juho Haanpää, who was a senator, were also published authors. They were both socially and politically active in their home region.His mother, Maria Susanna (Keckman) Haanpää, was born in Haapavesi and came from a farming family. At school in Leskelä, Haanpää was a good student. After finishing elementary school, he began to contribute from 1921 on to the magazine Pääskynen, At the same time, he was also very active in sports. In 1923 Haanpää joined the literary association Nuoren Voiman Liitto and continued to write for its magazine Nuori Voima. Haanpää's first book, MAANTIETÄ PITKIN (1925), appeared when he was 20. It was well received by critics, who made special note of Haanpää's skillful use of language. A few years later the story was translated into Swedish under the title “Hemfolk och Strykare”. After this successful debut, Haanpää decided to devote himself entirely to writing.
He served in the army from 1925-26 and in 1927 published TUULI KÄY HEIDÄN YLITSEEN, a collection of short stories. It was followed by KENTTÄ JA KASARMI (1928), which portrayed the army as a closed system, working under its own rules. In the promilitary atmosphere of the time, the book generated heated discussion. Among the critics was Olavi Paavolainen, the spiritual leader of the new generation of writers, who had reviewed Haanpää's earlier debut novel positively, and praised his straightforward and self-assured expression. Kenttä Ja Kasarmi was the first work in which Haanpää drew on his own unpleasant experiences in the army. Unable to adjust himself to military life, he felt that he had wasted a year of his life in "the straitjacket of a soldier." Haanpää's description of the brutal training methods and ugliness of the authoritarian military system upset patriotic reviewers so that for the next seven years no publisher would touch Haanpää's manuscripts.
Haanpää became best known for two controversial books that he wrote during this period of enforced silence. The first of these was the socialistically orientated “Noitaympyr” (1931) in which he examined the conflict between a misfit and his unbearable surroundings. At the end of the story Pate Teikka, the protagonist, chooses Communism instead of Western democracy and leaves Finland for an unknown future – he walks over the border into the Soviet Union. The second was “Vääpeli Sadon Tapaus” (1935), a bitter criticism of army life and brutality, dealing with the sadism of petty authority. The central characters are Simo Kärnä, a recruit and later corporal, and the psychopathic sergeant-major Sato, the embodiment of sadistic militarism. After repeated humiliations, Kärnä uses his intelligence and Sato's wife to gain his revenge, but eventually realizes that he has been as brutal as his enemy. Haanpää's other published works from the 1930s include ISÄNNÄT JA ISÄNTIEN VARJOT (1935), TAIVALVAARAN NÄYTTELJÄ (1938), and IHMISELON KARVAS IHANUUS (1939). Isännät ja isäntien varjot was published by Kirjailijain Kustannusliike, founded by Erkki Vala. The company was closely associated with the literary group Kiila (Wedge), whose members favored radical free verse and were more or less Marxists. Haanpää was among Kiila's best-known writers, along with such names as Arvo Turtiainen, Katri Vala, Viljo Kajava, and Elvi Sinervo. Suffice it to say that his anti-militarism and Marxist leanings in the 1920s and 1930s were not received with enthusiasm by right wing critics. Haanpää created his literary reputation chiefly with his short stories, of which he published twelve collections.
During the Winter War (1939-40), Haanpää served in the army. He was in the front line in Lapland. In 1940 while on leave he married Aili Karjalainen, a dairymaid whom he had met in the late 1930s. Haanpää utilized his war experiences in the story 'Sallimuksen Sormi', in which an exhausted infantry company, quartered in a church, is attacked by enemy aircraft. In the Continuation War (1941-44) Haanpää served in the service troops in the Kiestinki and Untua area. Haanpää's war novel KORPISOTAA (1940) was translated into French under the title Guerre Dans le Désert Blanc by M. Aurelien Sauvageot. The Austrian publishing company Karl H. Bischoff Verlag also planned to translate the work; one of Haanpää's short stories, 'Siipirikko', had already appeared in the German magazine Das Reich. However, German publishers did not consider Korpisotaa positive enough for the war effort. NYKYAIKAA (1942), a collection of short stories, reflected Haanpää's bitterness and disillusionment.
After the wars Haanpää wrote some of his best works, among them YHDEKSÄN MIEHEN SAAPPAAT (1945), a war novel, in which the same pair of boots passes from one trooper to another, and JAUHOT (1949), based on a historical event when peasants seized a government granary during the great famine of 1867-68. Haanpää's journey in 1953 to China with a delegation of Finnish writers inspired KIINALAISET JUTUT (1954). Although Haanpää had earlier condemned restrictions on free speech in the Soviet Union, he kept silent on this matter in his book on China, expressing an admiration for the spirit of change which had seized the country. "Kiinanmaassa tuoksahti joku merkillinen muuttumisen, uudistumisen ja kasvamisen ihme. Se oli jotakin ainutlaatuista ja muukalainen ei hevillä saane siitä täyttä käsitystä. Aavisteli, että kiinalaiset itse ällistelivät muuttuvaa maataan ja muuttuvaa elämäänsä ja kutsuivat siitä syystä ihmisiä maapallon toiselta puolelta näkemään, mitä heille tapahtui..." (from Kiinalaiset jutut). ATOMINTUTKIJA (1950) received good reviews by the right-wing columnist and critic Kauko Kare in the journal Suomalainen Suomi. Haanpää drowned on a fishing trip on September 30, 1955, two weeks before his 50th birthday. His last novel, PUUT, a story of a socialist who becomes a non-socialist, was left unfinished. Haanpää's collected works appeared in 1956 (10 vols.), and then in 1976 (8 vols.). Haanpää's notes from 1925 to 1939 were published in 1976 under the title MUISTIINMERKINTÖJÄ. Taivalvaaran näyttelijä was reprinted in 1997. 'Haanpää monument' (1996), made by the sculptor Tapio Junno, is situated in Leskelä, Piippola.
Mika Waltari (1908 – 1979), Finnish author
Mika Waltari (1908 – 1979) was born in Helsinki and lost his father, a Lutheran pastor, at the age of five. As a boy, he witnessed the Finnish Civil War in Helsinki. Later he enrolled in the University of Helsinki as a theology student, following his mother's wishes, but soon abandoned theology in favour of philosophy, aesthetics and literature, graduating in 1929. While studying, he contributed to various magazines, wrote poetry and stories and had his first book published in 1925 (at the age of 17). In 1927 he went to Paris where he wrote his first major novel Suuri Illusioni ('The Grand Illusion'), a story of bohemian life. Waltari also was, for a while, a member of the liberal literary movement Tulenkantajat, though his political and social views later turned conservative. He was married in 1931 and had a daughter, Satu, who also became a writer.
Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Waltari worked as a journalist and critic, writing for a number of newspapers and magazines and travelling widely in Europe. He was Editor for the magazine Suomen Kuvalehti. At the same time, he kept writing books in many genres, moving easily from one literary field to another. He participated, and often succeeded, in literary competitions to prove the quality of his work to critics. One of these competitions gave rise to one of his most popular characters, Inspector Palmu, a gruff detective of the Helsinki police department, who starred in three mystery novels, all of which were filmed (a fourth one was made without Waltari involved). Waltari also scripted the popular cartoon Kieku ja Kaiku and wrote Aiotko Kirjailijaksi, a guidebook for aspiring writers that influenced many younger writers such as Kalle Päätalo.
During the Winter War (1939–1940) and the Continuation War (1941–1944), Waltari worked in the government information center, placing his literary skills at the service of the government to produce political propaganda. 1945 saw the publication of Waltari's first and most successful historical novel, The Egyptian. The book became an international bestseller, serving as the basis of the 1954 Hollywood movie of the same name. Waltari wrote seven more historical novels, placed in various ancient cultures, among others The Dark Angel, set during the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. Waltari was one of the most prolific Finnish writers. He wrote at least 29 novels, 15 novellas, 6 collections of stories or fairy-tales, 6 collections of poetry and 26 plays, as well as screenplays, radioplays, non-fiction, translations, and hundreds of reviews and articles. Internationally he is probably the best-known Finnish writer, with his works translated into more than 40 languages.
Haanpää and Waltari wrote their army books during or immediately after they went through military training, whereas the autobiographical stories were written down much later, in response to an ethnological collection of memories of military training carried out in 1972–1973. The two books are the testimonies of only two single individuals, but immediately reached large national audiences and thus made the images they conveyed available for others to re-use, confirm or criticise. The collections of reminiscences, on the other hand, contains the stories of hundreds of former soldiers, most of whom probably never published a story or took part in public debate. These sources are compared and contrasted in this Post in order to bring out both their similarities and differences and to discuss how the narrators’ class, age, and political outlook informed depictions of the actual experience of interwar military training. Both the literary works and the reminiscences are, however, highly complicated historical sources in terms of what they actually carry information about. When, how, and why they were written is essential for what stories they tell and for how they craft experiences and memories into stories. They are shaped by cultural notions, political issues, and the historically changing contents of individual and collective commemoration. It is therefore necessary to discuss the circumstances in which these sources were created, and the problems of source criticism associated with them, before entering their narrative world.
Two Authors, Two Worlds
Pentti Haanpää’s collection of short stories, Kenttä Ja Kasarmi: Kertomuksia Tasavallan Armeijasta (Fields and Barracks: Tales from the Republic’s Army, 1928), and Mika Waltari’s Siellä Missä Miehiä Tehdään (Where Men Are Made, 1931) are the best-known and most widely read literary works of the interwar period depicting the life of conscripts’ doing their military service. In addition to these two books, only a few short stories and causerie-like military farces on the subject were published in the period. Three motion pictures about the conscript army were also produced 1929–1934. These films were made in close cooperation between the film company and the armed forces. The images of soldiering they conveyed was of a similar kind to those in military propaganda materials such as Suomen Sotilas. The films became a success with the public and were followed by no less than four military farces, premiering in cinemas in 1938–1939. The first feature film about the conscript army, ‘Our Boys’ (Meidän Poikamme, 1929), was released in the wake of Fields and Barracks. The film was first advertised as both more objective and truthful, and later as more patriotic in its supportive attitude to the armed forces and a strong national defence than Fields and Barracks – which demonstrates the impact of Haanpää’s work.
Pentti Haanpää (1905–1955) was born into a family of “educated peasants” in rural Northern Finland. His grandfather had been a representative of the peasantry (rural smallholders) in the Finnish Diet in the nineteenth century and was the author of books of moral tales. His father and two uncles were also both politically active in their local community and amateur writers. Yet Haanpää did not go through any higher education as a young man. He took occasional employment in farming and forestry and went on living on his family’s farm far into adult age. When he made his literary debut in 1925, the cultural establishment in Helsinki greeted him as a ‘man of nature’; a lumberjack and log rafter from the deep forests; a narrator brought forth from the depths of the true Finnish folk soul. His three first books received enthusiastic reviews in 1925–1927 and critics labelled him the new hope of national literature. All this only made the shock the greater for the nationalist and bourgeois-minded cultural establishment when Haanpää published Fields and Barracks in November 1928.
Haanpää had done his military service in the “wilderness garrison” of Kivimäki on the Karelian Isthmus, close to the Russian border, in 1925-1926. Since he lacked formal academic education, he served in the rank-and-file. During his time in the Kivimäki garrison, he developed a deeply felt indignation towards the army’s educational methods. He wrote the short stories of Fields and Barracks during the year after his completion of conscript service. They were fictional stories, but set in the contemporary Finnish conscript army and written in a style combining expressionism with psychological realism. They depicted military life as a time of gruesome hardships, sadism and violence that appeared meaningless to the conscripts and frustrated officers to the point of desperation. Haanpää’s regular publishers considered some sections portraying the soldiers’ uninhibited joking and partying so indecent that they wanted them to be left out. Haanpää refused to make even minor omissions and took his manuscript to a small socialist publishing house, which published it unaltered. The book aroused great controversy in Finland in the autumn of 1928 because of its hostility to both the military training system and the official pro-defence rhetoric. It was discussed in editorials as well as book reviews. There were demands for all copies to be confiscated and many bookshops did not dare put the book openly at display. The book was nevertheless a small commercial success – four new editions were swiftly printed. Yet Haanpää became an outcast in the mainstream cultural scene for several years.
Mika Waltari (1908–1979) was born into a family of priests and public servants. According to his memoirs, a Christian, bourgeois and patriotic “white” spirit permeated his childhood home. He attended an elite school for the sons of the Finnish-nationalist bourgeoisie, the Finnish Lyceum ‘Norssi’ in Helsinki, and was a member of the YMCA and the Christian Students’ Association. He emerged as a prolific author from age 17 and published several novels and collections of short stories and poems between 1926–1930. Entering the University of Helsinki as a student of theology, he switched to the science of religion and literary studies after three terms. He socialised in young artists’ circles, most importantly the famous ‘Torch Bearers’ (Tulenkantajat) group that combined Finnish nationalism with internationalism and optimistic modernism. The great success of his bestselling first novel, ‘The Great Illusion’ (Suuri Illusiooni) in 1928 helped him take the leap of giving up his plans to become a priest and committing himself to a writer’s career.
Waltari partly wrote Where Men Are Made, which is almost in the form of a diary, during his military service. In the book, he actually depicted how he managed to get access to the company office’s typewriter and an allowance to write on his manuscripts during his recruit training. Where Men Are Made is literary reportage, written from Waltari’s first person perspective, describing his everyday life as a conscript in a very positive tenor. Published only two years after the scandal surrounding Haanpää’s work, Waltari’s army book was received and read as a response to Fields and the Barracks. It is nonetheless important to keep in mind that Haanpää’s was not the only negative depiction of army life in circulation after the fierce anti-militarist campaigns of 1917. Waltari’s book probably would have been written even if Haanpää had never published his. The press reactions it received were, however, muted in comparison to the furore around Fields and Barracks; it was greeted with satisfaction by some of Haanpää’s critics, but not celebrated as a major literary work.
Both Haanpää and Waltari obviously wanted to have an impact on how the Finnish public conceived of the conscript army. Yet Fields and Barracks and Where Men Are Made are also works of art, intended to convey aesthetic impressions, ideological messages, and and understanding of human feelings and motives. One might ask to what extent they may be said to mirror the attitudes and understandings of larger groups rather than only the original and imaginative vision of two artistic individuals. All that aside, Haanpää’s and Waltari’s army depictions are valuable sources to the cultural imagery surrounding conscription in the interwar period. In their books there are echoes of contemporary opinion and views about class, conscription, military training and the cadre army, which are familiar from the materials examined in previous Posts. Although Haanpää and Waltari were talented writers, they also had to make sense of what they experienced in the military through relating it to previous cultural knowledge. Their works were products of the creative imagination, yet no doubt were influenced by the forms and contents of stories about army life and political debates over conscription they had themselves heard and read. Their stories, in turn, provided frames of reference for their readers’ subsequent stories about military training; models for emplotment and evaluation to either embrace or reject.
Memories of Military Training
The collection of autobiographical reminiscences, which is studied in this Post parallel with Haanpää’s and Waltari’s literary depictions, resulted from a writing competition arranged by the Ethnology Department at the University of Turku in 1972–1973. Conscripts into the armed forces of independent Finland were asked to write down and send in their memories of military training in the peacetime army. In addition to using the department’s network of regular informants, the competition was advertised in a brochure about voluntary defence work that was distributed to every household in Finland in the autumn of 1972. The 10 best contributions would be rewarded and the first prize was an award of 500 marks (equivalent to about 500 Euros at present). Those who entered their names for the collection were sent a very detailed questionnaire by mail. The response was unusually strong for an inquiry of this kind. The Ethnology Department received almost 700 answers, which altogether comprised almost 30 000 pages (A5), both handwritten and typed. Many men who had served in the Army evidently felt a great desire to recount their army memories.
However, the accounts of military training they wrote probably tell us more about how old men in the 1970’s made sense of experiences in their youth than about how they might have articulated those experiences at the time. As historians using interviews with contemporary witnesses have increasingly stressed since the late 1970’s, oral testimony – what people tell an interviewer about their memories, or equally what they write down from memory in response to a questionnaire – cannot be read as direct evidence of factual events or even the “original” subjective experiences of those events. Experiences and memories are marked by historicity: they are dynamic and changing. Memories are fleeting and fragmentary and only take solid form as mental images or articulated stories in a specific act of recollection that always takes place in the present. What an individual considers it relevant to remember, in the sense of telling others about his or her past, changes over time. How an individual experiences military training when he is in the midst of it, how he talks about it when just returned to civilian life, and how he remembers it as an old man, can produce three very different stories. More than a source of history, these reminiscences are a kind of history writing in themselves, where contemporary witnesses become their own historians, constructing and narrating their own version of history.
Academic oral history since the 1980’s, writes Ronald J. Grele, has been “predicated upon the proposition that oral history, while it does tell us about how people lived in the past, also, and maybe more importantly, tells us about how the past lives on into and informs the present”. The author’s original reason for using the collection of reminiscences from the 1970’s was a desire to grasp what “ordinary” men without higher education told friends and family about their own experiences of conscripted soldiering. He wanted to contrast the images of soldiering in the political sphere, military propaganda, and the “high culture” of literary works by esteemed authors to the “low culture” of popular oral culture. However, this oral culture has not been recorded in contemporary sources. It can be very faintly discerned in press reports and parliamentary debates on the scandalous treatment of conscripts outlined in an earlier Post. Some of its elements can be guessed at from criticisms of “old-fashioned” training methods in storys on military philosophy, the rhetoric of civic education directed at soldiers, or the literary imagery produced by Mika Waltari and Pentti Haanpää. As such, however, the auhor estimated that no other available corpus of sources bears witness to it more closely than the 1972–1973 collection of memories, which is very comprehensive and multifaceted. It contains the stories of hundreds of men from the lower classes, whose voices are not present in the written historical sources from the interwar period. Almost 300 of the answers entered for the writing competition depicted military training in the interwar period. The author of these thesis (Anders Ahlack) used a sample of 56 stories, comprising 4213 pages, including a random sample as well as all the stories exceeding 100 pages, because of their relative richness of detail. The sample was made only among those men who had served in the infantry, since this was by far the largest branch of the armed forces and overwhelmingly dominated the public image of “the army”. Among the authors in the sample are twelve farmers, nine workers in industry, crafts and forestry (three carpenters, two masons, an engine-man, a sheet metal worker, a sawmill worker and a lumberjack), and four men who worked or had worked in the service sector (two office clerks, a policeman and an engine driver). Five men obviously had had a higher education, although this was not asked in the questionnaire, as they stated folk school teacher (2), agronomist (2) or bank manager to be their occupation. Five further men were or had been in managerial positions that did not necessarily require higher education: a district headman at a sawmill, a head of a department (unspecified), a shop manager and a stores manager. Four had been regular officers or non-commissioned officers. Twelve men did not state their occupation.
Researchers of memory knowledge within folklore studies and oral history greatly emphasise the specific situation where experiences and memories are articulated into stories. The Finnish folklorist Jyrki Pöysä points out that a “collection” of reminiscences never actually consists in gathering something pre-existing that is “out there”, waiting for the researcher to come and collect it. Instead, it is a creative activity, where memories, stories and folklore are produced in cooperation between the informants and the scholars. The questions asked, and how they are put, make the informant intuitively feel that certain stories are expected of him and he thus may recall only certain things in memory and not others. The 1972-73 collection of memories of military training was executed in a manner that signalled approval and appreciation of conscription and the Finnish armed forces. The brochure that was the main advertising channel for the writing competition propagated voluntary civic work for supporting national defence. The ingress of the questionnaire connected the history of universal conscription and the national armed forces with “over fifty years of Finnish independence”. It further claimed that “every Finnish man has learnt the art of defending the country” in those forces, thus recycling old phrases from nationalist defence rhetoric. It was also pointed out in the first section that the collection of reminiscences was realised in “collaboration with the General Staff”. All this might have influenced who participated in the collection and who shunned it, as well as the informants’ notions of what kind of narration was expected of them.
Juha Mälkki, who has worked with all the answers from the interwar period surmises that the informants might represent mainly those with positive attitudes to the army. It is impossible to know which voices might be missing, yet in the author’s opinion the collected material offers a broad spectrum of experiences and attitudes, including significant numbers of very negative images of military service. The questionnaire, worked out by the ethnologists at the University of Turku, contained almost 230 different questions, grouped under 40 numbered topics, ranging from material culture, such as clothing, food and buildings, to military folklore, in the form of jokes and marching songs, and to the relationships between men and officers and among the soldiers themselves. The meticulous list of questions was evidently based on a very detailed and specific pre-understanding of the social ”morphology” of military life; notions of how military life is organised and structured and what social and cultural phenomena are specific to it. For example, regarding leaves of absence the questionnaire asked: “What false reasons were used when applying for leaves, or what stories were told about such attempts? Was it difficult to actually obtain leave when there was a real need, or were there suspicions that the reasons were falsified? What kinds of men were the most skilled in getting leave?” The questions asked were ways of helping the informants remember, but directed their recollections towards certain topics, excluding others. Many informants wrote at length about the first questions in the questionnaire, but further on answered more briefly and started skipping questions, apparently exhausted by the long list of questions and the cumbersomeness of writing. On the other hand, several informants chose to tell “their story”, largely ignoring the questions asked.
The ensuing stories have to be read with sensitivity as to how they are written in response to specific questions, at particular stages in their authors’ lives, and in a particular historical situation. The Finnish men writing for the collection in 1972–1973 were born into, grew up, and did their military service in the same mental and political landscape as Mika Waltari and Pentti Haanpää. Yet by the time they wrote down their memories of military training they had also experienced a world war and Finland’s military defeat in 1944, which against all odds secured Finland’s survival as an independent nation. They had heard the resurgent Finnish communists criticise the interwar period as one of Finnish militarism and characterize the Finnish war efforts as aggression. They had witnessed the official pact of “friendship and mutual assistance” between Finland and their former foe, the Soviet Union. They had recently observed the emergence of a youth revolt in the 1960’s with its anti-authoritarianism and critical stance towards the nationalist and moral values of previous generations. All of this was present in their “space of experience”, illuminating and giving new meanings to their own experiences of military training as conscripts. Individual memories overlap and connect with other people’s memories and images of the past, shared by larger collectives, such as generations or nations. This can provide social support for individual memories, increasing their coherence and credibility through linguistic interaction with other people. It can also, however, result in people confusing their own personal memories with things that happened to other people that they have only heard or read about. Historian Christof Dejung points out how the informants he interviewed about their memories of the Second World War in Switzerland had re-interpreted, re-shaped and rearticulated their memories since the war under the influence of political debates on Swiss history, stories they had been told, books about the war years they had read, and films they had seen. Individual memories, Dejung summarises, are parts of collective patterns of interpretation that originate both in the past and the present.
The oral historian Alistair Thomson stresses the psychological motives at work in the process where memories are constructed and articulated. People compose or construct memories using the public languages and meanings of their culture, but they do it in such a way as to help them feel relatively comfortable with their lives and identities. In Thomson’s words, we want to remember the past in a way that gives us “a feeling of composure” and ensures that our memories fit with what is publicly acceptable. When we remember, we seek the affirmation and recognition of others for our memories and our personal identities. Still, the thesis’ author finds that a radical scepticism regarding memories as evidence of the past would be an erroneous conclusion. As many oral historians have pointed out, distortions due to distance from events, class bias and ideology, as well as uncertainty regarding the absolute accuracy of factual evidence are not unique to oral evidence or reminiscences, but characteristic of many historical sources. For example, court records are based on oral testimony that has often been re-articulated and summarised by the recording clerks. Newspaper reports are usually based on the oral testimony of interviewed people that has been evaluated, condensed and re-narrated by journalists. The historian always has to make a critical assessment of his sources in the light of other sources as well as theories and assumptions about human motives and behaviour. In this respect, memories are not different in kind from most other historical source materials. The literary historian Alessandro Portelli, famous for his oral history work, writes that oral sources tell us less about events than about their meaning, about how events were understood and experienced and what role they came to play in the informant’s life. Still, he underlines that the reminiscences told by people in oral history interviews often reveal unknown events or unknown aspects of known events. They always cast light on the everyday life of the lower, “non-hegemonic” social classes that have left few traces in public archives. Oral sources might compensate chronological distance with much closer personal involvement. Portelli claims that in his experience, narrators are often capable of reconstructing their past attitudes even when they no longer coincide with present ones. They are able to make a distinction between past and present self and to objectify the past self as other than the present one.
Neither can memories be held as the product of the interview situation alone. The oral historian Luisa Passerini points out that when someone is asked for his or her life-story, this person’s memory draws on pre-existing storylines and ways of telling stories, even if these are in part modified by the circumstances. According to the oral historian Paul Thompson, the encapsulation of earlier attitudes in a story is a protection, which makes them less likely to represent a recent reformulation. Recurrent story telling can thus preserve memories, but if there is a strong “public memory” of the events in question, it can also distort personal recollections. In interviews with Australian veterans from the First World War, conducted in the 1980’s, Alistair Thomson found that memories of the post-war period, that had rarely been the focus of conversation and storytelling, seemed more fresh and less influenced by public accounts than the stories about the war years. Thomson connects this with the powerful presence in Australian culture of an “official”, nationalist commemoration of the Australian war experience. He describes a process where the diverse and even contradictory experiences of Australians at war were narrated through a public war legend, a compelling narrative that smoothed the sharp edges of individual experiences and constructed a homogenous veteran identity defined in terms of national ideals. Nonetheless, Thomson found that oral testimony collected in the 1980’s still indicated the variety of the Australian veterans’ experiences. Many of the veterans Thomson interviewed had preserved a distance from the nationalist myths about the war experience. The influence of the public legend depended on each veteran’s original experience of the war, on the ways he had previously composed his war remembering, and on the social and emotional constory of old age. In the case of the Swiss commeration of the Second World War, Christof Dejung points out that in spite of strong national myths about the defence of Switzerland, the political left, women, and the Jewish community have maintained diverging memory cultures that were ignored in official commemoration until recently. In the final analysis, Alistair Thomson concludes from his study that there is plentiful evidence in oral testimony to make for histories representing the range and complexity of Australian experiences of war. The use of soldier’s testimony should, however, be sensitive to the ways in which such testimony is articulated in relation to public stories and personal identities.
I think we can assume that certain parts of the memories of militarytraining in the Finnish conscript army were formed and influenced by decades of the informants telling and listening to army stories together with other men. Many of their elements have probably been told and retold many times since the interwar period. An informant might be prone to include a story that has been successful with his previous audiences – comrades, colleagues, and family members – in his answer to the writing competition. Just as Haanpää and Waltari were using and commenting on contemporary popular traditions and political debates, the men composing their memories in the 1970’s certainly borrowed elements and narrative forms from literary and oral traditions in depicting military life. However, comparisons with the critical press reports and parliamentary debates on the treatment of conscripts as well as with Pentti Haanpää’s and Mika Waltari’s army books, reveal that essential narrative elements in their reminiscences were already in public circulation in the interwar period. In comparison to the cultural images of the Finnish front-line experience in the Second World War, there was by far no such equally powerful “official” commemoration or nationalist legend about interwar military training in post-war society, prescribing how one was supposed to remember it. However, historian Juha Mälkki assumes that the experiences of fighting the Second World War were formative for how pre-war military training was remembered and narrated. Mälkki has used the 1972–1973 collection for a study of the emergence of the particular military culture making possible Finland’s relatively successful defence against the Soviet Union in 1939–1940. He reckons that the informants’ notions of which military skills and modes of functioning turned out useful or even life-saving in the Winter War informed their evaluation of their peacetime military training, which was in retrospect seen essentially as a preparation for the war experience.
This is an important observation. However, we must not presume that the informants’ war experiences had a uniform impact on all of them. The thesis’ author finds significant and wants to stress not only the similarities, but also the differences among the different voices and stories in the collection. The ways experiences are articulated are never completely determined by culture, public memory or even personal history. There are always different and mutually contradictory models of interpretation circulating in a culture. Despite their elements of collective tradition, the variation among the memories display how conscripts were influenced by their varying sociocultural backgrounds and political stances, both in how they experienced military training in their youth and in how they reproduced or re-assessed their experiences during their later lives. It also bears witness to how not only self-reflection, but also factors as difficult to capture as what we call personality, temperament and genuine innovativeness make human experience richer and more unpredictable than any social theory can fully fathom.
ex Ngāti Tumatauenga ("Tribe of the Maori War God") aka the New Zealand Army
Conscript Training in the 1920's - Part 3
Entering the Military Environment
When conscripts recalled how they reported for duty and entered military training, the formal hierarchy and the relationships between the recruits and their new superiors and teachers were often in the foreground of their stories. These superiors consisted of different groups: regular officers, regular non-commissioned officers (NCOs), conscripted probationary officers and conscripted squad leaders. Two different storylines about the attitude different military superiors took towards the conscripted soldiers can be abstracted; a “dark story” about disciplinary harshness and brutal abuses of power, and a brighter story about efficient training and well-liked and even admired superiors who were skilled and inspirational military educators. Whether they tell the dark or the brighter story – usually they do both, intertwining negative and positive anecdotes – most of the narrators studied here portrayed interwar military training as an extremely hard, tough and demanding experience. The narrators, especially those depicting military service in the 1920’s, portrayed relationships between conscripted soldiers and their superiors as strained and marked by animosity on both sides of a hierarchical chasm.
The reminiscences of Heikki Kolehmainen, born in 1897, concern a regiment in Tampere in 1919-1920 and provide most elements of the “dark story”. Kolehmainen made a professional military career after his military service, working for many years as a regular sergeant-major and advancing to officer’s rank during the Second World War. He was, moreover, already accustomed to military life when he was called up in 1919, since he had fought in the Civil War the year before. In spite of this familiarity with military life both at the time of writing down his memories in 1972–1973 and at the time of entering his military service, his memories convey a sense of appalled consternation at the loud shouting and commotion on his day of arrival for military service. “Using unexpectedly loud and bawling language [the Jäger officers] squashed us recruits, clattering and struggling in the stairs, into the large, cheerless and dreary squad-rooms.” The conscripts were woken up the next morning by a “seemingly demented corporal”, who ran screaming from room to room. As the training began, the soldiers’ superiors instituted a culture of haste. Whatever the recruits did, they were always pressed on to do it faster and told their performance was not good enough. There were incessant inspections of the dormitories and equipment, mainly intent on finding faults. The recruits’ beds and lockers were dismantled – “blown up” – almost daily by the duty officer because they allegedly were not properly made and arranged. Lectures and classes Kolehmainen remembered as tedious, “and as we usually had not learnt anything by the end of each class as it consisted of bawling”. Some of the treatment Kolehmainen and his comrades experienced at the hands of their squad leaders – it is unclear whether these were conscripted or regular NCOs – could be characterised as outright bullying. E.g. the practice of huudattaminen [~making someone shout] was often used to punish and humiliate some individual soldier. He would be ordered to climb a tree, a large rock or some other high place and shout out something in the vein of “I’m the biggest fool of this company!” The commands and instructions of the squad leaders Kolehmainen remembered as “yelling, barking, and richly larded with abuse even offensive of one’s honour, and very often with clumsily presented obscene jokes.” The squad leaders instructed the men that if a recruit mistakenly turned in the wrong direction during the profuse close-order drill exercises, the man facing him should spit in his face. A certain regular sergeant always led the so-called santsi, which were extra exercises in the evening after the ordinary daily programme, ordered as punishments for individuals or whole units. “He was famous for his harshness, an almost sadistic ruthless tormentor, whose narrow programme almost exclusively consisted of making us get down [flat on the ground] and get up again, over and over.”
Kolehmainen describes the relationships between regular officers and conscripts as distant and cold. Between the officers and men, there was “an insuperable armour-plating.” The officers never showed the men their more relaxed, personal face, only “an official face expressing contrived gravity and ambition”. When an officer faced his unit, stately and with emphasised briskness yet “without the faintest shadow of a smile”, the rank-and-file soldier “felt like assuming an attitude of a strong inferiority complex, expressed in his fearful glance and tense being”. In his memories, Kolehmainen refers to the Jäger officers’ ‘Prussian’ notions of discipline, such as emphasising the differences in rank between conscripted NCOs and the other conscripts. The corporals were not allowed to eat with the other soldiers but had to use the NCO’ dining room, yet even there they had to sit at a different table than the sergeants. Himself moving on to corporal school to be trained as a NCO in the reserve, he wondered at the principles of selection which seemed “alien and strange” to him: “the spirit in those days was that only the noisy, mouthy, yelling and inclined to bully were thought best suited as NCOs. Those who were calm, businesslike and strived for humane treatment of their subordinates, however, were considered neglectful and ineffective good-for-nothings.” In addition to all this, Kolehmainen’s contingent suffered from the food scarcity and epidemics plaguing the armed forces in the difficult years following the Civil War. No wonder that those many nights when he and his fellow conscripts were punished for one thing or another by confinement to the barracks were “mostly spent in silent melancholia”, someone perhaps singing alone, “stumps from here and there, mainly expressions of heavyheartedness”. Some of the recruits found the conditions so appalling that a group of them was seriously planning to escape from the garrison and join an expeditionary force on its way to fight the Bolsheviks in Eastern Karelia. They told their comrades, “Certainly things cannot be as miserable there as here”.
The narrative of Onni Mähönen, born 1913, who served in the Karelia Guards’ Regiment in Viipuri in 1935–1936, provides an example of a “brighter” story, almost opposite to that of Heikki Kolehmainen.
Karjalan Prikaatin Lippu / The Flag of the Karelian Guards Regiment, inaugurated by decision of the Commader in Chief of the Army on June 14th 1919, accepted by the President on 28 Ocy 1920, and in the late 1950s became the Karelia Brigade flag
Mähönen had received basic military training in the civil guards before he was called up. He underlined in his recollections that he had a very positive bias when he entered military training. Around the time of his call-up, as he recalled, there was a general spirit among conscripts that military service was “a natural part of every male citizen’s duties”. This probably in part reflects attitudes in Mähönen’s own social circles at the time, but probably also the higher acceptance of conscription and military training across the political spectrum of Finnish society in the 1930’s, as compared to the early 1920’s. Elements of military training familiar from Kolehmainen’s narrative recur in Mähönen’s memories, but are treated in an altogether different manner. Although the recruits in Mähönen’s unit were – like most interwar conscripts – awoken with a lot of racket the first morning, he thought that this was “somehow only proper”. There was quite enough time for getting oneself ready. “In general, military life broadly speaking started out just according to my expectations.” He found recruit training was easy since he already had most of the required skills. His squad leader was a “very calm and businesslike fellow who scarcely raised his voice without due cause.” There was “a lot of fuss” about how the beds were made and the lockers ordered, but according to Mähönen, “that was how discipline was built at [the regiment] in those days and I have to say that it had an effect, later on the squad rooms stayed tidy, things were in good order and every item of equipment was tightly in its own place.”
Just as Heikki Kolehmainen and Onni Mähönen remembered the roaring of superiors as one main impression of entering the military, even Onni Mähönen described his first such experience at some length. On his day of arrival, Mähönen’s company sergeant-major gave the recruits a warning speech about the dangers of the city during evening leaves: To an ordinary recruit the whole business seemed quite a bit of yelling and bullying. – During his whole sermon [the sergeant-major] walked slowly in front of the row, very close to the men, shouting at the top of his voice. – I had ended up in the front row and I must admit it felt strange in spite of all my [positive] bias [to military service], when the sergeant-major looked me straight in the eyes, at about ten centimetres distance, his shouting resounding in the whole corridor.” This was evidently behaviour unfamiliar to Mähönen from the civil guards. It disconcerted him in spite of his eagerness for soldiering. Yet in his memories he put it off as a “dramatised roughness” that was a “peculiarity” for this particular sergeant major. His other superiors were “normal”. Medical problems prevented Mähönen’s plans for NCO training. He was instead assigned to be a scribe at the regiment headquarters. There, he got on very well with the officers. ”I never heard any shouting, bawling or sneering at the headquarters.” Neither does Mähönen report any bullying or improper treatment of the conscripts during recruit training or in any other con-story. “If you duly performed your duties with a sensible attitude to military discipline, you did not have to experience anything very extraordinary in the Karelia Guards in those days”, he writes.
These very wordings can, however, be read as indications of Mähönen’s awareness that his positive experiences of military service were not shared by all conscripts. He recounts a significant incident towards the end of his military service, as he was at the military hospital for some medical examinations and talked to patients who served as soldiers in other military units. “I had got on well so far, I might say very well, life had been brisk and I had found lots of new
comrades”, Mähönen wrote. “… I guess that was the reason I thought everybody else took the same attitude to this phase of life, and because of that I was rather shocked when I found out that others were of a very different opinion.” He especially remembered a big and coarse man who burst into tears and said that he certainly had heard life in the army was miserable, but that he never had thought it could be as miserable as this.
Stressing the Toughness and Harshness
Circumstances varied between different military units, as illustrated by Heikki Kolehmainen’s and Onni Mähönen’s experiences. However, a majority of the reminiscences throughout the period emphasise the toughness and harshness of military training. The “dark stories” of military training spread in the interwar period not least through the story-telling of men who returned home after serving their time. It was evidently common that these disbanded men tried to frighten younger men who had their military training in front of them by telling them more or less truthful stories about what awaited them. Yet there were counterforces and counterstories as well, as those youngsters who were active within the civil guards movement before their military service were reassured and encouraged to expect an interesting and stimulating time as they reported for service. Entering military training seems to have had a shocking and depressing effect on many conscripts, especially during the years immediately after the Civil War when the military organisation was underfunded, understaffed and underdeveloped, and conscription and military training still strange, unfamiliar and subject to much resistance among the general public. Toivo Kantonen, who lived in a municipality with a socialist majority in 1918, recalled the psychological effect of the introduction of conscription to the “white” army as “the same as if there would now all of a sudden be a new law that everybody who has turned 65 will be killed”. Eero Tuominen recalls his departure to the call-up from a train station where people openly wept for their sons leaving for an unknown destiny. He wrote to his girlfriend two weeks later that military service felt like being a prisoner. His friend Vilho was so home-sick that he had lost all appetite, he wrote. “The off-duty hours are long and terrible here. Otherwise there is certainly so much running about that you don’t have much time to think.” Others recall how especially the
first weeks in the military felt hopelessly dreary. “I remember that I slid into a state of depression of some kind, everything somehow felt indifferent to me.”
One recurrent memory associated with entering military service throughout the period is the superiors’ loud shouting and roaring at conscripts, often insulting them. An informant who served in 1920–1921 illustrated the normal behaviour among superiors by contrasting it with his first meeting with the sergeant-major in his new unit after he finished corporal school: “I guess the most sensitive among us were silently crying for joy. He namely talked like a human being. We had the impression that the company sergeant-majors did not know human language, even if some words did sound familiar amongst all the shouting, screaming, barking and swearing.” Depictions of recruit training, the first three months of military training, dominate the reminiscences. This was evidently the toughest part of military service in many units, during which the superiors tried to socialise the new recruits into strict military discipline. The conscripts were still unaccustomed to the new and strange world they had entered. During the first weeks of training, they were kept in complete isolation from the surrounding civilian world. In many units recruits could get an evening leave for visiting the surrounding city only after the recruit period. Even then, conscripts who lived further away were only allowed leave to visit their families once during their military service. In the 1930’s, a conscript could already hope for two or three home leaves during the year, but if one’s company officers were in the least dissatisfied with one’s conduct even these could be refused. As a collective punishment for some conscript’s misdemeanour, all leave could be suspended, and the soldiers confined to their barracks for days or weeks.
The stories about recruit training typically stress the emphasis superiors put on manifesting hierarchy. Many informants recalled that the officers made a point of keeping relationships between officers and men extremely formal and distant. Likewise, the never-ending and repeated cleaning and ordering of squad-rooms and equipment lockers, making of beds and cleaning of rifles during recruit training, usually making up the first three months of training, were highlighted elements in the memories. The “blowing up” or “blasting” of meticulously made lockers, clothing bundles and beds are described as normal practice in most units.
Recruit learning how to neatly fold clothes, army-style
This meant that the inspecting NCO swept down the equipment onto the floor in disorder because it allegedly was not in satisfactory order. According to some stories, the squad leaders or sergeant-majors sometimes even threw the bedclothes out of the barracks window. In some units this wrecking seems to have happened almost daily over longer periods of time, in others it was a method used a couple of times in the beginning of the recruit training. The actual military training during the recruit period was remembered as mainly consisting of close-order drill exercises. An informant who was called up in 1931 claimed his unit did five hours of close-order drill training daily for over a month. One man even wrote the recruit training took half of the one-year service and mostly consisted of close-order drill. Recruit training certainly was not that prolonged anywhere, but the statement is significant concerning the impressions and memories this man was left with.
Bullying
As the recruits were socialised into a particular military behaviour, considerably more brutal means than wrecking beds were used to demonstrate the superiors’ power and the soldiers’ powerlessness in the military hierarchy. The reminiscences convey the same images of widespread practices intended at scaring, bullying and humiliating the soldiers into unquestioning obedience that were expressed in critical press reports of the 1920’s and even the writings of officers who wanted to reform military education. People understand and articulate the same events differently, emphasising or playing down certain aspects, repressing some memories or believing that what they have heard or read happened to themselves. Nevertheless, as a rough estimate according to how the informants themselves appear to have appraised how they were treated, a quarter of them describe personal experiences of severe bullying by a person in superior military rank. Another third experienced some milder forms of harassment. One in ten stated that although there was no bullying in their own unit they knew that it was frequent in some neighbouring unit. Overall, two thirds of the informants claim to have experienced or observed some form of bullying. Thus, one third reported no observations of bullying by superiors. There is a tendency in the material of the accounts of bullying growing milder and less frequent towards the end of the 1920’s and throughout the 1930’s, although severe instances of bullying are still reported in the 1930’s. There is also a general shift in the memories, where regular NCOs and officers dominate the stories about harsh treatment and bullying in the early 1920’s, whereas conscripted squad leaders are pointed out as the worst tormentors of recruits in many accounts of military training in the 1930’s.
A usual form of bullying individual conscripts in the 1920’s was the so called huudattaminen [~to make someone shout] described above by Heikki Kolehmainen, where an individual soldier was humiliated by being ordered to climb a high place and cry something. Valtteri Aaltonen, who served in 1923, wrote in his memories that conscripts were made to shout out sentences about themselves such as: “Recruit N.N. is a useless man for the Finnish Army”; “Recruit N.N. has got sawdust, eggshells and sour milk in his head and they are all mixed up too”; or “Recruit N.N.’s sister has calving fever”. Jorma Kiiski, who did his military service that same year, remembered how his squad leader forced “one of the weakest boys” to climb a pine tree. The soldier could not manage climbing higher than a couple of metres. The squad leader stood screaming under him, holding his bayonet to the soldier’s behind and the soldier was crying with shame and fear. “There was some kind of bullying going on every day”, continued Kiiski. Kustaa Liikkanen (born 1902) was punished by a sergeant inspecting the lockers who found some breadcrumbs in his drinking cup and thought his blanket was in bad condition. The sergeant hit Liikkanen over the head with the blanket, causing it to split and form a kind of poncho over his shoulders. In this gear, he was ordered, “to take the cup between my teeth and jump squat out into the [barracks] corridor, shouting loudly that I had shat in the cup”. This form of bullying, aimed at humiliating individuals, however, seems to have decreased towards the end of the 1920’s and was not exercised at least by regular NCOs or officers in the 1930’s. More often, the conscripts were bullied as a collective. In many units there was a practice of punishing the conscripts for even the smallest infringements, oftentimes even alleged breaches of regulations, with socalled santsi, extra duty. Santsi usually consisted in physically extreme close-order drill, with an emphasis on the heavy and dirty practice of instantly hitting the ground at the command, lie headlong pressed to the ground and then get up again, repeated over and over for up to an hour, sometimes in muddy fields, sleet or water puddles. To the soldier’s mind, it was often more a question of harassment and bullying than just punishments or adequate military training. For example, Toivo Verronen who served in 1936–1937 remembered a lieutenant who ordered the soldiers to first take off their blouses and then lie prone in a forest terrain covered by dry reindeer moss – a very prickly bed. Heikki Kolehmainen recalled that his unit at NCO school was once made to crawl 150 metres through sleet mixed with horse manure. Another usual form for santsi was extra marches with a heavy load, sometimes in the middle of the night or ‘spiced’ with hitting the ground and getting up – with the heavy load – every now and then.
Drill - Recruits form up in Column of Threes
A milder yet in some units very frequent form of harassment was making the soldiers crawl around the floor of their squad rooms, going beneath the bunk beds, or sometimes under every second bed and over every second. More imaginative and even theatrical forms of santsi were also well remembered by some narrators. Eino Sallila (born 1901) served in Kouvola in 1920–1921 and according to his memories the recruits were heavily bullied in his unit. He wrote at some length about a certain sergeant-major who was known for his ironical bullying style. Sallila described how this sergeantmajor enjoyed himself, “like a cat playing with a mouse”, at the beginning of an “extra exercise” for a group of conscripts to be punished for keeping their hair too long or having dirty finger-nails. He strode up in front of our group, stepping like a cock, and roared (…) “we will spend a little stimulating and educative time here outdoors, after which you can compare how much more gorgeous you [with long hair] are in comparison to those who followed the regulations.” (…) By now the sergeant-major was already energised and stepped up to the boy standing first in line and two inches from his nose he roared: “Now you tell me the reason why this group is standing in front of me.” This boy drew his lungs full of air and roared in the same style: “Because we had shitty finger-nails.” Thus the staging was in order and the performance itself could begin.
There was a command: “Long-haired and shitty-nailed, attention...” The soldiers were commanded to hit the ground and get up several times and to crawl forward on the ground while holding on with both hand to their rifles held behind their necks. Sallila recalled that when a fat boy did not keep up and lifted his seat a bit off the ground the sergeant-major came rushing and pushed him down with his boot: “when you lift your bottom like that, the enemy will notice you and shoot so many holes in your ass that we will drown in shit. – Don’t you even know that we are practicing for war –“. After these ”exercises” had continued for an hour, the group was commanded to run up and down a steep hill, all the time ordered to hit the ground and get up. Sallila commented: This devilish form of torture is perhaps not possible to completely explain in words. (…) As we afterwards were standing in line in front of our barracks and that ”dear mother” of ours was again striding in front of us looking rather satisfied, our group certainly did not look much like a valiant contingent of soldiers. (…) Every member in our bodies and every piece of clothing we had on were so wet that our tongues were the driest parts of us. It seems a miracle that nobody got seriously hurt in this operation. In most cases, the soldiers did not dare lodge a complaint against abusive superiors. “t was unusual that anybody complained, and if he did he would not do it twice, you got under pressure for that.” In many cases it was also impossible to report abusive superiors because no formal breach of regulations had been made. It was often impossible to make a sharp distinction between relevant training for warfare, punishments in accordance with regulations, and harassments.
Nigel’s Note: doesn’t sound like “bullying” to me. In the New Zealand Army in the late 1970’s, our Training NCO’s were complete bastards (but professional bastards, let it be said – they always explained why they were inflicting pain and punishment on us….) compared to these guys, who sound pretty mild on the whole. We had to crawl through mud-filled ditches complete with the odd dead sheep carcass (oooooold rotten sheep carcasses), do punishment parades pretty much every evening, push-ups for the last guys out of the mess after meals, last guys on the runs got “encouraged”with a boot to the bum, squad punishments (one guy fucked up, you all caught it, almost every time), make a mistake on the rifle range and it was run to the top of the nearest hill, repeat the mistake and it was do it again with your pack on, a third time and they added rocks to your pack. We used to do pushups and our PT NCO’s would walk across our backs – and God help you if you couldn’t hold up the weight, if anybody in the squad screwed up badly enough to get the whole squad in deep shit they usually got a thumping after lights out – the NCO’s just ignored it unless it got a bit out of hand – unit self-discipline was what it was called. Close-order drill – well, we had that almost every day for the first six weeks until we had it down to a fine art – but again, we also had a fairly detailed explanation as to why and what it was all about. I guess the chief difference with us was it was voluntary (no conscription) and if you wanted to quit, all it took was 24 hours notice – and if you quit, you were separated from your Platoon as soon as you opened your mouth – for all intents and purposes you were gone – so we were all very self-motivated and we worked to motivate each other as well.
So all the above sounds pretty typical, the difference being that the conscripts didn’t understand what was being done to them or why. To them, it seemed like needless harassment – and generally, the difference between a conscript army and a volunteer army is conscripts don’t need to be explained to, they’re just told because they ain’t going nowhere and they have no choice. A volunteer army has a choice and the volunteer needs to understand what’s being done to them and why to help them with their self-motivation. There’s a significant psychological difference, with volunteers generally having a much more positive approach – they “want” to be there.
Well-liked and admired Superiors
In spite of the many accounts of harshness, bullying and abuses, it must be underlined that many men throughout the period and especially in the 1930’s shared Onni Mähönen’s positive experiences, claiming that the overall relationships between superiors and soldiers in their own unit were quite good. Almost everyone who participated in the 1972–1973 collection remembered individual superiors who were well-liked and even admired by the men. In the descriptions of these popular officers, what was emphasized is not as much their friendliness as their calm, businesslike, matter-of-fact and civil manner, as well as their fairness. In most cases, it was also underlined how well-liked officers combined justness and correctness with a markedly competent, professional and highly demanding attitude to the men’s military training. All these qualities, however, were appreciated not least in contrast to other, not so calm superiors. Jorma Kiiski (b. 1903) described the “reassuring” feeling he had when he met his new lieutenant at NCO school. Instead of giving Kiiski a scolding for the condition of his rifle, this lieutenant declared that his rifle was hopelessly worn out. Kiiski did not forget to mention in his memories that the lieutenant was even smiling as he said this – evidently a remarkable circumstance. “During the whole six months in [NCO] school I could witness how this lieutenant really was a veritable humane gentleman who did not want to show how difficult he could make his subordinates’ lives.” When Urpo Sallanko (b. 1908) was sent to the company commander for a telling-off because he had resisted his squadleaders demands for demonstrative submissiveness, he was impressed by the calmness, “almost friendliness” of the captain. This officer said to him, “I like men who have character, and we are not trying to break it but educate it. But do you understand that here you must also learn to obey?” He was told to obey his superiors, but come to see the captain in person if he has anything to complain about and was let off with a very light punishment. “A very happy boy left [the captain’s] office. I did not mind the punishment, but I had expected brawling and bullying and now he spoke to me like a father to his son or like man to man. That was why I was so relieved.”
Just as in Sallanko’s case, the company officers – lieutenants and captains – and higher-ranking officers were often remembered as benevolent although distant paternal figures who protected the conscripts from bullying by lower-ranking superiors. The same Eino Sallila, who reported on severe bullying, cherished the memory of how the battalion commander once intervened as their Jäger sergeant major was keeping “extra exercises” for his unit on a Sunday, which was prohibited. “The sharp voice of the commander interrupted the sergeant-major’s explanations: ‘Take these men to their barracks immediately. Finland’s army does not need Prussian any more than Russian teachings of this kind, is that clear.’ The [estimation] of this captain then rose sharply among the men in the garrison, but rumour said that among his fellow officers it sank.” Among the men who had served in the 1920’s, several informants stated that the reason why there were no abuses in their unit was that the company commander did not tolerate it. This implies that these men considered bullying such a normal state in the armed forces at the time of their military service that its absence required a positive explanation. Albert Lahti (b. 1907) wrote that there was no real bullying in his company; “We had been blessed with regular NCOs better than average”. On the other hand, since the soldiers thought that committed and competent officers could stop the bullying, they might have understood its occurrence as evidence of the company officers’ silent approval, indifference or sheer incompetence. Even in some memories of military training that do not include accounts of inappropriate treatment, the military culture of excessive harshness and bullying is thus present as a shadow or potential that must be negated.
Understandings of disciplinary practices
Brutal treatment of soldiers certainly was no peculiarity to the Finnish Army. It is a familiar picture of life in modern Western armies. Within social research, it has often been interpreted in functionalistic terms. The objective is to initially break down the recruit, strip him of his dignity, individuality and previous identities, in order to subsequently rebuild him as an efficient soldier, identifying only with his military unit and combat group. His dignity is given back to him only when he has disciplined himself to become a well-oiled part of the fighting machine, desensitized to and prepared to perform military violence. Ethnologist Pekka Leimu, who has analysed the 1972–1973 collection for a study on hazing among the conscripts (1985), takes the view that harsh methods were necessary to discipline recalcitrant conscripts in the wake of the Civil War 1918. He interprets for example the practice of huudattaminen as a method for breaking down a conscript’s resistance by making him ridiculous in front of the other soldiers. Among the testimonies of men who themselves experienced interwar military training, we find a range of different understandings of the reasons behind the disciplinary practices in use. Most of them, however, differ markedly from the functionalist interpretation of brutality and bullying as a rational method for disciplining and socialising recruits into soldierhood. They rather looked to the individual psychology of the bullies for the reasons behind abusive practices.
Pentti Haanpää: Soldiers and Officers corrupting each other
Pentti Haanpää was obviously intrigued by the question of why the relationships between soldiers and officers often became so hostile. This particular question was a key theme in his collection of short stories about army life, where he tried out a range of different possible answers through the medium of fiction. Haanpää did not look for answers in any rational military curriculum, but in the contradictions and tensions between the psyche and character of Finnish men on the one hand and the military system on the other. He can actually be read as pointing to a contradiction between the Finnish character and military subordination as an underlying cause for the bullying of conscripts. In spite of largely writing about military life from the perspective of the conscripts, uneducated farmhands and forestry workers from Eastern and Northern Finland, Haanpää did not straightforwardly blame the officers for the conflict-ridden misery of military life that he portrayed. Rather, his stories told about a military world where the officers and soldiers harassed and corrupted each other in a vicious circle.
The conscripts Haanpää portrayed found peacetime military service meaningless and unproductive. In the light of modern historical research, one interpretation of his army stories is that the exaggerated emphasis on close-order drill and indoor duties in recruit training ran contrary to two central traits in contemporary agrarian norms. Firstly, the value put on personal autonomy – not bowing one’s head to any other man – preferably based on freeholdership, but also on being a skilled and esteemed workman. Secondly, the importance of a man being in useful, productive labour to support himself and his family. Haanpää further places the conscripts he portrays within a traditional image of the Finnish peasants and workers as obstinate, even hostile, towards authorities and officials. Against their officers, these conscripts “harboured all the bitterness, suspicion and animosity of the Finnish character towards one they have to obey”, he writes. If there is not a war to fight, any work that was done was for some distant, obscure, hypothetic, hardly understandable reasons.” The resulting recalcitrance and hostility towards superiors annoy and enrage the officers of Haanpää’s stories, provoking them to use ever more abusive means to force the soldiers into submissiveness. The forms of bullying Haanpää mentions are similar to the ones described in the 1972–1973 collection; shouting, endless close-order drill exercises used as a punishment or to break the soldiers’ resistance, the practice of huudattaminen or ‘make-them-shout’, ordering the soldiers to crawl around their squad-rooms beneath their bunk beds, etc.
Haanpää was both understanding and caustic about the idealism of nationalist officers. In the opening story of Fields and Barracks, ‘The German Jäger’ (Saksan Jääkäri), Haanpää portrayed a Jäger officer who fought in the world war, the Liberation War, the Estonian War of Independence and the Heimosodat (tribal wars) in Eastern Karelia, ending up as a training officer in the Finnish Army. He is born a tenant farmer’s son, but still allowed to attend elementary school. He reads “more books than is healthy for somebody bound to become a workman”. He meditates upon Runeberg’s and Topelius’s images of the Finnish people, “beautified by the sheen of poetry” and is infatuated with ideas about “ fitness, justice, valour, fatherland”. Arriving at the training camp of the Prussian army during the Great War, Haanpää’s Jäger protagonist feels “betrayed” and “depressed”. The barracks and training fields are grey and dull and there is no sign of the military grandness he had expected. “He felt that here one should rather take on the humility of a whipped dog.” Haanpää’s biographer Vesa Karonen suggests Haanpää was in part describing himself as a young man and his own dismay at the disillusioning contact with the bleak realities of military life. The idealism of this Jäger sergeant-major is gradually eroded by his war experiences. It receives a final blow from the reluctance and unyieldingness of Finnish conscripts in peacetime military service. These conscripts, as depicted by Haanpää: “The Jäger sergeant-major becomes increasingly depressed by seeing the conscripts’ “sleepy, grumpy and suffering” faces each morning. The only thing they are enthusiastic about is inventing schemes to avoid and escape their duties and exercises. They despise their officers, thinking that someone who serves for money in the armed forces is “either too lazy or otherwise unskilled” to find employment in civilian society. The task given the officers, to educate patriotism in the soldiers and make them trust and love their officers, proves utterly impossible in the face of the conscripts’ averseness. “Swearing and roaring at them was what you had to do, otherwise they would not move an inch.” Their obstinacy and scornfulness make the sergeant-major, a thoughtful and idealistic patriot, enraged. “He felt a desire to make these men run until they dropped dead, order them up a tree and down headlong into a snowdrift, to do something really evil, to really humiliate them, to make them understand how great power a man of one golden ribbon had in this Republic.”
The officers’ frustration with obstinate soldiers is the main explanation offered by Haanpää for the bullying of subordinates, yet he tried out others as well. One story in Fields and Barracks is a sketch of a sergeant who in his youth has been ridiculed for his vanity and ambitions by the people in his village, making him embittered and hateful towards all human beings. He finds his place in life as a training NCO in the army. “Now he was in a position that could not be better, now he could enjoy the sweetness of revenge, let out the endless hate and bitterness he felt towards all human flesh and blood.” Haanpää describes how the sergeant enjoys making dozens of men move at his order, lie prone on the ground and crawl, how he takes pleasure in singling out a soldier to playfully torment him, how he revels in seeing robust men in front of him frothing with rage yet unable to utter a word of protest. In another story, the main character is a middle-aged captain who has deteriorated from being a light-hearted, plucky and ambitious young officer, “happy and agile like a kitten”, into a jaded and embittered drunk, “his soul like a mistreated worn-out draught animal”. What caused him to change? Who knows, the voice of the narrator tells us; perhaps the burden of life, the greyness and monotony of life in a small garrison town. Then came the alcohol, “poisoning his blood and heart”, changing his character and shattering any hopes of further advancement. Constantly ill-humoured and hung-over in duty, he takes it out on his conscripts, his only satisfaction in life being the knowledge that his men fear and hate him.
In the final analysis, Haanpää seems to be blaming the military system more than these individual officers’ weaknesses of character. The officers he depicts are depressed by having to train ever new droves of recruits who play as stupid as they can and must be taught the most basic things by force. These officers all seem plagued by the same weariness, drinking most nights and arriving at the company in the morning in a bad mood. Haanpää seems to condemn the whole concept of professional, full-time training officers that was one of the core principles of the cadre army system in its Prussian and Russian forms; “few people could find joy and harmony to last a lifetime in teaching fast and efficient ways of killing”. In Haanpää’s images of soldiering, not only the conscripts but the officers themselves suffer terribly from the effects of this unsound profession.
Mika Waltari: taking the “right” attitude
Mika Waltari’s literary depiction of his military service presents a very different interpretation of the army discipline. He had a decidedly positive bias to military service and described his mood upon reporting for duty as the anticipation, both anxious and excited, of a great adventure. He had grown tired of himself and his everyday life, he wrote, he felt that it was “heavy to lead one’s own life that still has not found a direction”. One day he decided not to wait for his respite from military service to end, but headed for the call-up office. Reporting for duty, he sensed that he was leaving “everything old, ordinary and tiresome” behind and journeying into a completely new and unknown world. He was looking forward to “not having to think and worry” for himself, only follow orders. “I have only one ambition; that I would be able to take the right attitude, to submit myself and obey. Adjust to a new sphere of life, cope where others do […]”. Waltari was not disappointed and disillusioned by the reality of military life the way Haanpää evidently was. This probably had something to do with the differences between the social settings in which they served. Because of his educational level, Waltari was immediately upon arrival singled out for leadership training and sent to the NCO School summer camp in Parola in Southern Finland. There, he joined a group mainly consisting of educated youngsters from middle class families in the capital Helsinki. Most of them had the ambition of being picked out for reserve officer training and therefore strove to outperform each other, whatever challenges their superiors presented them with. They thought of themselves as an elite among the conscripted citizen-soldiers and were evidently to some extent treated as such by their superiors. Waltari does not describe having witnessed or experienced any real bullying or abuses. He certainly describes the less enjoyable sides of the conscripts’ life in detail – the gloominess and weariness of duty, the extreme physical strain and exhaustion of marching exercises, the tiresome meticulousness of equipment maintenance and the strictness of discipline. For example, he describes the draconian rifle-inspections, where nothing seems to be good enough for the inspecting probationary officers who more or less arbitrarily order the tired conscripts to re-polish scrupulously cleaned rifles. “I get to understand that it is impossible to ever get the rifle cleaned. That the inspector can always and in every case reject each and every rifle if that amuses him. […] We do not even want to understand. We just think the whole business is especially invented to torment us and take revenge upon us.”
Yet in the end, Waltari does not seem to be truly critical of anything in the military training system. Although the conscripts’ life feels arduous at times, there is no malevolence anywhere causing their hardships, only necessary training and preparation for war. Illustrative of his attitude is his comment the first time he experiences what is known in the military colloquial language as “licking the ground”, being ordered repeatedly to hit the ground flat during an exercise because the training officer is displeased with the conscripts’ performance. “It was not gruelling at all, rather a refreshing incident.” One evening, after a hard day of military exercises, Waltari’s squad is taken for an “extra singing lesson” in the form of a forced march at high speed. They are being punished for not having learnt the regiment’s marching song well enough. This is a typical form of disciplinary action, an experience that somebody else might have described as bullying, but which Waltari regards as a justified correction. Waltari has hurt his heel on a tough marching exercise two days before and suffers increasing pain during the march. Eventually he is dizzy with shooting pain and cannot keep up with the troop. The probationary officer leading the exercise gives him permission to stay behind, “he knows that my foot has been sore, he is sorry for me.” Although this superior thus has knowingly caused him immense
pain, Waltari is not angry with the officer but with himself. He sheds tears of shame as he is forced to fall behind. The humiliation for him is not in being subordinated and maltreated, but in not being able to take it like a man, to endure anything the others do, shrugging it off afterwards with a laugh.
In connection with this same “singing lesson” Waltari actually describes how he and his comrades articulate the experience afterwards, in effect defusing the pain and humiliation suffered. During the march, the conscripts “curse with black hearts, we hate the marching song, we hate the whole institution, the camp, our clothes, the road.” Yet a few weeks later, Waltari writes, “we will remember this march as one of the funniest memories of this whole summer. Because of this, we come to admire and love the song. It is the marching song of our regiment, mighty and wonderful. Its familiar tune bitter-sweetly thrills the heart and gives us a tremendous sense of duty, love and strength to endure all hardships.” He thus ascribes another meaning to what happened, turning a loathsome and perhaps humiliating experience into a positive experience, formative of his identity as a member of this particular group of conscripts who shared the experience. Throughout, Waltari portrays his superiors as good-hearted men who behind their strict official facade deeply care for their soldiers. The severe sergeant-major at summer camp is the conscripts’ “terror and delight” and his shouting can be heard from the company office all day long – yet the conscripts are secretly proud of him and fear him and mock him “like schoolboys would a teacher”. They tell the most fanciful horror stories about him, although in reality, according to Waltari, the sergeant-major is a kind and dutiful man. He tries to keep everything running and is simply overworked. “No wonder if he is irritated and tyrannises us. Actually [he] is sometimes very friendly and tries to arrange everything for our best.” The sergeant-major at reserve officer school, where Waltari ends up after his recruit training, is also both feared and well-liked. “His command of language is magnificent and he treats us like mischievous puppies that he tries to bring up to decent living, sometimes with lenience, sometimes with strictness.” Where Haanpää used the metaphor of a whipped dog for conscripted soldiering, Waltari thus uses the image of untamed puppies that are educated with loving stringency.
There is one passage where Waltari as a recruit already seems half aware of the preferential treatment he and his comrades are getting, as he is talking to a conscript from another unit. “They have an awfully harsh recruit training. They are mainly completely ordinary ground level catfish [recruits].” In general, however, he makes an effort to assure the reader that most of the horror stories told about military training are simply outrageously exaggerated. Waltari repeatedly describes how the soldiers take pleasure in boasting about the toughness of their training. When Waltari and his comrades are commanded to peel potatoes for the whole regiment together with soldiers from another unit, they entertain each other by competing in who can tell the wildest stories about tyrannical officers and physically extreme exercises, taking pride in having a harder training, being more “under the steamroller”, than the soldiers of any other unit. “Is it any wonder that you hear the most remarkable stories about the army?” Waltari asks.
The 1972–1973 memories: Contempt for the bullies
Most of the elderly men writing down their memories of military service in the early 1970’s did not reflect or comment as explicitly as the two young authors Haanpää and Waltari on the reasons behind the sometimes harsh treatment of soldiers in their writings. Perhaps they regarded it as a given aspect of military life in the period; perhaps they felt that the time for criticising or defending these practices had long passed and that it was more significant to their own narrative that they had been through it and coped with it. The terminology used in the memories nevertheless gives some clues. One frame of interpretation was the notion of a ‘Prussian discipline’ brought to Finland by the Jägers. Here, the incomprehensible elements of military training – the harshness, the yelling, the theatrical emphasis on hierarchy, saluting and geometrically precise formations – are made understandable and at the same time usually rejected as “foreign” customs. The concept of “Prussian discipline” externalizes elements of military culture experienced as absurd, as something that could not have been invented within Finnish culture, that was unsuited to the Finnish man’s character and that was in time replaced by an emerging domestic military culture that was both more humane and better suited to local circumstances. This nationalistically coloured interpretation thus includes a notion of Finnish conscripts as somehow more independent and unyielding than their German counterparts.
Three other colloquial terms from interwar military jargon were also used to describe harsh disciplinary treatment; simputus (‘bullheading’) that originally referred to older pupils at the cadet school hazing younger arrivals, but soon spread into the vernacular, designating a bullying based on the power to command within the military hierarchy as well; höykytys, which translates as ‘hammering’ or ‘torment’; and santsi, literally referring to an extra portion of food, which meant extra duty as a punishment. Calling a disciplinary practice simputus was a clear marker that it was considered mere harassment. Although höykytys or santsi in principle could refer to punishments in accordance with regulations, corrections for real neglectfulness or minor misdemeanours, these terms in the stories were also commonly used in association with representations of unjust collective punishments for insignificant lapses of individuals or even for fabricated accusations. According to the reminiscences, the conscripts did not in general regard these practices as rational instruments of military training but as harassment. Urpo Sallanko, serving in 1929–1930 wrote, “… my nature rose up in protest against this ‘hammering’. I thought it had nothing to do with training for defending the fatherland.” The narrators tend to understand bullying, especially practices they designated as simputus, in terms of the individual psychology of certain superiors. Eino Sallila commented on one abusive sergeant, “Finland was certainly short of men in those days, as such sadists had to be tolerated in the army for years on end.”
The young soldiers depicted in their recollections discarded the bullies as men lacking self-restraint who are only taking out their personal problems and aggressions on the soldiers. The men remembering bullying offered explanations such as the low educational and mental level of NCOs in the 1920’s;92 the war traumas of the Jäger officers; the bullies having marital problems or simply a hang-over; an officers’ bitterness over his degradation due to alcoholism; the immaturity of a very young squad leader who had volunteered for service; the envy of a bullying sergeant-major from a proletarian background towards conscripts from higher social strata; and the sadistic or abnormal personal character of the bullying officers. Contempt for the bullies and an attempt to construct them as weaklings in spite of their formal power over other men runs through the descriptions of bullying. The conscripted NCOs inclination to bully recruits was explained as their being intoxicated with power and unable to manage the position they had been assigned. Valtteri Aaltonen (b. 1903) wrote, “For these ”gentlemen” their position as superior and in authority had gone so badly to their head that they, or most of them, had to use this ”position” for making life more difficult for us recruits. The officers were somewhat more bearable. They of course had received more academic education than the NCOs whose education at the best only amounted to elementary school.”
In his memories, Heikki Kolehmainen referred to corporals who took their rank too seriously as ‘cockerels’. Kustaa Liikkanen, who served as a conscript in the Turku garrison in 1922-23, derided the lack of self-restraint and natural leadership qualities in the company’s sergeant-major in his memories, by admiringly describing a certain corporal Kamonen as a very talented military educator: His behaviour and commanding was on quite another level than [the sergeant-major’s]. Kamonen’s style of command was crisp, but at the same time it was demanding, calm but very resolute. He never got over-excited. In other words, he did not jump out of his skin. Never spraying spit in the eyes of those he was commanding. His eyes never bulged as much as an inch out of his head. Thus, self-confidence above all. In other words, according to Virtanen, officers who had to bawl at the soldiers or bully them in order to get something done were not using a disciplinary technique, but were simply revealing themselves as men with neither self-confidence nor self-control and therefore unsuited as leaders of other men. Heikki Kolehmainen, who in the 1970’s could comment upon the interwar development from the perspective of a long professional military career, estimated that one main reason for the bullying and maltreatment of conscripts in the 1920’s was simply the lack of properly trained regular personnel. Whereas all kinds of “dregs of society” had to be employed as NCOs in the early 1920’s, the quality of training officers slowly rose towards the end of the 1920’s, claims Kolehmainen. In his experience, the scarcity of educated personnel was finally overcome in his regiment as late as in 1937. As a result of a combination of efforts to develop military training, a slow increase in the number of professionally trained officers and better educated NCOs, general enhancement of the army’s organisational structures, as well as public and political pressure, the bullying seems to have decreased and softened in the 1930’s. However, it never completely disappeared from either the practices or popular notions of military training in the interwar period.
When conscripts recalled how they reported for duty and entered military training, the formal hierarchy and the relationships between the recruits and their new superiors and teachers were often in the foreground of their stories. These superiors consisted of different groups: regular officers, regular non-commissioned officers (NCOs), conscripted probationary officers and conscripted squad leaders. Two different storylines about the attitude different military superiors took towards the conscripted soldiers can be abstracted; a “dark story” about disciplinary harshness and brutal abuses of power, and a brighter story about efficient training and well-liked and even admired superiors who were skilled and inspirational military educators. Whether they tell the dark or the brighter story – usually they do both, intertwining negative and positive anecdotes – most of the narrators studied here portrayed interwar military training as an extremely hard, tough and demanding experience. The narrators, especially those depicting military service in the 1920’s, portrayed relationships between conscripted soldiers and their superiors as strained and marked by animosity on both sides of a hierarchical chasm.
The reminiscences of Heikki Kolehmainen, born in 1897, concern a regiment in Tampere in 1919-1920 and provide most elements of the “dark story”. Kolehmainen made a professional military career after his military service, working for many years as a regular sergeant-major and advancing to officer’s rank during the Second World War. He was, moreover, already accustomed to military life when he was called up in 1919, since he had fought in the Civil War the year before. In spite of this familiarity with military life both at the time of writing down his memories in 1972–1973 and at the time of entering his military service, his memories convey a sense of appalled consternation at the loud shouting and commotion on his day of arrival for military service. “Using unexpectedly loud and bawling language [the Jäger officers] squashed us recruits, clattering and struggling in the stairs, into the large, cheerless and dreary squad-rooms.” The conscripts were woken up the next morning by a “seemingly demented corporal”, who ran screaming from room to room. As the training began, the soldiers’ superiors instituted a culture of haste. Whatever the recruits did, they were always pressed on to do it faster and told their performance was not good enough. There were incessant inspections of the dormitories and equipment, mainly intent on finding faults. The recruits’ beds and lockers were dismantled – “blown up” – almost daily by the duty officer because they allegedly were not properly made and arranged. Lectures and classes Kolehmainen remembered as tedious, “and as we usually had not learnt anything by the end of each class as it consisted of bawling”. Some of the treatment Kolehmainen and his comrades experienced at the hands of their squad leaders – it is unclear whether these were conscripted or regular NCOs – could be characterised as outright bullying. E.g. the practice of huudattaminen [~making someone shout] was often used to punish and humiliate some individual soldier. He would be ordered to climb a tree, a large rock or some other high place and shout out something in the vein of “I’m the biggest fool of this company!” The commands and instructions of the squad leaders Kolehmainen remembered as “yelling, barking, and richly larded with abuse even offensive of one’s honour, and very often with clumsily presented obscene jokes.” The squad leaders instructed the men that if a recruit mistakenly turned in the wrong direction during the profuse close-order drill exercises, the man facing him should spit in his face. A certain regular sergeant always led the so-called santsi, which were extra exercises in the evening after the ordinary daily programme, ordered as punishments for individuals or whole units. “He was famous for his harshness, an almost sadistic ruthless tormentor, whose narrow programme almost exclusively consisted of making us get down [flat on the ground] and get up again, over and over.”
Kolehmainen describes the relationships between regular officers and conscripts as distant and cold. Between the officers and men, there was “an insuperable armour-plating.” The officers never showed the men their more relaxed, personal face, only “an official face expressing contrived gravity and ambition”. When an officer faced his unit, stately and with emphasised briskness yet “without the faintest shadow of a smile”, the rank-and-file soldier “felt like assuming an attitude of a strong inferiority complex, expressed in his fearful glance and tense being”. In his memories, Kolehmainen refers to the Jäger officers’ ‘Prussian’ notions of discipline, such as emphasising the differences in rank between conscripted NCOs and the other conscripts. The corporals were not allowed to eat with the other soldiers but had to use the NCO’ dining room, yet even there they had to sit at a different table than the sergeants. Himself moving on to corporal school to be trained as a NCO in the reserve, he wondered at the principles of selection which seemed “alien and strange” to him: “the spirit in those days was that only the noisy, mouthy, yelling and inclined to bully were thought best suited as NCOs. Those who were calm, businesslike and strived for humane treatment of their subordinates, however, were considered neglectful and ineffective good-for-nothings.” In addition to all this, Kolehmainen’s contingent suffered from the food scarcity and epidemics plaguing the armed forces in the difficult years following the Civil War. No wonder that those many nights when he and his fellow conscripts were punished for one thing or another by confinement to the barracks were “mostly spent in silent melancholia”, someone perhaps singing alone, “stumps from here and there, mainly expressions of heavyheartedness”. Some of the recruits found the conditions so appalling that a group of them was seriously planning to escape from the garrison and join an expeditionary force on its way to fight the Bolsheviks in Eastern Karelia. They told their comrades, “Certainly things cannot be as miserable there as here”.
The narrative of Onni Mähönen, born 1913, who served in the Karelia Guards’ Regiment in Viipuri in 1935–1936, provides an example of a “brighter” story, almost opposite to that of Heikki Kolehmainen.
Karjalan Prikaatin Lippu / The Flag of the Karelian Guards Regiment, inaugurated by decision of the Commader in Chief of the Army on June 14th 1919, accepted by the President on 28 Ocy 1920, and in the late 1950s became the Karelia Brigade flag
Mähönen had received basic military training in the civil guards before he was called up. He underlined in his recollections that he had a very positive bias when he entered military training. Around the time of his call-up, as he recalled, there was a general spirit among conscripts that military service was “a natural part of every male citizen’s duties”. This probably in part reflects attitudes in Mähönen’s own social circles at the time, but probably also the higher acceptance of conscription and military training across the political spectrum of Finnish society in the 1930’s, as compared to the early 1920’s. Elements of military training familiar from Kolehmainen’s narrative recur in Mähönen’s memories, but are treated in an altogether different manner. Although the recruits in Mähönen’s unit were – like most interwar conscripts – awoken with a lot of racket the first morning, he thought that this was “somehow only proper”. There was quite enough time for getting oneself ready. “In general, military life broadly speaking started out just according to my expectations.” He found recruit training was easy since he already had most of the required skills. His squad leader was a “very calm and businesslike fellow who scarcely raised his voice without due cause.” There was “a lot of fuss” about how the beds were made and the lockers ordered, but according to Mähönen, “that was how discipline was built at [the regiment] in those days and I have to say that it had an effect, later on the squad rooms stayed tidy, things were in good order and every item of equipment was tightly in its own place.”
Just as Heikki Kolehmainen and Onni Mähönen remembered the roaring of superiors as one main impression of entering the military, even Onni Mähönen described his first such experience at some length. On his day of arrival, Mähönen’s company sergeant-major gave the recruits a warning speech about the dangers of the city during evening leaves: To an ordinary recruit the whole business seemed quite a bit of yelling and bullying. – During his whole sermon [the sergeant-major] walked slowly in front of the row, very close to the men, shouting at the top of his voice. – I had ended up in the front row and I must admit it felt strange in spite of all my [positive] bias [to military service], when the sergeant-major looked me straight in the eyes, at about ten centimetres distance, his shouting resounding in the whole corridor.” This was evidently behaviour unfamiliar to Mähönen from the civil guards. It disconcerted him in spite of his eagerness for soldiering. Yet in his memories he put it off as a “dramatised roughness” that was a “peculiarity” for this particular sergeant major. His other superiors were “normal”. Medical problems prevented Mähönen’s plans for NCO training. He was instead assigned to be a scribe at the regiment headquarters. There, he got on very well with the officers. ”I never heard any shouting, bawling or sneering at the headquarters.” Neither does Mähönen report any bullying or improper treatment of the conscripts during recruit training or in any other con-story. “If you duly performed your duties with a sensible attitude to military discipline, you did not have to experience anything very extraordinary in the Karelia Guards in those days”, he writes.
These very wordings can, however, be read as indications of Mähönen’s awareness that his positive experiences of military service were not shared by all conscripts. He recounts a significant incident towards the end of his military service, as he was at the military hospital for some medical examinations and talked to patients who served as soldiers in other military units. “I had got on well so far, I might say very well, life had been brisk and I had found lots of new
comrades”, Mähönen wrote. “… I guess that was the reason I thought everybody else took the same attitude to this phase of life, and because of that I was rather shocked when I found out that others were of a very different opinion.” He especially remembered a big and coarse man who burst into tears and said that he certainly had heard life in the army was miserable, but that he never had thought it could be as miserable as this.
Stressing the Toughness and Harshness
Circumstances varied between different military units, as illustrated by Heikki Kolehmainen’s and Onni Mähönen’s experiences. However, a majority of the reminiscences throughout the period emphasise the toughness and harshness of military training. The “dark stories” of military training spread in the interwar period not least through the story-telling of men who returned home after serving their time. It was evidently common that these disbanded men tried to frighten younger men who had their military training in front of them by telling them more or less truthful stories about what awaited them. Yet there were counterforces and counterstories as well, as those youngsters who were active within the civil guards movement before their military service were reassured and encouraged to expect an interesting and stimulating time as they reported for service. Entering military training seems to have had a shocking and depressing effect on many conscripts, especially during the years immediately after the Civil War when the military organisation was underfunded, understaffed and underdeveloped, and conscription and military training still strange, unfamiliar and subject to much resistance among the general public. Toivo Kantonen, who lived in a municipality with a socialist majority in 1918, recalled the psychological effect of the introduction of conscription to the “white” army as “the same as if there would now all of a sudden be a new law that everybody who has turned 65 will be killed”. Eero Tuominen recalls his departure to the call-up from a train station where people openly wept for their sons leaving for an unknown destiny. He wrote to his girlfriend two weeks later that military service felt like being a prisoner. His friend Vilho was so home-sick that he had lost all appetite, he wrote. “The off-duty hours are long and terrible here. Otherwise there is certainly so much running about that you don’t have much time to think.” Others recall how especially the
first weeks in the military felt hopelessly dreary. “I remember that I slid into a state of depression of some kind, everything somehow felt indifferent to me.”
One recurrent memory associated with entering military service throughout the period is the superiors’ loud shouting and roaring at conscripts, often insulting them. An informant who served in 1920–1921 illustrated the normal behaviour among superiors by contrasting it with his first meeting with the sergeant-major in his new unit after he finished corporal school: “I guess the most sensitive among us were silently crying for joy. He namely talked like a human being. We had the impression that the company sergeant-majors did not know human language, even if some words did sound familiar amongst all the shouting, screaming, barking and swearing.” Depictions of recruit training, the first three months of military training, dominate the reminiscences. This was evidently the toughest part of military service in many units, during which the superiors tried to socialise the new recruits into strict military discipline. The conscripts were still unaccustomed to the new and strange world they had entered. During the first weeks of training, they were kept in complete isolation from the surrounding civilian world. In many units recruits could get an evening leave for visiting the surrounding city only after the recruit period. Even then, conscripts who lived further away were only allowed leave to visit their families once during their military service. In the 1930’s, a conscript could already hope for two or three home leaves during the year, but if one’s company officers were in the least dissatisfied with one’s conduct even these could be refused. As a collective punishment for some conscript’s misdemeanour, all leave could be suspended, and the soldiers confined to their barracks for days or weeks.
The stories about recruit training typically stress the emphasis superiors put on manifesting hierarchy. Many informants recalled that the officers made a point of keeping relationships between officers and men extremely formal and distant. Likewise, the never-ending and repeated cleaning and ordering of squad-rooms and equipment lockers, making of beds and cleaning of rifles during recruit training, usually making up the first three months of training, were highlighted elements in the memories. The “blowing up” or “blasting” of meticulously made lockers, clothing bundles and beds are described as normal practice in most units.
Recruit learning how to neatly fold clothes, army-style
This meant that the inspecting NCO swept down the equipment onto the floor in disorder because it allegedly was not in satisfactory order. According to some stories, the squad leaders or sergeant-majors sometimes even threw the bedclothes out of the barracks window. In some units this wrecking seems to have happened almost daily over longer periods of time, in others it was a method used a couple of times in the beginning of the recruit training. The actual military training during the recruit period was remembered as mainly consisting of close-order drill exercises. An informant who was called up in 1931 claimed his unit did five hours of close-order drill training daily for over a month. One man even wrote the recruit training took half of the one-year service and mostly consisted of close-order drill. Recruit training certainly was not that prolonged anywhere, but the statement is significant concerning the impressions and memories this man was left with.
Bullying
As the recruits were socialised into a particular military behaviour, considerably more brutal means than wrecking beds were used to demonstrate the superiors’ power and the soldiers’ powerlessness in the military hierarchy. The reminiscences convey the same images of widespread practices intended at scaring, bullying and humiliating the soldiers into unquestioning obedience that were expressed in critical press reports of the 1920’s and even the writings of officers who wanted to reform military education. People understand and articulate the same events differently, emphasising or playing down certain aspects, repressing some memories or believing that what they have heard or read happened to themselves. Nevertheless, as a rough estimate according to how the informants themselves appear to have appraised how they were treated, a quarter of them describe personal experiences of severe bullying by a person in superior military rank. Another third experienced some milder forms of harassment. One in ten stated that although there was no bullying in their own unit they knew that it was frequent in some neighbouring unit. Overall, two thirds of the informants claim to have experienced or observed some form of bullying. Thus, one third reported no observations of bullying by superiors. There is a tendency in the material of the accounts of bullying growing milder and less frequent towards the end of the 1920’s and throughout the 1930’s, although severe instances of bullying are still reported in the 1930’s. There is also a general shift in the memories, where regular NCOs and officers dominate the stories about harsh treatment and bullying in the early 1920’s, whereas conscripted squad leaders are pointed out as the worst tormentors of recruits in many accounts of military training in the 1930’s.
A usual form of bullying individual conscripts in the 1920’s was the so called huudattaminen [~to make someone shout] described above by Heikki Kolehmainen, where an individual soldier was humiliated by being ordered to climb a high place and cry something. Valtteri Aaltonen, who served in 1923, wrote in his memories that conscripts were made to shout out sentences about themselves such as: “Recruit N.N. is a useless man for the Finnish Army”; “Recruit N.N. has got sawdust, eggshells and sour milk in his head and they are all mixed up too”; or “Recruit N.N.’s sister has calving fever”. Jorma Kiiski, who did his military service that same year, remembered how his squad leader forced “one of the weakest boys” to climb a pine tree. The soldier could not manage climbing higher than a couple of metres. The squad leader stood screaming under him, holding his bayonet to the soldier’s behind and the soldier was crying with shame and fear. “There was some kind of bullying going on every day”, continued Kiiski. Kustaa Liikkanen (born 1902) was punished by a sergeant inspecting the lockers who found some breadcrumbs in his drinking cup and thought his blanket was in bad condition. The sergeant hit Liikkanen over the head with the blanket, causing it to split and form a kind of poncho over his shoulders. In this gear, he was ordered, “to take the cup between my teeth and jump squat out into the [barracks] corridor, shouting loudly that I had shat in the cup”. This form of bullying, aimed at humiliating individuals, however, seems to have decreased towards the end of the 1920’s and was not exercised at least by regular NCOs or officers in the 1930’s. More often, the conscripts were bullied as a collective. In many units there was a practice of punishing the conscripts for even the smallest infringements, oftentimes even alleged breaches of regulations, with socalled santsi, extra duty. Santsi usually consisted in physically extreme close-order drill, with an emphasis on the heavy and dirty practice of instantly hitting the ground at the command, lie headlong pressed to the ground and then get up again, repeated over and over for up to an hour, sometimes in muddy fields, sleet or water puddles. To the soldier’s mind, it was often more a question of harassment and bullying than just punishments or adequate military training. For example, Toivo Verronen who served in 1936–1937 remembered a lieutenant who ordered the soldiers to first take off their blouses and then lie prone in a forest terrain covered by dry reindeer moss – a very prickly bed. Heikki Kolehmainen recalled that his unit at NCO school was once made to crawl 150 metres through sleet mixed with horse manure. Another usual form for santsi was extra marches with a heavy load, sometimes in the middle of the night or ‘spiced’ with hitting the ground and getting up – with the heavy load – every now and then.
Drill - Recruits form up in Column of Threes
A milder yet in some units very frequent form of harassment was making the soldiers crawl around the floor of their squad rooms, going beneath the bunk beds, or sometimes under every second bed and over every second. More imaginative and even theatrical forms of santsi were also well remembered by some narrators. Eino Sallila (born 1901) served in Kouvola in 1920–1921 and according to his memories the recruits were heavily bullied in his unit. He wrote at some length about a certain sergeant-major who was known for his ironical bullying style. Sallila described how this sergeantmajor enjoyed himself, “like a cat playing with a mouse”, at the beginning of an “extra exercise” for a group of conscripts to be punished for keeping their hair too long or having dirty finger-nails. He strode up in front of our group, stepping like a cock, and roared (…) “we will spend a little stimulating and educative time here outdoors, after which you can compare how much more gorgeous you [with long hair] are in comparison to those who followed the regulations.” (…) By now the sergeant-major was already energised and stepped up to the boy standing first in line and two inches from his nose he roared: “Now you tell me the reason why this group is standing in front of me.” This boy drew his lungs full of air and roared in the same style: “Because we had shitty finger-nails.” Thus the staging was in order and the performance itself could begin.
There was a command: “Long-haired and shitty-nailed, attention...” The soldiers were commanded to hit the ground and get up several times and to crawl forward on the ground while holding on with both hand to their rifles held behind their necks. Sallila recalled that when a fat boy did not keep up and lifted his seat a bit off the ground the sergeant-major came rushing and pushed him down with his boot: “when you lift your bottom like that, the enemy will notice you and shoot so many holes in your ass that we will drown in shit. – Don’t you even know that we are practicing for war –“. After these ”exercises” had continued for an hour, the group was commanded to run up and down a steep hill, all the time ordered to hit the ground and get up. Sallila commented: This devilish form of torture is perhaps not possible to completely explain in words. (…) As we afterwards were standing in line in front of our barracks and that ”dear mother” of ours was again striding in front of us looking rather satisfied, our group certainly did not look much like a valiant contingent of soldiers. (…) Every member in our bodies and every piece of clothing we had on were so wet that our tongues were the driest parts of us. It seems a miracle that nobody got seriously hurt in this operation. In most cases, the soldiers did not dare lodge a complaint against abusive superiors. “t was unusual that anybody complained, and if he did he would not do it twice, you got under pressure for that.” In many cases it was also impossible to report abusive superiors because no formal breach of regulations had been made. It was often impossible to make a sharp distinction between relevant training for warfare, punishments in accordance with regulations, and harassments.
Nigel’s Note: doesn’t sound like “bullying” to me. In the New Zealand Army in the late 1970’s, our Training NCO’s were complete bastards (but professional bastards, let it be said – they always explained why they were inflicting pain and punishment on us….) compared to these guys, who sound pretty mild on the whole. We had to crawl through mud-filled ditches complete with the odd dead sheep carcass (oooooold rotten sheep carcasses), do punishment parades pretty much every evening, push-ups for the last guys out of the mess after meals, last guys on the runs got “encouraged”with a boot to the bum, squad punishments (one guy fucked up, you all caught it, almost every time), make a mistake on the rifle range and it was run to the top of the nearest hill, repeat the mistake and it was do it again with your pack on, a third time and they added rocks to your pack. We used to do pushups and our PT NCO’s would walk across our backs – and God help you if you couldn’t hold up the weight, if anybody in the squad screwed up badly enough to get the whole squad in deep shit they usually got a thumping after lights out – the NCO’s just ignored it unless it got a bit out of hand – unit self-discipline was what it was called. Close-order drill – well, we had that almost every day for the first six weeks until we had it down to a fine art – but again, we also had a fairly detailed explanation as to why and what it was all about. I guess the chief difference with us was it was voluntary (no conscription) and if you wanted to quit, all it took was 24 hours notice – and if you quit, you were separated from your Platoon as soon as you opened your mouth – for all intents and purposes you were gone – so we were all very self-motivated and we worked to motivate each other as well.
So all the above sounds pretty typical, the difference being that the conscripts didn’t understand what was being done to them or why. To them, it seemed like needless harassment – and generally, the difference between a conscript army and a volunteer army is conscripts don’t need to be explained to, they’re just told because they ain’t going nowhere and they have no choice. A volunteer army has a choice and the volunteer needs to understand what’s being done to them and why to help them with their self-motivation. There’s a significant psychological difference, with volunteers generally having a much more positive approach – they “want” to be there.
Well-liked and admired Superiors
In spite of the many accounts of harshness, bullying and abuses, it must be underlined that many men throughout the period and especially in the 1930’s shared Onni Mähönen’s positive experiences, claiming that the overall relationships between superiors and soldiers in their own unit were quite good. Almost everyone who participated in the 1972–1973 collection remembered individual superiors who were well-liked and even admired by the men. In the descriptions of these popular officers, what was emphasized is not as much their friendliness as their calm, businesslike, matter-of-fact and civil manner, as well as their fairness. In most cases, it was also underlined how well-liked officers combined justness and correctness with a markedly competent, professional and highly demanding attitude to the men’s military training. All these qualities, however, were appreciated not least in contrast to other, not so calm superiors. Jorma Kiiski (b. 1903) described the “reassuring” feeling he had when he met his new lieutenant at NCO school. Instead of giving Kiiski a scolding for the condition of his rifle, this lieutenant declared that his rifle was hopelessly worn out. Kiiski did not forget to mention in his memories that the lieutenant was even smiling as he said this – evidently a remarkable circumstance. “During the whole six months in [NCO] school I could witness how this lieutenant really was a veritable humane gentleman who did not want to show how difficult he could make his subordinates’ lives.” When Urpo Sallanko (b. 1908) was sent to the company commander for a telling-off because he had resisted his squadleaders demands for demonstrative submissiveness, he was impressed by the calmness, “almost friendliness” of the captain. This officer said to him, “I like men who have character, and we are not trying to break it but educate it. But do you understand that here you must also learn to obey?” He was told to obey his superiors, but come to see the captain in person if he has anything to complain about and was let off with a very light punishment. “A very happy boy left [the captain’s] office. I did not mind the punishment, but I had expected brawling and bullying and now he spoke to me like a father to his son or like man to man. That was why I was so relieved.”
Just as in Sallanko’s case, the company officers – lieutenants and captains – and higher-ranking officers were often remembered as benevolent although distant paternal figures who protected the conscripts from bullying by lower-ranking superiors. The same Eino Sallila, who reported on severe bullying, cherished the memory of how the battalion commander once intervened as their Jäger sergeant major was keeping “extra exercises” for his unit on a Sunday, which was prohibited. “The sharp voice of the commander interrupted the sergeant-major’s explanations: ‘Take these men to their barracks immediately. Finland’s army does not need Prussian any more than Russian teachings of this kind, is that clear.’ The [estimation] of this captain then rose sharply among the men in the garrison, but rumour said that among his fellow officers it sank.” Among the men who had served in the 1920’s, several informants stated that the reason why there were no abuses in their unit was that the company commander did not tolerate it. This implies that these men considered bullying such a normal state in the armed forces at the time of their military service that its absence required a positive explanation. Albert Lahti (b. 1907) wrote that there was no real bullying in his company; “We had been blessed with regular NCOs better than average”. On the other hand, since the soldiers thought that committed and competent officers could stop the bullying, they might have understood its occurrence as evidence of the company officers’ silent approval, indifference or sheer incompetence. Even in some memories of military training that do not include accounts of inappropriate treatment, the military culture of excessive harshness and bullying is thus present as a shadow or potential that must be negated.
Understandings of disciplinary practices
Brutal treatment of soldiers certainly was no peculiarity to the Finnish Army. It is a familiar picture of life in modern Western armies. Within social research, it has often been interpreted in functionalistic terms. The objective is to initially break down the recruit, strip him of his dignity, individuality and previous identities, in order to subsequently rebuild him as an efficient soldier, identifying only with his military unit and combat group. His dignity is given back to him only when he has disciplined himself to become a well-oiled part of the fighting machine, desensitized to and prepared to perform military violence. Ethnologist Pekka Leimu, who has analysed the 1972–1973 collection for a study on hazing among the conscripts (1985), takes the view that harsh methods were necessary to discipline recalcitrant conscripts in the wake of the Civil War 1918. He interprets for example the practice of huudattaminen as a method for breaking down a conscript’s resistance by making him ridiculous in front of the other soldiers. Among the testimonies of men who themselves experienced interwar military training, we find a range of different understandings of the reasons behind the disciplinary practices in use. Most of them, however, differ markedly from the functionalist interpretation of brutality and bullying as a rational method for disciplining and socialising recruits into soldierhood. They rather looked to the individual psychology of the bullies for the reasons behind abusive practices.
Pentti Haanpää: Soldiers and Officers corrupting each other
Pentti Haanpää was obviously intrigued by the question of why the relationships between soldiers and officers often became so hostile. This particular question was a key theme in his collection of short stories about army life, where he tried out a range of different possible answers through the medium of fiction. Haanpää did not look for answers in any rational military curriculum, but in the contradictions and tensions between the psyche and character of Finnish men on the one hand and the military system on the other. He can actually be read as pointing to a contradiction between the Finnish character and military subordination as an underlying cause for the bullying of conscripts. In spite of largely writing about military life from the perspective of the conscripts, uneducated farmhands and forestry workers from Eastern and Northern Finland, Haanpää did not straightforwardly blame the officers for the conflict-ridden misery of military life that he portrayed. Rather, his stories told about a military world where the officers and soldiers harassed and corrupted each other in a vicious circle.
The conscripts Haanpää portrayed found peacetime military service meaningless and unproductive. In the light of modern historical research, one interpretation of his army stories is that the exaggerated emphasis on close-order drill and indoor duties in recruit training ran contrary to two central traits in contemporary agrarian norms. Firstly, the value put on personal autonomy – not bowing one’s head to any other man – preferably based on freeholdership, but also on being a skilled and esteemed workman. Secondly, the importance of a man being in useful, productive labour to support himself and his family. Haanpää further places the conscripts he portrays within a traditional image of the Finnish peasants and workers as obstinate, even hostile, towards authorities and officials. Against their officers, these conscripts “harboured all the bitterness, suspicion and animosity of the Finnish character towards one they have to obey”, he writes. If there is not a war to fight, any work that was done was for some distant, obscure, hypothetic, hardly understandable reasons.” The resulting recalcitrance and hostility towards superiors annoy and enrage the officers of Haanpää’s stories, provoking them to use ever more abusive means to force the soldiers into submissiveness. The forms of bullying Haanpää mentions are similar to the ones described in the 1972–1973 collection; shouting, endless close-order drill exercises used as a punishment or to break the soldiers’ resistance, the practice of huudattaminen or ‘make-them-shout’, ordering the soldiers to crawl around their squad-rooms beneath their bunk beds, etc.
Haanpää was both understanding and caustic about the idealism of nationalist officers. In the opening story of Fields and Barracks, ‘The German Jäger’ (Saksan Jääkäri), Haanpää portrayed a Jäger officer who fought in the world war, the Liberation War, the Estonian War of Independence and the Heimosodat (tribal wars) in Eastern Karelia, ending up as a training officer in the Finnish Army. He is born a tenant farmer’s son, but still allowed to attend elementary school. He reads “more books than is healthy for somebody bound to become a workman”. He meditates upon Runeberg’s and Topelius’s images of the Finnish people, “beautified by the sheen of poetry” and is infatuated with ideas about “ fitness, justice, valour, fatherland”. Arriving at the training camp of the Prussian army during the Great War, Haanpää’s Jäger protagonist feels “betrayed” and “depressed”. The barracks and training fields are grey and dull and there is no sign of the military grandness he had expected. “He felt that here one should rather take on the humility of a whipped dog.” Haanpää’s biographer Vesa Karonen suggests Haanpää was in part describing himself as a young man and his own dismay at the disillusioning contact with the bleak realities of military life. The idealism of this Jäger sergeant-major is gradually eroded by his war experiences. It receives a final blow from the reluctance and unyieldingness of Finnish conscripts in peacetime military service. These conscripts, as depicted by Haanpää: “The Jäger sergeant-major becomes increasingly depressed by seeing the conscripts’ “sleepy, grumpy and suffering” faces each morning. The only thing they are enthusiastic about is inventing schemes to avoid and escape their duties and exercises. They despise their officers, thinking that someone who serves for money in the armed forces is “either too lazy or otherwise unskilled” to find employment in civilian society. The task given the officers, to educate patriotism in the soldiers and make them trust and love their officers, proves utterly impossible in the face of the conscripts’ averseness. “Swearing and roaring at them was what you had to do, otherwise they would not move an inch.” Their obstinacy and scornfulness make the sergeant-major, a thoughtful and idealistic patriot, enraged. “He felt a desire to make these men run until they dropped dead, order them up a tree and down headlong into a snowdrift, to do something really evil, to really humiliate them, to make them understand how great power a man of one golden ribbon had in this Republic.”
The officers’ frustration with obstinate soldiers is the main explanation offered by Haanpää for the bullying of subordinates, yet he tried out others as well. One story in Fields and Barracks is a sketch of a sergeant who in his youth has been ridiculed for his vanity and ambitions by the people in his village, making him embittered and hateful towards all human beings. He finds his place in life as a training NCO in the army. “Now he was in a position that could not be better, now he could enjoy the sweetness of revenge, let out the endless hate and bitterness he felt towards all human flesh and blood.” Haanpää describes how the sergeant enjoys making dozens of men move at his order, lie prone on the ground and crawl, how he takes pleasure in singling out a soldier to playfully torment him, how he revels in seeing robust men in front of him frothing with rage yet unable to utter a word of protest. In another story, the main character is a middle-aged captain who has deteriorated from being a light-hearted, plucky and ambitious young officer, “happy and agile like a kitten”, into a jaded and embittered drunk, “his soul like a mistreated worn-out draught animal”. What caused him to change? Who knows, the voice of the narrator tells us; perhaps the burden of life, the greyness and monotony of life in a small garrison town. Then came the alcohol, “poisoning his blood and heart”, changing his character and shattering any hopes of further advancement. Constantly ill-humoured and hung-over in duty, he takes it out on his conscripts, his only satisfaction in life being the knowledge that his men fear and hate him.
In the final analysis, Haanpää seems to be blaming the military system more than these individual officers’ weaknesses of character. The officers he depicts are depressed by having to train ever new droves of recruits who play as stupid as they can and must be taught the most basic things by force. These officers all seem plagued by the same weariness, drinking most nights and arriving at the company in the morning in a bad mood. Haanpää seems to condemn the whole concept of professional, full-time training officers that was one of the core principles of the cadre army system in its Prussian and Russian forms; “few people could find joy and harmony to last a lifetime in teaching fast and efficient ways of killing”. In Haanpää’s images of soldiering, not only the conscripts but the officers themselves suffer terribly from the effects of this unsound profession.
Mika Waltari: taking the “right” attitude
Mika Waltari’s literary depiction of his military service presents a very different interpretation of the army discipline. He had a decidedly positive bias to military service and described his mood upon reporting for duty as the anticipation, both anxious and excited, of a great adventure. He had grown tired of himself and his everyday life, he wrote, he felt that it was “heavy to lead one’s own life that still has not found a direction”. One day he decided not to wait for his respite from military service to end, but headed for the call-up office. Reporting for duty, he sensed that he was leaving “everything old, ordinary and tiresome” behind and journeying into a completely new and unknown world. He was looking forward to “not having to think and worry” for himself, only follow orders. “I have only one ambition; that I would be able to take the right attitude, to submit myself and obey. Adjust to a new sphere of life, cope where others do […]”. Waltari was not disappointed and disillusioned by the reality of military life the way Haanpää evidently was. This probably had something to do with the differences between the social settings in which they served. Because of his educational level, Waltari was immediately upon arrival singled out for leadership training and sent to the NCO School summer camp in Parola in Southern Finland. There, he joined a group mainly consisting of educated youngsters from middle class families in the capital Helsinki. Most of them had the ambition of being picked out for reserve officer training and therefore strove to outperform each other, whatever challenges their superiors presented them with. They thought of themselves as an elite among the conscripted citizen-soldiers and were evidently to some extent treated as such by their superiors. Waltari does not describe having witnessed or experienced any real bullying or abuses. He certainly describes the less enjoyable sides of the conscripts’ life in detail – the gloominess and weariness of duty, the extreme physical strain and exhaustion of marching exercises, the tiresome meticulousness of equipment maintenance and the strictness of discipline. For example, he describes the draconian rifle-inspections, where nothing seems to be good enough for the inspecting probationary officers who more or less arbitrarily order the tired conscripts to re-polish scrupulously cleaned rifles. “I get to understand that it is impossible to ever get the rifle cleaned. That the inspector can always and in every case reject each and every rifle if that amuses him. […] We do not even want to understand. We just think the whole business is especially invented to torment us and take revenge upon us.”
Yet in the end, Waltari does not seem to be truly critical of anything in the military training system. Although the conscripts’ life feels arduous at times, there is no malevolence anywhere causing their hardships, only necessary training and preparation for war. Illustrative of his attitude is his comment the first time he experiences what is known in the military colloquial language as “licking the ground”, being ordered repeatedly to hit the ground flat during an exercise because the training officer is displeased with the conscripts’ performance. “It was not gruelling at all, rather a refreshing incident.” One evening, after a hard day of military exercises, Waltari’s squad is taken for an “extra singing lesson” in the form of a forced march at high speed. They are being punished for not having learnt the regiment’s marching song well enough. This is a typical form of disciplinary action, an experience that somebody else might have described as bullying, but which Waltari regards as a justified correction. Waltari has hurt his heel on a tough marching exercise two days before and suffers increasing pain during the march. Eventually he is dizzy with shooting pain and cannot keep up with the troop. The probationary officer leading the exercise gives him permission to stay behind, “he knows that my foot has been sore, he is sorry for me.” Although this superior thus has knowingly caused him immense
pain, Waltari is not angry with the officer but with himself. He sheds tears of shame as he is forced to fall behind. The humiliation for him is not in being subordinated and maltreated, but in not being able to take it like a man, to endure anything the others do, shrugging it off afterwards with a laugh.
In connection with this same “singing lesson” Waltari actually describes how he and his comrades articulate the experience afterwards, in effect defusing the pain and humiliation suffered. During the march, the conscripts “curse with black hearts, we hate the marching song, we hate the whole institution, the camp, our clothes, the road.” Yet a few weeks later, Waltari writes, “we will remember this march as one of the funniest memories of this whole summer. Because of this, we come to admire and love the song. It is the marching song of our regiment, mighty and wonderful. Its familiar tune bitter-sweetly thrills the heart and gives us a tremendous sense of duty, love and strength to endure all hardships.” He thus ascribes another meaning to what happened, turning a loathsome and perhaps humiliating experience into a positive experience, formative of his identity as a member of this particular group of conscripts who shared the experience. Throughout, Waltari portrays his superiors as good-hearted men who behind their strict official facade deeply care for their soldiers. The severe sergeant-major at summer camp is the conscripts’ “terror and delight” and his shouting can be heard from the company office all day long – yet the conscripts are secretly proud of him and fear him and mock him “like schoolboys would a teacher”. They tell the most fanciful horror stories about him, although in reality, according to Waltari, the sergeant-major is a kind and dutiful man. He tries to keep everything running and is simply overworked. “No wonder if he is irritated and tyrannises us. Actually [he] is sometimes very friendly and tries to arrange everything for our best.” The sergeant-major at reserve officer school, where Waltari ends up after his recruit training, is also both feared and well-liked. “His command of language is magnificent and he treats us like mischievous puppies that he tries to bring up to decent living, sometimes with lenience, sometimes with strictness.” Where Haanpää used the metaphor of a whipped dog for conscripted soldiering, Waltari thus uses the image of untamed puppies that are educated with loving stringency.
There is one passage where Waltari as a recruit already seems half aware of the preferential treatment he and his comrades are getting, as he is talking to a conscript from another unit. “They have an awfully harsh recruit training. They are mainly completely ordinary ground level catfish [recruits].” In general, however, he makes an effort to assure the reader that most of the horror stories told about military training are simply outrageously exaggerated. Waltari repeatedly describes how the soldiers take pleasure in boasting about the toughness of their training. When Waltari and his comrades are commanded to peel potatoes for the whole regiment together with soldiers from another unit, they entertain each other by competing in who can tell the wildest stories about tyrannical officers and physically extreme exercises, taking pride in having a harder training, being more “under the steamroller”, than the soldiers of any other unit. “Is it any wonder that you hear the most remarkable stories about the army?” Waltari asks.
The 1972–1973 memories: Contempt for the bullies
Most of the elderly men writing down their memories of military service in the early 1970’s did not reflect or comment as explicitly as the two young authors Haanpää and Waltari on the reasons behind the sometimes harsh treatment of soldiers in their writings. Perhaps they regarded it as a given aspect of military life in the period; perhaps they felt that the time for criticising or defending these practices had long passed and that it was more significant to their own narrative that they had been through it and coped with it. The terminology used in the memories nevertheless gives some clues. One frame of interpretation was the notion of a ‘Prussian discipline’ brought to Finland by the Jägers. Here, the incomprehensible elements of military training – the harshness, the yelling, the theatrical emphasis on hierarchy, saluting and geometrically precise formations – are made understandable and at the same time usually rejected as “foreign” customs. The concept of “Prussian discipline” externalizes elements of military culture experienced as absurd, as something that could not have been invented within Finnish culture, that was unsuited to the Finnish man’s character and that was in time replaced by an emerging domestic military culture that was both more humane and better suited to local circumstances. This nationalistically coloured interpretation thus includes a notion of Finnish conscripts as somehow more independent and unyielding than their German counterparts.
Three other colloquial terms from interwar military jargon were also used to describe harsh disciplinary treatment; simputus (‘bullheading’) that originally referred to older pupils at the cadet school hazing younger arrivals, but soon spread into the vernacular, designating a bullying based on the power to command within the military hierarchy as well; höykytys, which translates as ‘hammering’ or ‘torment’; and santsi, literally referring to an extra portion of food, which meant extra duty as a punishment. Calling a disciplinary practice simputus was a clear marker that it was considered mere harassment. Although höykytys or santsi in principle could refer to punishments in accordance with regulations, corrections for real neglectfulness or minor misdemeanours, these terms in the stories were also commonly used in association with representations of unjust collective punishments for insignificant lapses of individuals or even for fabricated accusations. According to the reminiscences, the conscripts did not in general regard these practices as rational instruments of military training but as harassment. Urpo Sallanko, serving in 1929–1930 wrote, “… my nature rose up in protest against this ‘hammering’. I thought it had nothing to do with training for defending the fatherland.” The narrators tend to understand bullying, especially practices they designated as simputus, in terms of the individual psychology of certain superiors. Eino Sallila commented on one abusive sergeant, “Finland was certainly short of men in those days, as such sadists had to be tolerated in the army for years on end.”
The young soldiers depicted in their recollections discarded the bullies as men lacking self-restraint who are only taking out their personal problems and aggressions on the soldiers. The men remembering bullying offered explanations such as the low educational and mental level of NCOs in the 1920’s;92 the war traumas of the Jäger officers; the bullies having marital problems or simply a hang-over; an officers’ bitterness over his degradation due to alcoholism; the immaturity of a very young squad leader who had volunteered for service; the envy of a bullying sergeant-major from a proletarian background towards conscripts from higher social strata; and the sadistic or abnormal personal character of the bullying officers. Contempt for the bullies and an attempt to construct them as weaklings in spite of their formal power over other men runs through the descriptions of bullying. The conscripted NCOs inclination to bully recruits was explained as their being intoxicated with power and unable to manage the position they had been assigned. Valtteri Aaltonen (b. 1903) wrote, “For these ”gentlemen” their position as superior and in authority had gone so badly to their head that they, or most of them, had to use this ”position” for making life more difficult for us recruits. The officers were somewhat more bearable. They of course had received more academic education than the NCOs whose education at the best only amounted to elementary school.”
In his memories, Heikki Kolehmainen referred to corporals who took their rank too seriously as ‘cockerels’. Kustaa Liikkanen, who served as a conscript in the Turku garrison in 1922-23, derided the lack of self-restraint and natural leadership qualities in the company’s sergeant-major in his memories, by admiringly describing a certain corporal Kamonen as a very talented military educator: His behaviour and commanding was on quite another level than [the sergeant-major’s]. Kamonen’s style of command was crisp, but at the same time it was demanding, calm but very resolute. He never got over-excited. In other words, he did not jump out of his skin. Never spraying spit in the eyes of those he was commanding. His eyes never bulged as much as an inch out of his head. Thus, self-confidence above all. In other words, according to Virtanen, officers who had to bawl at the soldiers or bully them in order to get something done were not using a disciplinary technique, but were simply revealing themselves as men with neither self-confidence nor self-control and therefore unsuited as leaders of other men. Heikki Kolehmainen, who in the 1970’s could comment upon the interwar development from the perspective of a long professional military career, estimated that one main reason for the bullying and maltreatment of conscripts in the 1920’s was simply the lack of properly trained regular personnel. Whereas all kinds of “dregs of society” had to be employed as NCOs in the early 1920’s, the quality of training officers slowly rose towards the end of the 1920’s, claims Kolehmainen. In his experience, the scarcity of educated personnel was finally overcome in his regiment as late as in 1937. As a result of a combination of efforts to develop military training, a slow increase in the number of professionally trained officers and better educated NCOs, general enhancement of the army’s organisational structures, as well as public and political pressure, the bullying seems to have decreased and softened in the 1930’s. However, it never completely disappeared from either the practices or popular notions of military training in the interwar period.
ex Ngāti Tumatauenga ("Tribe of the Maori War God") aka the New Zealand Army
Conscript Training in the 1920's - Part 4
Functionalism versus Meaning in an understanding of Bullying
To some extent, sociological interpretations of military bullying as ‘breaking down and re-building’ the soldier can be applied to the Finnish interwar case. Recruit training, with its emphasis on close-order drill and indoor duties, was evidently aimed at drilling the soldiers into instinctive, unquestioning and instantaneous obedience. According to Juha Mälkki, Finnish military thinking in the 1920’s understood military discipline as the exact and mechanical fulfilment of given orders. Inspections by high ranking officers focused on inspecting the soldiers marching past in close-order and the neatness of garrisons and camps. The outer appearance of the troops was taken as evidence of how disciplined they were, which in turn was understood as a direct indicator of how well they would perform in combat, i.e. how well they would execute given orders. However, the incessant inspections, where nothing was ever good enough, perfectly made beds were “blasted” and laboriously cleaned rifles “burnt”, also seem to have been intended to instil the soldiers with a sense that not even their utmost efforts were ever enough to fulfil military requirements. Not only should the soldiers feel that they were constantly supervised and that even the slightest infringements of regulations – a lump of sugar in the drinking cup, the spoon lying in the wrong direction – would be detected and punished by their superiors. They should also feel they were good-for-nothings who only by subjecting themselves to thorough and prolonged training by their superiors might one day reach the status of real soldiers.
In the Finnish case, there does not seem to have been any centrally controlled system or articulated plan behind this particular way of socializing the conscripts into a specific military behaviour and attitude, nor behind its extreme forms, the bullying by superiors. Rather, abuses and bullying occurred where superior officers turned a blind eye, and was easily weeded out where commanding officers wanted to stop it. The hierarchical relationships therefore varied from company to company. The rather poorly organised armed forces of the early 1920’s had to manage with NCOs and training officers without proper military education. There was a lack in the supervision of how conscripts were treated. Many officers certainly also seem to have harboured a mindset, perhaps shaped by old European military traditions, according to which scaring, humiliating and bullying the soldiers into fearful obedience was a natural and necessary part of shaping a civilian into a soldier. In addition to the military imperative of producing obedient and efficient soldiers, many officers embraced the political project of rebuilding the conscript into “a citizen conscious of his patriotic duties”. The reminiscences do not, however, reveal much of how this was undertaken, other than by draconian discipline. The ‘enlightenment lectures’ given by the military priests are hardly mentioned. A few men bring up that officers delivered patriotic speeches on festive occasions such as when the soldiers gave their oath of allegiance or were disbanded. Traces of the political re-education project mainly become visible in recollections of the ban on socialist newspapers and other leftist publications in the garrison areas, permanently reminding conscripts from a “red” background that their citizenship was seen as questionable.
Certain cafés and restaurants in the garrison towns that were associated with the workers’ movement were also out of bounds for conscripts on evening leaves. Some informants write about how conscripts were anxious to conceal their family association with the red rebellion or the workers’ movement from the officers in fear of harassment. Many informants mention that certain conscripts’ advancement to NCO or officer training was blocked because of their or their families’ association with the political left – a view confirmed by recent historical research. Some of the officers might very well have had rational and articulate ideas about the functionality of harsh and humiliating methods. However, as described above, many Finnish military educationalists in the 1920’s already viewed this traditional military pedagogy as counter-productive to the needs of a national Finnish army whose effectiveness in combat had to be based on patriotic motivation and not on numbers or ‘machine-like obedience’. Neither did the men who personally experienced interwar military training later choose to present the bullying as somehow productive of anything positive, be it discipline, group cohesion, or a new military identity.
Physical Training in Military Service
Conscription dislocated young men from family and working life into garrisons and training fields, packed them into dormitories of 20 to 50 men, robbed them of personal privacy, infringed on their integrity, and demanded they performed extreme physical tasks. It toughened men through gymnastics, drill, sports and field exercises. It trained men into particular postures and ways of moving as well as an attitude marked by a recklessness towards vulnerability. Yet physical vulnerability did put limits to what the men could be put through. And conscripts faked or inflicted illness and injuries upon themselves to evade training.
Yrjö Norta (b Turku 1904, d Helsinki 1988, Finnish filmmaker)recording soldiers doing Drill for a promotional film (1927)
Physical Inspection and Assessment
The first concrete contact with conscription and military service for a young man was actually the call-up inspection. The colloquial term often used in Finnish for the call-up, syyni, refers to viewing or gazing – to the conscript being seen and inspected by the call-up board. As most men remembered the call-up, the youngsters had to undress in the presence of the others called up and step up stark naked in front of the examination board. Juha Mälkki characterises this practice as part of the “inspection mentality” of the era. It was evidently an embarrassing or at least peculiar experience for many conscripts, since it often needed to be treated with humour in narration, giving rise to a large number of anecdotes. One of these stories demonstrates how joking was used at the call-up itself as a means of defusing the tense situation of scores of young naked men being inspected by older men behind a table. Albert Lahti remembered that a young man at his callup tried to cover his genitals with his hands as he stepped up on the scales to be weighed. A local district court judge corrected him tongue-in-cheek: “Come, come, young man, don't cover anything and don’t lessen the load. Step down and take your hands off your balls and then step up on the scales once more so we can see your real weight. – You don’t get away as a crown wreck that shamelessly!” The boy did as he was told and steps back upon the scales with his hands at the sides and is greeted by the judge: “All right, what did I tell you, four kilogrammes more weight straight away as you don’t support those balls”. Laughter rolled around the room where a ”court room atmosphere” had reigned the moment before. The joke was on the boy on the scales – according to the end of the story he afterwards asked his comrades in round-eyed wonder whether his balls could really be that heavy. For that, he got the nickname ”Lead Balls”.
At the call-up, conscripts were sorted into those fit and those unfit for military service. As such, there was nothing very particular about the criteria applied. In the military, just as in the civil sphere, it was considered superior for a man to be strong, not weak, tall rather than short, have good eyesight and hearing, well-shaped limbs and no serious or chronic diseases. Yet hardly anywhere else at this time was such a systematic examination and comparison of conscripts’s made, accompanied by a categorical sorting strongly associated with masculine pride or shame over one’s own body. The physical examination at the call-up often stands out in the memories of military service and appears to have left behind strong images in memory. Even if few men probably were looking forward to their military service, being categorised as fit for service was still a matter of honour, whereas being exempted on the grounds of being physically unfit carried a strong stigma. The colloquial term for those discarded, ruununraakki, literally translates as “crown wreck”, somebody whose body was such a wreck that it was not good enough for the crown, for serving the country as a soldier. According to many informants, the ‘crown wrecks’ were shown contempt in the interwar years, also by young women who would not accept their courtships. Historian Kenneth Lundin has noted that in 1930’s feature films set in the conscript army, the ‘crown wrecks’ were always depicted as lazy, fat malingerers. Urpo Sallanko (b. 1908) recounted in his memories that he was very nervous at the call-up because he was of small stature. Both his older brothers had been categorised as ’crown wrecks’ and discarded. Hearing about his brothers, a neighbour woman had told the other women in his home village that ”she would be ashamed to give birth to kids who are not good enough to be men of war. This naturally reached my mothers ears,” Urpo wrote, “and made her weep”. Lauri Mattila’s friend Janne was sent home “to eat more porridge” because of his weak constitution and “was so ashamed of his fate that he never told anyone about what happened to him at the call-up”.
This notion of ’crown wrecks’ seems to have been a tradition from the days of the ’old’ Finnish conscript army in the 1880’s and 1890’s. At that time, roughly one tenth of each age cohort was called up for active service and about a third for a brief reserve training. The military authorities could thus be very selective at the call-up examinations, only choosing the physically “best” developed for the drawing of lots that determined who had to do three years of active service and who was put in the reserve. According to Heikki Kolehmainen (b. 1897), this tradition was alive and well in the countryside when he entered service in 1919. “You would often hear old men tell about the drawing of lots, about their service in the reserve or the active forces, and like a red thread through those conversations ran a positive, even boastful attitude of having been classed fit for conscription in those days. We [youngsters] accordingly thought of those who had served for three years as real he-men, of those who had served in the reserve as men, and of the crown wrecks as useless cripples.” Nevertheless, the ’crown wrecks’ were a group of considerable size. In the days of the “old” conscript army, at the end of the nineteenth century, around half of each age cohort was exempted.
Being in higher education or being a sole provider were valid grounds for exemption, but a weak physique was the most usual reason. In the 1920’s, about one third of each male age class never entered service on these grounds, and towards the end of the 1930’s roughly one man in six was still discarded. Claims that politically “untrustworthy” men would have been rejected under the guise of medical reasons have, however, been convincingly refuted by historical research. Historian Juha Mälkki claims that the number of men who received military training precisely met the manpower needs of the planned wartime army organisation and that the number discarded would thus have been governed by operative considerations in interwar Finland. Nevertheless, the high rejection rates caused public concern over the state of public health. Somewhat surprisingly, these numbers were not kept secret, but discussed openly in the press. Being a “crown wreck” was thus not an existence on the margin of society, but rather usual. Although being fit for service was probably associated with toughness by most contemporaries, the stigmatisation of being discarded might be exaggerated in both the collected reminiscences and interwar popular culture.
Toughening and Hardening the Conscripts
The army stories emphasise the toughness and hardships of military service, but also depict a military culture where the individual soldier was trained to physically merge with his unit and become indifferent to nakedness, pains or vulnerabilities. He became part of a collective. The initial physical inspection at the call-up can be interpreted as a stripping of the youngsters’ old, civilian identities, as a symbolic initiation that was repeated and completed months later, when the recruit arrived at his garrison and had to hand in his civilian clothes and don the uniform clothing of the army. In the light of the reminiscences, it seems that stripping naked was rather an introduction to a military culture where there should be nothing private about one’s body. Once the recruits entered service they had virtually no privacy. They spent their days and nights in a group of other men; sleeping, washing, and easing nature in full visibility of a score of other youngsters. The scarcity of toilets, causing long queues, and going to the latrine at camp in close formation with one’s whole unit stand out strongly in some men’s memories. Even more colourful are descriptions of the so-called “willie inspection” as the men stood in naked in line to be very intrusively inspected for symptoms of gonorrhea and other venereal diseases. Janne Kuusinen still remembered fifty years later that some men were ashamed the first time they had to undergo this and would not take off all clothes, that some men caught a cold as they were made to stand naked for over an hour, and that one man was diagnosed with tight foreskin and sent to surgery the next day. This ruthlessness concerning the conscripts’ privacy can be understood as either sheer brutality or as a part of training intended to do away with any feeling of physical individuality. A soldier should neither be shy nor self-conscious.
Army stories display the pride men felt over having been found fit for military service at the call-up. However, in many stories conscripts were greeted as too soft and immature upon reporting for duty, as mere “raw material” or “a shapeless mass of meat” that completely lacked the strength, toughness, skills and comportment required in a soldier. At every turn, the recruits were reminded that they were not yet physically fit for war, but needed ruthless training and hardening. Their status as complete greenhorns was in many units manifested through physical manifestations. Their hair was cut or even completely shaved off, in some units this was administered by the older soldiers as part of a “hazing” ritual. They were allotted the shabbiest and most worn-out uniforms and equipment. “Dreams of soldier life in handsome uniforms were roughly scrapped on the very first day”, commented Eero Tuominen, who ten months later became a storekeeper sergeant himself, and remembered as the greatest benefit of this new position that for the first time he could get a uniform tidy enough to visit a theatre. Valtteri Aaltonen realised that the Finnish soldiers on home leave in neat uniforms with the insignia that he had seen in his home district were “an idealised image”, as he entered the garrison, saw the soldiers in their everyday clothes and got his own kit. Jorma Kiiski claims one recruit in his unit was given a shirt that had 52 patchs. The stories about torn and unsightly uniforms mainly date from the early to mid–1920’s, but informants serving in later years also remember that the storekeeper sergeants were demonstratively rude to the new recruits and seemed to make a point of handing out boots and uniforms in impossible sizes to each of them.”
In official debates on military education, physical training of Conscripts centred on gymnastics, sports and athletics. The official Sports Regulations for the armed forces, approved by the Minister of Defence in 1924, underlined how modern athletics derived their origins from ancient combat exercises.
Artillery General Vilho Nenonen, Minister of Defence between 1923 and 1924
Vilho Petter Nenonen (March 6, 1883, Kuopio - February 17, 1960) received his military education in the Hamina Cadet School 1896-1901, in the Mihailov Artillery School in St Petersburg 1901-1903, and in St Petersburg Artillery Academy 1906-1909. He served in the Russian army during World War I. When the Finnish Civil War began he moved to Finland and was given the job of creating the artillery of General Mannerheim's White Army. After the war he also served as the Minister of Defence between 1923 and 1924. During the Continuation War he was a part of Mannerheim's inner circle. He was promoted to the rank of General of the Artillery in 1941. Nenonen developed the Finnish Army's artillery and tactics that proved decisive in the defensive victory in the Battle of Tali-Ihantala. The trajectory calculation formulas he developed are still in use today by all modern artillery. He received the Mannerheim Cross in 1945.
Sports, it was stated, especially team games, developed the soldiers’ mental as well as physical fitness for modern warfare. The regulations gave detailed instructions for baseball, football, skiing, swimming, and a number of branches of athletics. However, according to historian Erkki Vasara, the regular army never received sufficient funding for sports grounds and equipment during the interwar years. In this area, the Suojeluskuntas (Civil Guards) were much more advanced than the regular army. Sports and athletics in the army focussed on competitions between different units and therefore mainly engaged the most skilled sportsmen among the conscripts.
For most conscripts, physical education meant morning gymnastics, close-order drill, marching and field exercises. The physicality of military training was remembered by some in terms of stiffness, strain and pain. Military training especially in the 1920’s emphasised a “military” rigidity in comportment and body language. Instructors gave meticulous guidelines for standing at attention: protrude your breast, pull in your stomach, set your feet at an angle of 60 degrees to each other, keep your elbows slightly pushed forward, and keep your middle finger at the seam of your trousers, etc. Paavo Vuorinen (b. 1908) remembered one sergeant major who made every formation in line into an agonising experience: “I guarantee that a [very small] ten penny coin would have stayed securely in place between one’s buttocks without falling down, as we stood there at attention, as if each one of us had swallowed an iron bar, and still [the sergeant major] had the gall to squeak with a voice like sour beer: ”No bearing whatsoever in this drove, not even crushed bones, just gruel, gruel ... Incessant, impertinent barking all the time, utter insolence really. Finnish military education in the interwar period followed the general European military tradition, originating in the new emphasis on military drill in the seventeenth century, where recruits had to learn new “soldierly” ways of moving, even how to stand still. The soldier was robbed of control over his own posture, even the direction of his eyes. Jorma Kiiski (b. 1903) understood this training in a carriage as a dimension of the pompous theatricality of the ”Prussian discipline”. “There was a lot of unnecessary self-importance, muscle tension to the level of painfulness, attention, closing the ranks, turnings, salute, yes sir, certainly sir, no matter how obscure the orders.”
Stories about the harshness and brutality of military training entail strong images of how the Conscripts were put under extreme physical strain. An important element in the stories is the ruthlessness shown by superiors as they pushed the conscripts beyond their physical limits. Kustaa Liikkanen relates how his unit was on a heavy ski march in full marching kit. Two conscripts arrived exhausted at the resting-place a good while later than the rest. The sergeant-major started bellowing about where they had been, making them repeatedly hit the ground, barking, “I’ll damned well teach you about lagging behind the troops. Up! Down! Don’t you think I know what a man can take! Up! Down!” To ”harden” the soldiers and simulate wartime conditions, or sometimes only as a form of punishment, Officers made their men march until some fainted. Eino Sallila took part in a field manoeuvre lasting several days. On the march back to the garrison, he claims, many conscripts were so exhausted that they fainted and fell down along the road. One fainting soldier in Sallila’s group rolled down into a ditch filled with water, but when Sallila ran to pick him up, an officer roared at him to let the man lie. Back at camp, a higher-ranking officer praised the men for their efforts, adding that in order to understand the exertions they had been put through, “you have to be aware of the purpose of the exercise – we are exercising for war.” Sallila sourly commented in his memories that had the enemy attacked on the next day, the whole regiment would have been completely disabled.
The army stories portray some officers as unflinching in their view that smarting and bleeding sores were something a soldier must learn to doggedly endure. Kalle Leppälä had constantly bad chafes on his feet during the recruit period, due to badly fitting boots. “Sometimes I bled so much in my boots that I had to let the blood drop out along the bootlegs in the evening. I never complained about the sores, but took the pain clenching my teeth. It was pointless complaining about trifles, that I gradually learned during my time in the army; I did not want to become known as a shirker.” Viljo Vuori (b. 1907) had so bad sores during a march that the medical officer told him to put his pack in the baggage, but when his company commander found out about this, he was ordered to fetch the pack and continue marching. The next day, Vuori was unable to walk and the foot was in a bad condition for a long time. Both the medical officer and the company commander probably foresaw this physical effect of marching on with the heavy pack, but where the physician found it necessary to stop at this physical limit, the other commander thought the conscript must learn to press himself through the pain, even if it would disable him for weeks. Pentti Haanpää portrayed the physical “hardening” of conscripts in a short story about a recruit who tells his second lieutenant he is ill and cannot take part in a marching exercise, but is dismissed; “A soldier must take no notice if he is feeling a bit sick. You must hold on until you fall. Preferably stay standing until you drop dead. Get back in line.” The sick conscript marches ready to faint and vomits at the resting place. An older soldier hushes him away from the spew, making him believe he will be in even greater trouble if the second-lieutenant finds out, only to then pretend to the passing officer that he himself has been sick. The “old” soldier gets a seat in a horse carriage and the sick recruit learns his lesson. In the army, a man must learn to endure hardships, but above all acquire the audacity and skilfulness to shirk duty and minimise the strain.
The military discipline regulated many areas of the conscripts’ life yet at the same time military culture had a quality of brisk outdoor life that in some stories is portrayed as invigorating or even liberating. In Haanpää’s stories, the physical training appears to be strenuous work that produces no results, at least none that the soldiers comprehend. The Finnish conscript depicted by Haanpää enjoys disbandment not least as a physical release from the straitjacket of the strictly disciplined military comportment, relaxing his body and putting his hands deep down into his pockets. Mika Waltari and his comrades, on the contrary, experience some elements of military life in terms of freedom from the physical constraints of school discipline and urban middle-class family life. Waltari’s initial impressions of life at summer camp are marked by physical sensuousness and the cultured town-dwellers romanticisation of rough and masculine outdoor life. “We enjoy that our hands are always dirty. We can mess and eat our food out of the mess-kit just as we like. We do not have to care at all about our clothes. We can flop down on the ground anywhere we like and roll and lounge.”
Pride in Endurance
Pressing one’s body to extreme physical performances could also be a positive experience and a matter of honour and pride. Many informants highlight the experience of their heaviest marches in full pack, by foot or on ski, lasting several days. Kustaa Liikkanen mentions with marked pride how he pulled through a seven-day skiing march with 18 kilograms of pack plus his rifle and 100 cartridges of live ammunition. Lauri Mattila remembered an extremely heavy 32-hour march, including a combat exercise, in sweltering summer heat with full pack. The boots and pack chaffed the soldiers’ skin on the feet, thighs and shoulders. Dozens of soldiers fainted along the way. They were driven by ambulance a few kilometres forward and then had to resume marching. Nonetheless, Mattila recalled the march as a kind of trial that none of the men wanted to fail. “It was a march where everything you can get out of a man by marching him was truly taken out. It was a matter of honour for every man to remain on his feet and march for as long as the others could march and making the utmost effort ….if they fainted and fell they would be trampled underfoot by those behind”. Mika Waltari actually describes the painful experience of a heavy marching exercise in more detail than Haanpää; the scorching summer sun, the sweat, the thirst, the weight of the pack, straps and boots chafing and cutting into the skin, hands going numb and eyes smarting from sweat and dust, the mounting pain in every limb and the increasing exhaustion. “In my mind there is only blackness, despairing submission, silent curses rolling over and over.” Yet as soon as Waltari and his comrades are back at camp they start bickering and cracking jokes about how they could have walked much further now they had been warmed up, and they proudly compare their sores and blisters. They happily tell each other that the major has praised their detachment. Once they have been for a swim and bought doughnuts from the canteen, Waltari describes their state of mind and body as virtually blissful: “We are proud and satisfied beyond imagination. It only does you good, comrades! Who the heck would like to be a civilian now? Nowhere else can you reach such a perfect physical feeling of happiness.”
In Waltari’s eyes, the army fosters ”healthy bodies accustomed to the heaviest strains, more and more hardened men than in civilian circumstances.” Waltari himself appears to have been eager to demonstrate his fitness, to prove that in spite of being an intellectual, artist and town-dweller he could cope with the military and even enjoy his training. He really lives the part and seems to regard his toughness as proven and recognised by the physical hardships he has endured. Just as in Lauri Mattila’s narrative, it is a matter of honour to Waltari and his comrades to “take it like a man” and cope with whatever the others manage. Even if many army stories signalled disapproval of the physical treatment of conscripts, the narrative tradition conveyed a cultural knowledge about what a healthy conscript had to take and what he should endure. Enduring physical strain and pain without complaint and without breaking down was not so much idealised as portrayed as a grim necessity.
Conscript Resistance
Physical Training was a central arena for the power struggle that often raged between the soldiers and their superiors, where Officers and NCOs tried to enforce subordination through punishments directed at the connscripts in the form of strain, exhaustion and pain. Conscripts resisted this treatment through injuries and illness, real or faked. During the first years after the Civil War, as many conscripts were undernourished, the exercises and punishments could be dangerously exhausting. “The exercises were tough, get up and hit the ground until the boys were completely exhausted and the weakest fell ill and at times the hospital was full of patients. Throughout the 1920’s, however, the press reported on how men returning from military service gave an appalling picture of poor sanitary conditions and deficient medical services. One non-socialist daily local newspaper wrote in 1925, “Ask the gentleman, whose son has performed military service, ask the peasant or the worker, and the answer shall very often be that the youngsters have been badly neglected, overstrained, been treated according to all too Prussian methods. […] There’s talk of lifethreatening illnesses contracted in the military service, talk of deaths, of overstrain due to unacceptable punishment methods, of venereal disease due to shabby clothing handed out to the young soldiers, of tuberculosis contracted through transmission from sick soldiers. […] A father whose healthy son has returned ruined by illness will become an irremediable anti-militarist and strongly influence his environment, and a father whose son has been conscripted in spite of sickness and returned with ruined health can be counted to the same category.”
This image of the conscript army as an unhealthy and even dangerous place for conscripts was largely confirmed by the chief medical officer of the Finnish Army, V.F. Lindén in an interview for the press agency of the social democratic newspapers in 1928. Lindén brought his concerns over the bad general state of health among conscripts to public attention. The mortality among Finnish conscripts aged 20–21 was about twice as high as it had been before the introduction of conscription, stated Lindén. More than 1200 conscripts had died in service over a period of eight years – 250 out of them due to accidents or physical violence and 95 through suicide. However, Lindén thought that the main reasons for the high mortality rates were too heavy exercises in the first weeks and months of recruit training, lack of sanitary personnel, and deficient knowledge of personal hygiene and prevention among the conscripts. The alarming press reports on the conscripts’ state of health cease around 1930. Evidently, the sanitary conditions and medical treatment of conscripts improved. Juha Mälkki has also pointed to the possible significance of a new law on compensations for casualties, injuries and ill-health contracted during military service, passed in 1926. Because of the law, the military authorities were faced with new economic incentives to better monitor the health of individual conscripts and counteract mistreatment and over-straining exercises.
Illness could, however, be both welcome and unwelcome among the conscripts. For some, malingering became the only available method of resisting the military system and shirking duty. For others, the military service became twice as arduous because of fevers, sores and other injuries. The memories of military training are full of stories about how mercilessly the medical officers declared fit for duty any conscripts reporting sick. In some units, conscripts were afraid to report sick even if they really were unwell. They thought that the distrustful medical officers would not put them on the sick-list anyway and they knew that soldiers reporting sick but declared fit were punished with extra duty upon returning to their company. Stories about how one could sham illness or inflict injuries upon oneself abound in the reminiscences, from the case of a boy who cut off his finger with an axe to escape the misery of military service to less dramatic mischief such as rubbing one’s throat with a toothbrush to make it look sore, eating tea leaves or cigar butts, or just feigning various pains. According to Pentti Haanpää, the men in line envied and loathed those on the sick-list who just loafed around in the dormitory all day, and the soldier fit for service “cursed himself who cannot get sick since the body is so damned healthy”. Yet it is evident that even if the malingerers’ cunning could be admired and their pleasant life envied, malingering was not quite honourable. Some informants mention that malingerers were unpopular among the other conscripts since they could incur punishments such as suspension of leave for the whole unit if detected. Stories about malingering are often told as humorous anecdotes, but none of the informants admits to having malingered themselves.
The Silence around Learning to Kill
One central aspect of military training is virtually never touched upon in the army memories and stories: what it was like to learn to kill other people. Combat training and especially close quarter combat exercises are usually mentioned only in passing and there are no comments on whether it felt awkward or only natural to learn, e.g., the right moves to swiftly gore your adversary in a bayonet fight. According to the guidebook for bayonet fighting by Jäger Major Efraim Kemppainen, “the whole energy of the learner must be directed at beating the antagonist as quickly as possible. In serious action the rule must be: kill or get killed.” In the guidebook for close quarter combat, presumably mirroring the content of lectures and practical training in the army, it was pointed out how not only the rifle with bayonet and hand grenade, but also the soldiers field axe, pick, and spade were excellent striking weapons. Did lessons such as these make no memorable impression on young Finnish men in the 1920’s and 1930’s? Was it too selfevident to them twenty years after the Second World War that soldiering is about killing, or was this an aspect of soldiering too painful to articulate, or put under a too strong cultural taboo?
Somewhat surprisingly, it is Mika Waltari and not Pentti Haanpää who writes explicitly on how combat training made him reflect on the horrors of a real war and on what it would be like to kill and risk one’s own life in battle. Yet Waltari turns the passage in question into a rejection of pacifism, as “a dream that enfolds weak hearts and mediocre intelligences”. Hesitation to kill in war, he states, is only an expression of selfishness and lack of patriotism. “Suddenly I sense the happiness and love of this lovely brown earth, our country that foreign boots must never trample. I feel that I could pierce the bodies of strangers, human beings like me, in cold consideration, fear sending shivers down my spine.” … “And I am not selfconceited enough to hesitate to die for [this country] if destiny should one day call.” Many of the 1972–1973 informants might have felt like Waltari in this respect, but shunned the unavoidable loftiness in these extreme articulations of patriotism. They had shown their position in action, not in words. Being concrete about one’s approval of killing in defence of the nation might have felt especially awkward in the period when they were writing, marked by the pronounced friendship between Finland and the Soviet Union on the official level and the anti-authoritarian cultural movements of the 1960’s and 70’s. Yet they were possibly also reproducing views they had learnt in their youth.
The moral and practical education given to Finnish conscripts corresponds to Joshua S. Sanborn’s analysis of how Russian soldiers were trained for the Great War. The Russian conscripts in military training were desensitized to performing violence, since it was reduced to a set of rules and a system of procedures that made war seem orderly and rational. Military training, Sanborn states, took place above the act of violence, in references to grand symbols such as the Emperor, the Fatherland/Nation or the Faith; below the act in the mechanics of movement that produce violent results; before it in the preparation for death in battle; after it in terms of the glory that accrues to the victorious soldier; and during it in terms of and military virtue. The act of violence itself, however, was absent and not talked about. The reason for this discretion, Sanborn argues, was that that the army had been given the task of training men who would commit extreme violence in certain circumscribed situations, but who could also one day reintegrate back into civilian life.
Not only within military training, but throughout the cultural arenas in interwar Finland where soldiering was depicted and debated, the “technical” objective of military training – learning a range of techniques to efficiently kill people and destroy infrastructure – was almost never mentioned. Conscription forged a tight symbolic link between manhood and the execution of lethal violence in war, but any debate over this link in itself stopped after the Civil War. Eventually, all parties came to take for granted that men were authorized and duty bound by the nation-state to kill when needed, to protect the country and all its inhabitants. Yet in Finland as in other European countries, conscripted men were usually only talked about as victims of violence – sacrificing their life in battle, enduring the violent harassments of brutal superiors – and never as the performers of violence. An obvious example is the imagery of Suomen Sotilas, where much was said about a sense of duty and a spirit of self-sacrifice, but nothing about how one prepares mentally for killing the enemy. There was an obvious cultural unease around “the license to kill” given to every fit citizen-soldier, and so it was wrapped in a cloak of silence. That unease and the lack of words to describe it still show in the reminiscences written in the early 1970’s.
Comradeship: Unity and Violent Tensions
When military service was thought of as a formative experience for young men, the horizontal relationship among them, the famous military “comradeship”, was at least as important as vertical relationships between the soldiers and their superiors and educators. How this comradeship was depicted carried messages not only about what soldiering was like in practice, but about what conscripts were like and what influence they had on each other, in the absence of parents, siblings, wives or girlfriends. In Finnish stories about their military training, there are hints at a particular kind of affinity among men, but also images of a social collective run through by hierarchies, conflict lines and social tensions. Not only were the soldiers often depicted as being in conflict with their superiors. Social life among the conscripts was also demarcated by boundaries and informal hierarchies erected and upheld by the soldiers themselves. One must remember that the soldiers’ life together was not based on any voluntary choice or preference, but forced upon them by the military system. As Ute Frevert points out in her study of conscription in the German Kaiserreich, military “comradeship” should not be confused with civilian friendship. Unlike friendship, military comradeship did not require any personal sympathy between the men. It did not have to be sought and tried, but came included as the conscripts were assigned to different squads and groups. It was more or less a necessity for the soldiers to try getting by with the group he was placed in. Intellectual fellowship was superfluous. According to Frevert, comradeship was a given fact in the military, more practical, regularised, firm and unequivocal than friendship in the civilian sphere.
Frevert has also made the interesting suggestion that conscription strengthened men’s identification with other men on the basis of gender, overriding social division lines among men to a higher degree than in previous times. In her own study of conscription in nineteenth century Germany, she found that in spite of the official ideology of equality and comradeship among all conscripts, socio-economic hierarchies and division lines from civilian society were often reproduced within the army. Nonetheless, she underlines that the army was an institution where regional differences and the opposition between cities and countryside lost importance, since all recruits shared more or less the same experiences there, regardless of their geographic origin. It was also the only institution in German society that brought burghers and workers, farmhands, sales clerks and students in close contact with each other. At least in retrospective, in the memoirs of German middle class men military service was described as a place where men learnt to understand themselves as part of a bigger whole.
Genuine Comradeship
Cultural models for describing military comradeship as central to the experience of military training were certainly available in interwar Finland, as displayed by Mika Waltari’s 1931 description of his own military service. Waltari depicted military comradeship with an intensity and warmth that is exceptional, but matched the contemporary celebration of military comradeship e.g. in German associations for veterans from the Great War, as studied by Thomas Kühne. Waltari actually made the relationships among the conscripted soldiers the key theme of Where Men Are Made. His first impressions of army life, as described in the book, are dominated not by barking officers and horrible wake-up calls, but by the friendliness and support of the other soldiers upon his arrival at his regiment in Helsinki. He is delighted to describe the atmosphere on his first night in the barracks, when the lights have just been switched off, stealthily smoked cigarettes glow in the dark, a small jug of smuggled vodka mixed with water goes around, and the conscripts whisper stories to each other. When he is transferred to NCO school a few days later, he joins a group of conscripts sharing his own social background. Half the men in his tent at summer camp were university students and several alumni of the Norssi lyceum, the same elite school in Helsinki Waltari himself had attended. “It is almost like coming home”, he writes.
A 22-year old Bachelor of Arts at the time, Waltari described his recruit training in terms reminiscent of a boy scout camp; a time of boyish eagerness, playfulness and comradeship in midst of the lyrically described Finnish summer nature. He gives the reader to understand that he had yearned for belonging and attachment to a larger whole in the cosmopolitan artist circles where he had spent the previous years and now immensely enjoyed the warm, close comradeship he found among his old school friends and soldier comrades. He depicts long rainy Sundays spent in the warmth and security of the tent at summer camp, the “strangely homely and lovely twilight feel”, some soldiers playing cards, others smoking (although it is prohibited), someone writing a letter and Waltari and his friends in a serious mood, thinking about the future: “We are still boys, who only know life from a very narrow sphere, from home, school, some small experiences, and sports achievements. Now we all have more serious eyes than usually. We feel the binding and demanding beckoning of real life in the distance. Until Muusio again takes to teasing Lahtikarhu…” Whereas playing war games was meaningless and contrary to the dignity of the men Haanpää depicted, Waltari and his middle-class comrades enjoy recruit training at the summer camp as a last sheltered haven, a relapse into the carelessness of boyhood, before adult life with its responsibilities and worries. “Actually everything is very much a game for us. (…) We are only boys. It is wonderful to leave all thinking, forget about historical dates and biographies and scientific research methods.”
Waltari enjoys sharing joy and sadness with his comrades, the lazy hours at the service club, the “growing manhood, melancholy and longing” of autumn nights at the barracks. He feels “the magical unity of the troop” as they march singing through camp. One night towards the end of recruit training, when Waltari is awake as assistant duty officer, he walks along the tents full of sleeping conscripts and reflects on the weeks spent at summer camp: “I already know that my purest and manliest memories will be associated with this summer. In my mind, I pass through the beautiful, hot days, – all the fatigue, depression and euphoria. The boys talk in their sleep. One thing at last I have found. The beautiful, genuine rejoicing of comradeship, the community of downheartedness and gladness. Every single boy is my friend, every single gray blouse arouses a warm quiver of comradeship within me.” How could the young Waltari express such a certainty that these would be the “purest and manliest” experiences of his life? Here, the cultural notions and narrative models informing Waltari’s story-telling strongly shine through.
The Difficulty of Describing Comradeship
Surely, Waltari was not the only man in interwar Finland who experienced and enjoyed warmth, closeness and support among his soldier comrades. Yet either the Finnish men writing down their army stories in the 1970’s did not experience the close military comradeship described by Mika Waltari, or they were unable or unwilling to explicate what comradeship or friendship with other men had meant to them during their military service. A whole set of the questions in the 1972–1973 ethnological questionnaire referred to the conscripts’ activities among themselves. For example, the ethnologists asked, “What did you do in evenings or other off-duty hours when you were not permitted leave? What games were played, what songs were sung and what was talked about? Was alcohol ever brought to the barracks? What about women? Was there betting? How was the time spent in the service club?” Some of all these questions would easily have accommodated even sentimental narration about comradeship, for example, “What kind of esprit de corps or feeling of togetherness reigned among the men in your dormitory, squad, platoon, company, military unit or service branch?”
Yet on this matter most answers were shortish, in the vein of “the group spirit was good”. The informants’ stories about comradeship tended, just like the questions asked by the ethnologists, to concentrate on the soldiers’ off-duty activities together, not their emotions for each other. They mention things such as singing, playing cards (although this was not permitted), discussing and telling each other stories, going for walks, wrestling or dancing to the accordion or violin of some fellow conscript. Some men were assiduous letter writers, others spent much time talking, playing games or reading books and newspapers in the service club, some only sat around in the squad room deep in their own thoughts.
Recruit reading the paper while drinking a coffee during leisure-time in the garrison of Kontioranta
A couple of informants mention a “strong feeling of togetherness”, but the general impression is that the soldiers were mainly bored in their eventless and confined off-duty hours. One informant who wrote ten full pages A4 about his military training gave this answer to the question about what the soldiers did off duty: “nder this question I seriously tried to recall how that scarce spare time was spent, but I could not find any point of reference, there hardly was anything special.” Some fragments in the reminiscences hint at, if not intimacy, then at least a relaxedness among the conscripts regarding certain forms of intimacy and sentimentality that in later periods might have been considered ridiculous for a 21-year old man. One example is the habit of dancing in härkäpari [~oxen couple] – two men dancing together for the lack of female partners. In today’s world this would give rise to jests and allusions to homosexuality, yet to working men in the 1920’s and 1930’s, often used to living for periods in all-male environments such as work camps for mobile teams of workmen in forestry, rafting, road and railroad construction etc, it perhaps was quite natural. The soldiers’ autograph albums, where the soldiers wrote down song storys, jokes and poems and illustrated them with drawings, provide another clue. One informant
recalled that the contents of the song-book storys were so indecent that they could not be taken back home upon disbandment. He failed to mention, however, that significant elements in the contents of these notebooks were highly sentimental love poems, often written down by comrades in each other’s albums, elaborating on the theme of unrequited love or being left by a lover. Although love in these poems is heterosexual, the popularity of this shared folklore among the soldiers hints at an emotional openness among the conscripts that the informants did not usually remember or wish to highlight half a century later.
The men participating in the 1972–1973 collection, aged circa 55 to 75, were perhaps simply not inclined to speak openly. To feel or even write about the kind of enchantment expressed by Waltari would possibly have seemed strange to them. Even if some of them would have been willing to describe it, they might have lacked a language and narrative form to do so. Army stories as an oral narrative genre tend to focus on anecdotes about memorable incidents, not on descriptions of psychological states or social relationships. On the other hand, the silences on this account should perhaps be taken at face value, as indications that the bonds formed between men in military training often were not deeply personal. The questionnaire asked informants whether they later stayed in touch with their comrades from military training, and they usually answered in the negative.
The roughness of military comradeship
In Pentti Haanpää’s army stories, there are hardly any traces of the warm comradeship of the kind that Mika Waltari was so enchanted with. The conscripts Haanpää describes band together mainly in opposition to their superiors, in wild partying or in bursts of black humour, easing the mental pressure of living under the officers’ oppression. The laughter of military humour, as described by Haanpää, could be directed not only against the superiors as a vehicle for symbolic resistance. He was keen to show his readers that the joke among soldiers was often at a comrade. In one of his stories, a group of soldiers being transported by train in a cattle wagon without a toilet grab hold of their comrade who is relieving himself through the open door and hold him fast, trousers down and bare-bottomed, as the train passes a station filled with people. The others are splitting their sides with laughter, but the victim is enraged and the joke results in a fistfight. – This was the section that Haanpää’s regular publishers above all wanted removed, but the author fiercely resisted omitting these particular elements of comradeship from his depiction of soldiering. (Nigel’s comment: sounds exactly like the type of thing we did in the NZ Army – military humour at it’s lowest – I remember a trip we did where one of the guys was pissing out of the side of the old Bedford RL as we rocketed down the highway – overtook a car and he kept pissing along the side of the car and onto the windscreen as we went past – the look on the old couples faces in the car as we went past had the rest of us pissing ourselves laughing….the NCO's or officers would have had us for breakfast if they'd caught on.....)
In the last story of Fields and Barracks, some conscripts celebrate their approaching discharge by organising a “love party”, bringing prostitutes to the barracks at night. Haanpää hardly intended this story as a sympathetic depiction of military comradeship, but rather as an image of soldiers giving way to pent-up pressures in a crude and orgiastic manner. The commotion of the “partying” keeps awake those conscripts who would only want to sleep. The medic, “a tall and religious boy” is woken up and persuaded to provide his partying “comrades” with protection against venereal disease, in spite of his shock and revulsion with the whole business. A few days later, on their very last night in military service, the soldiers bring smuggled liquor to the barracks and have a noisy drinking-bout, “vomit and pieces of lockers and stools littering the floor”. (Nigel’s comment: again, sounds more realistic to me: as one of my old NCO’s when I was a young guy on my first overseas exercise and partying up in Singapore at the end of the exercise said to us “A soldier who won’t fuck, won’t fight"…and the party we had at the end of Basic Training was something else - to this day I still remember the pain the next morning - one of the worst hangovers of my life.....).
Only the second to last paragraph of Haanpää’s book indicates some kind of positive solidarity among the soldiers, as they bid farewell to their comrades. Together, they had lived a year under the same roof, …endured hardships and shared joys, dragged heavy boots in the dust of summer roads or so often hit the wet ground of the fatherland. Together they had sung a song, laughed and cursed, maybe enjoyed comfort from the pleasures of this world from the same bottle or the same woman. Now they parted possibly never to share the same road again. There is a hint of nostalgia here, yet Fields and Barracks as a whole conveys a feeling of slight distaste for the form that even the non-hierarchical relationships among the soldiers take on in the corruptive world that was Pentti Haanpää’s picture of the conscript army.
To some extent, sociological interpretations of military bullying as ‘breaking down and re-building’ the soldier can be applied to the Finnish interwar case. Recruit training, with its emphasis on close-order drill and indoor duties, was evidently aimed at drilling the soldiers into instinctive, unquestioning and instantaneous obedience. According to Juha Mälkki, Finnish military thinking in the 1920’s understood military discipline as the exact and mechanical fulfilment of given orders. Inspections by high ranking officers focused on inspecting the soldiers marching past in close-order and the neatness of garrisons and camps. The outer appearance of the troops was taken as evidence of how disciplined they were, which in turn was understood as a direct indicator of how well they would perform in combat, i.e. how well they would execute given orders. However, the incessant inspections, where nothing was ever good enough, perfectly made beds were “blasted” and laboriously cleaned rifles “burnt”, also seem to have been intended to instil the soldiers with a sense that not even their utmost efforts were ever enough to fulfil military requirements. Not only should the soldiers feel that they were constantly supervised and that even the slightest infringements of regulations – a lump of sugar in the drinking cup, the spoon lying in the wrong direction – would be detected and punished by their superiors. They should also feel they were good-for-nothings who only by subjecting themselves to thorough and prolonged training by their superiors might one day reach the status of real soldiers.
In the Finnish case, there does not seem to have been any centrally controlled system or articulated plan behind this particular way of socializing the conscripts into a specific military behaviour and attitude, nor behind its extreme forms, the bullying by superiors. Rather, abuses and bullying occurred where superior officers turned a blind eye, and was easily weeded out where commanding officers wanted to stop it. The hierarchical relationships therefore varied from company to company. The rather poorly organised armed forces of the early 1920’s had to manage with NCOs and training officers without proper military education. There was a lack in the supervision of how conscripts were treated. Many officers certainly also seem to have harboured a mindset, perhaps shaped by old European military traditions, according to which scaring, humiliating and bullying the soldiers into fearful obedience was a natural and necessary part of shaping a civilian into a soldier. In addition to the military imperative of producing obedient and efficient soldiers, many officers embraced the political project of rebuilding the conscript into “a citizen conscious of his patriotic duties”. The reminiscences do not, however, reveal much of how this was undertaken, other than by draconian discipline. The ‘enlightenment lectures’ given by the military priests are hardly mentioned. A few men bring up that officers delivered patriotic speeches on festive occasions such as when the soldiers gave their oath of allegiance or were disbanded. Traces of the political re-education project mainly become visible in recollections of the ban on socialist newspapers and other leftist publications in the garrison areas, permanently reminding conscripts from a “red” background that their citizenship was seen as questionable.
Certain cafés and restaurants in the garrison towns that were associated with the workers’ movement were also out of bounds for conscripts on evening leaves. Some informants write about how conscripts were anxious to conceal their family association with the red rebellion or the workers’ movement from the officers in fear of harassment. Many informants mention that certain conscripts’ advancement to NCO or officer training was blocked because of their or their families’ association with the political left – a view confirmed by recent historical research. Some of the officers might very well have had rational and articulate ideas about the functionality of harsh and humiliating methods. However, as described above, many Finnish military educationalists in the 1920’s already viewed this traditional military pedagogy as counter-productive to the needs of a national Finnish army whose effectiveness in combat had to be based on patriotic motivation and not on numbers or ‘machine-like obedience’. Neither did the men who personally experienced interwar military training later choose to present the bullying as somehow productive of anything positive, be it discipline, group cohesion, or a new military identity.
Physical Training in Military Service
Conscription dislocated young men from family and working life into garrisons and training fields, packed them into dormitories of 20 to 50 men, robbed them of personal privacy, infringed on their integrity, and demanded they performed extreme physical tasks. It toughened men through gymnastics, drill, sports and field exercises. It trained men into particular postures and ways of moving as well as an attitude marked by a recklessness towards vulnerability. Yet physical vulnerability did put limits to what the men could be put through. And conscripts faked or inflicted illness and injuries upon themselves to evade training.
Yrjö Norta (b Turku 1904, d Helsinki 1988, Finnish filmmaker)recording soldiers doing Drill for a promotional film (1927)
Physical Inspection and Assessment
The first concrete contact with conscription and military service for a young man was actually the call-up inspection. The colloquial term often used in Finnish for the call-up, syyni, refers to viewing or gazing – to the conscript being seen and inspected by the call-up board. As most men remembered the call-up, the youngsters had to undress in the presence of the others called up and step up stark naked in front of the examination board. Juha Mälkki characterises this practice as part of the “inspection mentality” of the era. It was evidently an embarrassing or at least peculiar experience for many conscripts, since it often needed to be treated with humour in narration, giving rise to a large number of anecdotes. One of these stories demonstrates how joking was used at the call-up itself as a means of defusing the tense situation of scores of young naked men being inspected by older men behind a table. Albert Lahti remembered that a young man at his callup tried to cover his genitals with his hands as he stepped up on the scales to be weighed. A local district court judge corrected him tongue-in-cheek: “Come, come, young man, don't cover anything and don’t lessen the load. Step down and take your hands off your balls and then step up on the scales once more so we can see your real weight. – You don’t get away as a crown wreck that shamelessly!” The boy did as he was told and steps back upon the scales with his hands at the sides and is greeted by the judge: “All right, what did I tell you, four kilogrammes more weight straight away as you don’t support those balls”. Laughter rolled around the room where a ”court room atmosphere” had reigned the moment before. The joke was on the boy on the scales – according to the end of the story he afterwards asked his comrades in round-eyed wonder whether his balls could really be that heavy. For that, he got the nickname ”Lead Balls”.
At the call-up, conscripts were sorted into those fit and those unfit for military service. As such, there was nothing very particular about the criteria applied. In the military, just as in the civil sphere, it was considered superior for a man to be strong, not weak, tall rather than short, have good eyesight and hearing, well-shaped limbs and no serious or chronic diseases. Yet hardly anywhere else at this time was such a systematic examination and comparison of conscripts’s made, accompanied by a categorical sorting strongly associated with masculine pride or shame over one’s own body. The physical examination at the call-up often stands out in the memories of military service and appears to have left behind strong images in memory. Even if few men probably were looking forward to their military service, being categorised as fit for service was still a matter of honour, whereas being exempted on the grounds of being physically unfit carried a strong stigma. The colloquial term for those discarded, ruununraakki, literally translates as “crown wreck”, somebody whose body was such a wreck that it was not good enough for the crown, for serving the country as a soldier. According to many informants, the ‘crown wrecks’ were shown contempt in the interwar years, also by young women who would not accept their courtships. Historian Kenneth Lundin has noted that in 1930’s feature films set in the conscript army, the ‘crown wrecks’ were always depicted as lazy, fat malingerers. Urpo Sallanko (b. 1908) recounted in his memories that he was very nervous at the call-up because he was of small stature. Both his older brothers had been categorised as ’crown wrecks’ and discarded. Hearing about his brothers, a neighbour woman had told the other women in his home village that ”she would be ashamed to give birth to kids who are not good enough to be men of war. This naturally reached my mothers ears,” Urpo wrote, “and made her weep”. Lauri Mattila’s friend Janne was sent home “to eat more porridge” because of his weak constitution and “was so ashamed of his fate that he never told anyone about what happened to him at the call-up”.
This notion of ’crown wrecks’ seems to have been a tradition from the days of the ’old’ Finnish conscript army in the 1880’s and 1890’s. At that time, roughly one tenth of each age cohort was called up for active service and about a third for a brief reserve training. The military authorities could thus be very selective at the call-up examinations, only choosing the physically “best” developed for the drawing of lots that determined who had to do three years of active service and who was put in the reserve. According to Heikki Kolehmainen (b. 1897), this tradition was alive and well in the countryside when he entered service in 1919. “You would often hear old men tell about the drawing of lots, about their service in the reserve or the active forces, and like a red thread through those conversations ran a positive, even boastful attitude of having been classed fit for conscription in those days. We [youngsters] accordingly thought of those who had served for three years as real he-men, of those who had served in the reserve as men, and of the crown wrecks as useless cripples.” Nevertheless, the ’crown wrecks’ were a group of considerable size. In the days of the “old” conscript army, at the end of the nineteenth century, around half of each age cohort was exempted.
Being in higher education or being a sole provider were valid grounds for exemption, but a weak physique was the most usual reason. In the 1920’s, about one third of each male age class never entered service on these grounds, and towards the end of the 1930’s roughly one man in six was still discarded. Claims that politically “untrustworthy” men would have been rejected under the guise of medical reasons have, however, been convincingly refuted by historical research. Historian Juha Mälkki claims that the number of men who received military training precisely met the manpower needs of the planned wartime army organisation and that the number discarded would thus have been governed by operative considerations in interwar Finland. Nevertheless, the high rejection rates caused public concern over the state of public health. Somewhat surprisingly, these numbers were not kept secret, but discussed openly in the press. Being a “crown wreck” was thus not an existence on the margin of society, but rather usual. Although being fit for service was probably associated with toughness by most contemporaries, the stigmatisation of being discarded might be exaggerated in both the collected reminiscences and interwar popular culture.
Toughening and Hardening the Conscripts
The army stories emphasise the toughness and hardships of military service, but also depict a military culture where the individual soldier was trained to physically merge with his unit and become indifferent to nakedness, pains or vulnerabilities. He became part of a collective. The initial physical inspection at the call-up can be interpreted as a stripping of the youngsters’ old, civilian identities, as a symbolic initiation that was repeated and completed months later, when the recruit arrived at his garrison and had to hand in his civilian clothes and don the uniform clothing of the army. In the light of the reminiscences, it seems that stripping naked was rather an introduction to a military culture where there should be nothing private about one’s body. Once the recruits entered service they had virtually no privacy. They spent their days and nights in a group of other men; sleeping, washing, and easing nature in full visibility of a score of other youngsters. The scarcity of toilets, causing long queues, and going to the latrine at camp in close formation with one’s whole unit stand out strongly in some men’s memories. Even more colourful are descriptions of the so-called “willie inspection” as the men stood in naked in line to be very intrusively inspected for symptoms of gonorrhea and other venereal diseases. Janne Kuusinen still remembered fifty years later that some men were ashamed the first time they had to undergo this and would not take off all clothes, that some men caught a cold as they were made to stand naked for over an hour, and that one man was diagnosed with tight foreskin and sent to surgery the next day. This ruthlessness concerning the conscripts’ privacy can be understood as either sheer brutality or as a part of training intended to do away with any feeling of physical individuality. A soldier should neither be shy nor self-conscious.
Army stories display the pride men felt over having been found fit for military service at the call-up. However, in many stories conscripts were greeted as too soft and immature upon reporting for duty, as mere “raw material” or “a shapeless mass of meat” that completely lacked the strength, toughness, skills and comportment required in a soldier. At every turn, the recruits were reminded that they were not yet physically fit for war, but needed ruthless training and hardening. Their status as complete greenhorns was in many units manifested through physical manifestations. Their hair was cut or even completely shaved off, in some units this was administered by the older soldiers as part of a “hazing” ritual. They were allotted the shabbiest and most worn-out uniforms and equipment. “Dreams of soldier life in handsome uniforms were roughly scrapped on the very first day”, commented Eero Tuominen, who ten months later became a storekeeper sergeant himself, and remembered as the greatest benefit of this new position that for the first time he could get a uniform tidy enough to visit a theatre. Valtteri Aaltonen realised that the Finnish soldiers on home leave in neat uniforms with the insignia that he had seen in his home district were “an idealised image”, as he entered the garrison, saw the soldiers in their everyday clothes and got his own kit. Jorma Kiiski claims one recruit in his unit was given a shirt that had 52 patchs. The stories about torn and unsightly uniforms mainly date from the early to mid–1920’s, but informants serving in later years also remember that the storekeeper sergeants were demonstratively rude to the new recruits and seemed to make a point of handing out boots and uniforms in impossible sizes to each of them.”
In official debates on military education, physical training of Conscripts centred on gymnastics, sports and athletics. The official Sports Regulations for the armed forces, approved by the Minister of Defence in 1924, underlined how modern athletics derived their origins from ancient combat exercises.
Artillery General Vilho Nenonen, Minister of Defence between 1923 and 1924
Vilho Petter Nenonen (March 6, 1883, Kuopio - February 17, 1960) received his military education in the Hamina Cadet School 1896-1901, in the Mihailov Artillery School in St Petersburg 1901-1903, and in St Petersburg Artillery Academy 1906-1909. He served in the Russian army during World War I. When the Finnish Civil War began he moved to Finland and was given the job of creating the artillery of General Mannerheim's White Army. After the war he also served as the Minister of Defence between 1923 and 1924. During the Continuation War he was a part of Mannerheim's inner circle. He was promoted to the rank of General of the Artillery in 1941. Nenonen developed the Finnish Army's artillery and tactics that proved decisive in the defensive victory in the Battle of Tali-Ihantala. The trajectory calculation formulas he developed are still in use today by all modern artillery. He received the Mannerheim Cross in 1945.
Sports, it was stated, especially team games, developed the soldiers’ mental as well as physical fitness for modern warfare. The regulations gave detailed instructions for baseball, football, skiing, swimming, and a number of branches of athletics. However, according to historian Erkki Vasara, the regular army never received sufficient funding for sports grounds and equipment during the interwar years. In this area, the Suojeluskuntas (Civil Guards) were much more advanced than the regular army. Sports and athletics in the army focussed on competitions between different units and therefore mainly engaged the most skilled sportsmen among the conscripts.
For most conscripts, physical education meant morning gymnastics, close-order drill, marching and field exercises. The physicality of military training was remembered by some in terms of stiffness, strain and pain. Military training especially in the 1920’s emphasised a “military” rigidity in comportment and body language. Instructors gave meticulous guidelines for standing at attention: protrude your breast, pull in your stomach, set your feet at an angle of 60 degrees to each other, keep your elbows slightly pushed forward, and keep your middle finger at the seam of your trousers, etc. Paavo Vuorinen (b. 1908) remembered one sergeant major who made every formation in line into an agonising experience: “I guarantee that a [very small] ten penny coin would have stayed securely in place between one’s buttocks without falling down, as we stood there at attention, as if each one of us had swallowed an iron bar, and still [the sergeant major] had the gall to squeak with a voice like sour beer: ”No bearing whatsoever in this drove, not even crushed bones, just gruel, gruel ... Incessant, impertinent barking all the time, utter insolence really. Finnish military education in the interwar period followed the general European military tradition, originating in the new emphasis on military drill in the seventeenth century, where recruits had to learn new “soldierly” ways of moving, even how to stand still. The soldier was robbed of control over his own posture, even the direction of his eyes. Jorma Kiiski (b. 1903) understood this training in a carriage as a dimension of the pompous theatricality of the ”Prussian discipline”. “There was a lot of unnecessary self-importance, muscle tension to the level of painfulness, attention, closing the ranks, turnings, salute, yes sir, certainly sir, no matter how obscure the orders.”
Stories about the harshness and brutality of military training entail strong images of how the Conscripts were put under extreme physical strain. An important element in the stories is the ruthlessness shown by superiors as they pushed the conscripts beyond their physical limits. Kustaa Liikkanen relates how his unit was on a heavy ski march in full marching kit. Two conscripts arrived exhausted at the resting-place a good while later than the rest. The sergeant-major started bellowing about where they had been, making them repeatedly hit the ground, barking, “I’ll damned well teach you about lagging behind the troops. Up! Down! Don’t you think I know what a man can take! Up! Down!” To ”harden” the soldiers and simulate wartime conditions, or sometimes only as a form of punishment, Officers made their men march until some fainted. Eino Sallila took part in a field manoeuvre lasting several days. On the march back to the garrison, he claims, many conscripts were so exhausted that they fainted and fell down along the road. One fainting soldier in Sallila’s group rolled down into a ditch filled with water, but when Sallila ran to pick him up, an officer roared at him to let the man lie. Back at camp, a higher-ranking officer praised the men for their efforts, adding that in order to understand the exertions they had been put through, “you have to be aware of the purpose of the exercise – we are exercising for war.” Sallila sourly commented in his memories that had the enemy attacked on the next day, the whole regiment would have been completely disabled.
The army stories portray some officers as unflinching in their view that smarting and bleeding sores were something a soldier must learn to doggedly endure. Kalle Leppälä had constantly bad chafes on his feet during the recruit period, due to badly fitting boots. “Sometimes I bled so much in my boots that I had to let the blood drop out along the bootlegs in the evening. I never complained about the sores, but took the pain clenching my teeth. It was pointless complaining about trifles, that I gradually learned during my time in the army; I did not want to become known as a shirker.” Viljo Vuori (b. 1907) had so bad sores during a march that the medical officer told him to put his pack in the baggage, but when his company commander found out about this, he was ordered to fetch the pack and continue marching. The next day, Vuori was unable to walk and the foot was in a bad condition for a long time. Both the medical officer and the company commander probably foresaw this physical effect of marching on with the heavy pack, but where the physician found it necessary to stop at this physical limit, the other commander thought the conscript must learn to press himself through the pain, even if it would disable him for weeks. Pentti Haanpää portrayed the physical “hardening” of conscripts in a short story about a recruit who tells his second lieutenant he is ill and cannot take part in a marching exercise, but is dismissed; “A soldier must take no notice if he is feeling a bit sick. You must hold on until you fall. Preferably stay standing until you drop dead. Get back in line.” The sick conscript marches ready to faint and vomits at the resting place. An older soldier hushes him away from the spew, making him believe he will be in even greater trouble if the second-lieutenant finds out, only to then pretend to the passing officer that he himself has been sick. The “old” soldier gets a seat in a horse carriage and the sick recruit learns his lesson. In the army, a man must learn to endure hardships, but above all acquire the audacity and skilfulness to shirk duty and minimise the strain.
The military discipline regulated many areas of the conscripts’ life yet at the same time military culture had a quality of brisk outdoor life that in some stories is portrayed as invigorating or even liberating. In Haanpää’s stories, the physical training appears to be strenuous work that produces no results, at least none that the soldiers comprehend. The Finnish conscript depicted by Haanpää enjoys disbandment not least as a physical release from the straitjacket of the strictly disciplined military comportment, relaxing his body and putting his hands deep down into his pockets. Mika Waltari and his comrades, on the contrary, experience some elements of military life in terms of freedom from the physical constraints of school discipline and urban middle-class family life. Waltari’s initial impressions of life at summer camp are marked by physical sensuousness and the cultured town-dwellers romanticisation of rough and masculine outdoor life. “We enjoy that our hands are always dirty. We can mess and eat our food out of the mess-kit just as we like. We do not have to care at all about our clothes. We can flop down on the ground anywhere we like and roll and lounge.”
Pride in Endurance
Pressing one’s body to extreme physical performances could also be a positive experience and a matter of honour and pride. Many informants highlight the experience of their heaviest marches in full pack, by foot or on ski, lasting several days. Kustaa Liikkanen mentions with marked pride how he pulled through a seven-day skiing march with 18 kilograms of pack plus his rifle and 100 cartridges of live ammunition. Lauri Mattila remembered an extremely heavy 32-hour march, including a combat exercise, in sweltering summer heat with full pack. The boots and pack chaffed the soldiers’ skin on the feet, thighs and shoulders. Dozens of soldiers fainted along the way. They were driven by ambulance a few kilometres forward and then had to resume marching. Nonetheless, Mattila recalled the march as a kind of trial that none of the men wanted to fail. “It was a march where everything you can get out of a man by marching him was truly taken out. It was a matter of honour for every man to remain on his feet and march for as long as the others could march and making the utmost effort ….if they fainted and fell they would be trampled underfoot by those behind”. Mika Waltari actually describes the painful experience of a heavy marching exercise in more detail than Haanpää; the scorching summer sun, the sweat, the thirst, the weight of the pack, straps and boots chafing and cutting into the skin, hands going numb and eyes smarting from sweat and dust, the mounting pain in every limb and the increasing exhaustion. “In my mind there is only blackness, despairing submission, silent curses rolling over and over.” Yet as soon as Waltari and his comrades are back at camp they start bickering and cracking jokes about how they could have walked much further now they had been warmed up, and they proudly compare their sores and blisters. They happily tell each other that the major has praised their detachment. Once they have been for a swim and bought doughnuts from the canteen, Waltari describes their state of mind and body as virtually blissful: “We are proud and satisfied beyond imagination. It only does you good, comrades! Who the heck would like to be a civilian now? Nowhere else can you reach such a perfect physical feeling of happiness.”
In Waltari’s eyes, the army fosters ”healthy bodies accustomed to the heaviest strains, more and more hardened men than in civilian circumstances.” Waltari himself appears to have been eager to demonstrate his fitness, to prove that in spite of being an intellectual, artist and town-dweller he could cope with the military and even enjoy his training. He really lives the part and seems to regard his toughness as proven and recognised by the physical hardships he has endured. Just as in Lauri Mattila’s narrative, it is a matter of honour to Waltari and his comrades to “take it like a man” and cope with whatever the others manage. Even if many army stories signalled disapproval of the physical treatment of conscripts, the narrative tradition conveyed a cultural knowledge about what a healthy conscript had to take and what he should endure. Enduring physical strain and pain without complaint and without breaking down was not so much idealised as portrayed as a grim necessity.
Conscript Resistance
Physical Training was a central arena for the power struggle that often raged between the soldiers and their superiors, where Officers and NCOs tried to enforce subordination through punishments directed at the connscripts in the form of strain, exhaustion and pain. Conscripts resisted this treatment through injuries and illness, real or faked. During the first years after the Civil War, as many conscripts were undernourished, the exercises and punishments could be dangerously exhausting. “The exercises were tough, get up and hit the ground until the boys were completely exhausted and the weakest fell ill and at times the hospital was full of patients. Throughout the 1920’s, however, the press reported on how men returning from military service gave an appalling picture of poor sanitary conditions and deficient medical services. One non-socialist daily local newspaper wrote in 1925, “Ask the gentleman, whose son has performed military service, ask the peasant or the worker, and the answer shall very often be that the youngsters have been badly neglected, overstrained, been treated according to all too Prussian methods. […] There’s talk of lifethreatening illnesses contracted in the military service, talk of deaths, of overstrain due to unacceptable punishment methods, of venereal disease due to shabby clothing handed out to the young soldiers, of tuberculosis contracted through transmission from sick soldiers. […] A father whose healthy son has returned ruined by illness will become an irremediable anti-militarist and strongly influence his environment, and a father whose son has been conscripted in spite of sickness and returned with ruined health can be counted to the same category.”
This image of the conscript army as an unhealthy and even dangerous place for conscripts was largely confirmed by the chief medical officer of the Finnish Army, V.F. Lindén in an interview for the press agency of the social democratic newspapers in 1928. Lindén brought his concerns over the bad general state of health among conscripts to public attention. The mortality among Finnish conscripts aged 20–21 was about twice as high as it had been before the introduction of conscription, stated Lindén. More than 1200 conscripts had died in service over a period of eight years – 250 out of them due to accidents or physical violence and 95 through suicide. However, Lindén thought that the main reasons for the high mortality rates were too heavy exercises in the first weeks and months of recruit training, lack of sanitary personnel, and deficient knowledge of personal hygiene and prevention among the conscripts. The alarming press reports on the conscripts’ state of health cease around 1930. Evidently, the sanitary conditions and medical treatment of conscripts improved. Juha Mälkki has also pointed to the possible significance of a new law on compensations for casualties, injuries and ill-health contracted during military service, passed in 1926. Because of the law, the military authorities were faced with new economic incentives to better monitor the health of individual conscripts and counteract mistreatment and over-straining exercises.
Illness could, however, be both welcome and unwelcome among the conscripts. For some, malingering became the only available method of resisting the military system and shirking duty. For others, the military service became twice as arduous because of fevers, sores and other injuries. The memories of military training are full of stories about how mercilessly the medical officers declared fit for duty any conscripts reporting sick. In some units, conscripts were afraid to report sick even if they really were unwell. They thought that the distrustful medical officers would not put them on the sick-list anyway and they knew that soldiers reporting sick but declared fit were punished with extra duty upon returning to their company. Stories about how one could sham illness or inflict injuries upon oneself abound in the reminiscences, from the case of a boy who cut off his finger with an axe to escape the misery of military service to less dramatic mischief such as rubbing one’s throat with a toothbrush to make it look sore, eating tea leaves or cigar butts, or just feigning various pains. According to Pentti Haanpää, the men in line envied and loathed those on the sick-list who just loafed around in the dormitory all day, and the soldier fit for service “cursed himself who cannot get sick since the body is so damned healthy”. Yet it is evident that even if the malingerers’ cunning could be admired and their pleasant life envied, malingering was not quite honourable. Some informants mention that malingerers were unpopular among the other conscripts since they could incur punishments such as suspension of leave for the whole unit if detected. Stories about malingering are often told as humorous anecdotes, but none of the informants admits to having malingered themselves.
The Silence around Learning to Kill
One central aspect of military training is virtually never touched upon in the army memories and stories: what it was like to learn to kill other people. Combat training and especially close quarter combat exercises are usually mentioned only in passing and there are no comments on whether it felt awkward or only natural to learn, e.g., the right moves to swiftly gore your adversary in a bayonet fight. According to the guidebook for bayonet fighting by Jäger Major Efraim Kemppainen, “the whole energy of the learner must be directed at beating the antagonist as quickly as possible. In serious action the rule must be: kill or get killed.” In the guidebook for close quarter combat, presumably mirroring the content of lectures and practical training in the army, it was pointed out how not only the rifle with bayonet and hand grenade, but also the soldiers field axe, pick, and spade were excellent striking weapons. Did lessons such as these make no memorable impression on young Finnish men in the 1920’s and 1930’s? Was it too selfevident to them twenty years after the Second World War that soldiering is about killing, or was this an aspect of soldiering too painful to articulate, or put under a too strong cultural taboo?
Somewhat surprisingly, it is Mika Waltari and not Pentti Haanpää who writes explicitly on how combat training made him reflect on the horrors of a real war and on what it would be like to kill and risk one’s own life in battle. Yet Waltari turns the passage in question into a rejection of pacifism, as “a dream that enfolds weak hearts and mediocre intelligences”. Hesitation to kill in war, he states, is only an expression of selfishness and lack of patriotism. “Suddenly I sense the happiness and love of this lovely brown earth, our country that foreign boots must never trample. I feel that I could pierce the bodies of strangers, human beings like me, in cold consideration, fear sending shivers down my spine.” … “And I am not selfconceited enough to hesitate to die for [this country] if destiny should one day call.” Many of the 1972–1973 informants might have felt like Waltari in this respect, but shunned the unavoidable loftiness in these extreme articulations of patriotism. They had shown their position in action, not in words. Being concrete about one’s approval of killing in defence of the nation might have felt especially awkward in the period when they were writing, marked by the pronounced friendship between Finland and the Soviet Union on the official level and the anti-authoritarian cultural movements of the 1960’s and 70’s. Yet they were possibly also reproducing views they had learnt in their youth.
The moral and practical education given to Finnish conscripts corresponds to Joshua S. Sanborn’s analysis of how Russian soldiers were trained for the Great War. The Russian conscripts in military training were desensitized to performing violence, since it was reduced to a set of rules and a system of procedures that made war seem orderly and rational. Military training, Sanborn states, took place above the act of violence, in references to grand symbols such as the Emperor, the Fatherland/Nation or the Faith; below the act in the mechanics of movement that produce violent results; before it in the preparation for death in battle; after it in terms of the glory that accrues to the victorious soldier; and during it in terms of and military virtue. The act of violence itself, however, was absent and not talked about. The reason for this discretion, Sanborn argues, was that that the army had been given the task of training men who would commit extreme violence in certain circumscribed situations, but who could also one day reintegrate back into civilian life.
Not only within military training, but throughout the cultural arenas in interwar Finland where soldiering was depicted and debated, the “technical” objective of military training – learning a range of techniques to efficiently kill people and destroy infrastructure – was almost never mentioned. Conscription forged a tight symbolic link between manhood and the execution of lethal violence in war, but any debate over this link in itself stopped after the Civil War. Eventually, all parties came to take for granted that men were authorized and duty bound by the nation-state to kill when needed, to protect the country and all its inhabitants. Yet in Finland as in other European countries, conscripted men were usually only talked about as victims of violence – sacrificing their life in battle, enduring the violent harassments of brutal superiors – and never as the performers of violence. An obvious example is the imagery of Suomen Sotilas, where much was said about a sense of duty and a spirit of self-sacrifice, but nothing about how one prepares mentally for killing the enemy. There was an obvious cultural unease around “the license to kill” given to every fit citizen-soldier, and so it was wrapped in a cloak of silence. That unease and the lack of words to describe it still show in the reminiscences written in the early 1970’s.
Comradeship: Unity and Violent Tensions
When military service was thought of as a formative experience for young men, the horizontal relationship among them, the famous military “comradeship”, was at least as important as vertical relationships between the soldiers and their superiors and educators. How this comradeship was depicted carried messages not only about what soldiering was like in practice, but about what conscripts were like and what influence they had on each other, in the absence of parents, siblings, wives or girlfriends. In Finnish stories about their military training, there are hints at a particular kind of affinity among men, but also images of a social collective run through by hierarchies, conflict lines and social tensions. Not only were the soldiers often depicted as being in conflict with their superiors. Social life among the conscripts was also demarcated by boundaries and informal hierarchies erected and upheld by the soldiers themselves. One must remember that the soldiers’ life together was not based on any voluntary choice or preference, but forced upon them by the military system. As Ute Frevert points out in her study of conscription in the German Kaiserreich, military “comradeship” should not be confused with civilian friendship. Unlike friendship, military comradeship did not require any personal sympathy between the men. It did not have to be sought and tried, but came included as the conscripts were assigned to different squads and groups. It was more or less a necessity for the soldiers to try getting by with the group he was placed in. Intellectual fellowship was superfluous. According to Frevert, comradeship was a given fact in the military, more practical, regularised, firm and unequivocal than friendship in the civilian sphere.
Frevert has also made the interesting suggestion that conscription strengthened men’s identification with other men on the basis of gender, overriding social division lines among men to a higher degree than in previous times. In her own study of conscription in nineteenth century Germany, she found that in spite of the official ideology of equality and comradeship among all conscripts, socio-economic hierarchies and division lines from civilian society were often reproduced within the army. Nonetheless, she underlines that the army was an institution where regional differences and the opposition between cities and countryside lost importance, since all recruits shared more or less the same experiences there, regardless of their geographic origin. It was also the only institution in German society that brought burghers and workers, farmhands, sales clerks and students in close contact with each other. At least in retrospective, in the memoirs of German middle class men military service was described as a place where men learnt to understand themselves as part of a bigger whole.
Genuine Comradeship
Cultural models for describing military comradeship as central to the experience of military training were certainly available in interwar Finland, as displayed by Mika Waltari’s 1931 description of his own military service. Waltari depicted military comradeship with an intensity and warmth that is exceptional, but matched the contemporary celebration of military comradeship e.g. in German associations for veterans from the Great War, as studied by Thomas Kühne. Waltari actually made the relationships among the conscripted soldiers the key theme of Where Men Are Made. His first impressions of army life, as described in the book, are dominated not by barking officers and horrible wake-up calls, but by the friendliness and support of the other soldiers upon his arrival at his regiment in Helsinki. He is delighted to describe the atmosphere on his first night in the barracks, when the lights have just been switched off, stealthily smoked cigarettes glow in the dark, a small jug of smuggled vodka mixed with water goes around, and the conscripts whisper stories to each other. When he is transferred to NCO school a few days later, he joins a group of conscripts sharing his own social background. Half the men in his tent at summer camp were university students and several alumni of the Norssi lyceum, the same elite school in Helsinki Waltari himself had attended. “It is almost like coming home”, he writes.
A 22-year old Bachelor of Arts at the time, Waltari described his recruit training in terms reminiscent of a boy scout camp; a time of boyish eagerness, playfulness and comradeship in midst of the lyrically described Finnish summer nature. He gives the reader to understand that he had yearned for belonging and attachment to a larger whole in the cosmopolitan artist circles where he had spent the previous years and now immensely enjoyed the warm, close comradeship he found among his old school friends and soldier comrades. He depicts long rainy Sundays spent in the warmth and security of the tent at summer camp, the “strangely homely and lovely twilight feel”, some soldiers playing cards, others smoking (although it is prohibited), someone writing a letter and Waltari and his friends in a serious mood, thinking about the future: “We are still boys, who only know life from a very narrow sphere, from home, school, some small experiences, and sports achievements. Now we all have more serious eyes than usually. We feel the binding and demanding beckoning of real life in the distance. Until Muusio again takes to teasing Lahtikarhu…” Whereas playing war games was meaningless and contrary to the dignity of the men Haanpää depicted, Waltari and his middle-class comrades enjoy recruit training at the summer camp as a last sheltered haven, a relapse into the carelessness of boyhood, before adult life with its responsibilities and worries. “Actually everything is very much a game for us. (…) We are only boys. It is wonderful to leave all thinking, forget about historical dates and biographies and scientific research methods.”
Waltari enjoys sharing joy and sadness with his comrades, the lazy hours at the service club, the “growing manhood, melancholy and longing” of autumn nights at the barracks. He feels “the magical unity of the troop” as they march singing through camp. One night towards the end of recruit training, when Waltari is awake as assistant duty officer, he walks along the tents full of sleeping conscripts and reflects on the weeks spent at summer camp: “I already know that my purest and manliest memories will be associated with this summer. In my mind, I pass through the beautiful, hot days, – all the fatigue, depression and euphoria. The boys talk in their sleep. One thing at last I have found. The beautiful, genuine rejoicing of comradeship, the community of downheartedness and gladness. Every single boy is my friend, every single gray blouse arouses a warm quiver of comradeship within me.” How could the young Waltari express such a certainty that these would be the “purest and manliest” experiences of his life? Here, the cultural notions and narrative models informing Waltari’s story-telling strongly shine through.
The Difficulty of Describing Comradeship
Surely, Waltari was not the only man in interwar Finland who experienced and enjoyed warmth, closeness and support among his soldier comrades. Yet either the Finnish men writing down their army stories in the 1970’s did not experience the close military comradeship described by Mika Waltari, or they were unable or unwilling to explicate what comradeship or friendship with other men had meant to them during their military service. A whole set of the questions in the 1972–1973 ethnological questionnaire referred to the conscripts’ activities among themselves. For example, the ethnologists asked, “What did you do in evenings or other off-duty hours when you were not permitted leave? What games were played, what songs were sung and what was talked about? Was alcohol ever brought to the barracks? What about women? Was there betting? How was the time spent in the service club?” Some of all these questions would easily have accommodated even sentimental narration about comradeship, for example, “What kind of esprit de corps or feeling of togetherness reigned among the men in your dormitory, squad, platoon, company, military unit or service branch?”
Yet on this matter most answers were shortish, in the vein of “the group spirit was good”. The informants’ stories about comradeship tended, just like the questions asked by the ethnologists, to concentrate on the soldiers’ off-duty activities together, not their emotions for each other. They mention things such as singing, playing cards (although this was not permitted), discussing and telling each other stories, going for walks, wrestling or dancing to the accordion or violin of some fellow conscript. Some men were assiduous letter writers, others spent much time talking, playing games or reading books and newspapers in the service club, some only sat around in the squad room deep in their own thoughts.
Recruit reading the paper while drinking a coffee during leisure-time in the garrison of Kontioranta
A couple of informants mention a “strong feeling of togetherness”, but the general impression is that the soldiers were mainly bored in their eventless and confined off-duty hours. One informant who wrote ten full pages A4 about his military training gave this answer to the question about what the soldiers did off duty: “nder this question I seriously tried to recall how that scarce spare time was spent, but I could not find any point of reference, there hardly was anything special.” Some fragments in the reminiscences hint at, if not intimacy, then at least a relaxedness among the conscripts regarding certain forms of intimacy and sentimentality that in later periods might have been considered ridiculous for a 21-year old man. One example is the habit of dancing in härkäpari [~oxen couple] – two men dancing together for the lack of female partners. In today’s world this would give rise to jests and allusions to homosexuality, yet to working men in the 1920’s and 1930’s, often used to living for periods in all-male environments such as work camps for mobile teams of workmen in forestry, rafting, road and railroad construction etc, it perhaps was quite natural. The soldiers’ autograph albums, where the soldiers wrote down song storys, jokes and poems and illustrated them with drawings, provide another clue. One informant
recalled that the contents of the song-book storys were so indecent that they could not be taken back home upon disbandment. He failed to mention, however, that significant elements in the contents of these notebooks were highly sentimental love poems, often written down by comrades in each other’s albums, elaborating on the theme of unrequited love or being left by a lover. Although love in these poems is heterosexual, the popularity of this shared folklore among the soldiers hints at an emotional openness among the conscripts that the informants did not usually remember or wish to highlight half a century later.
The men participating in the 1972–1973 collection, aged circa 55 to 75, were perhaps simply not inclined to speak openly. To feel or even write about the kind of enchantment expressed by Waltari would possibly have seemed strange to them. Even if some of them would have been willing to describe it, they might have lacked a language and narrative form to do so. Army stories as an oral narrative genre tend to focus on anecdotes about memorable incidents, not on descriptions of psychological states or social relationships. On the other hand, the silences on this account should perhaps be taken at face value, as indications that the bonds formed between men in military training often were not deeply personal. The questionnaire asked informants whether they later stayed in touch with their comrades from military training, and they usually answered in the negative.
The roughness of military comradeship
In Pentti Haanpää’s army stories, there are hardly any traces of the warm comradeship of the kind that Mika Waltari was so enchanted with. The conscripts Haanpää describes band together mainly in opposition to their superiors, in wild partying or in bursts of black humour, easing the mental pressure of living under the officers’ oppression. The laughter of military humour, as described by Haanpää, could be directed not only against the superiors as a vehicle for symbolic resistance. He was keen to show his readers that the joke among soldiers was often at a comrade. In one of his stories, a group of soldiers being transported by train in a cattle wagon without a toilet grab hold of their comrade who is relieving himself through the open door and hold him fast, trousers down and bare-bottomed, as the train passes a station filled with people. The others are splitting their sides with laughter, but the victim is enraged and the joke results in a fistfight. – This was the section that Haanpää’s regular publishers above all wanted removed, but the author fiercely resisted omitting these particular elements of comradeship from his depiction of soldiering. (Nigel’s comment: sounds exactly like the type of thing we did in the NZ Army – military humour at it’s lowest – I remember a trip we did where one of the guys was pissing out of the side of the old Bedford RL as we rocketed down the highway – overtook a car and he kept pissing along the side of the car and onto the windscreen as we went past – the look on the old couples faces in the car as we went past had the rest of us pissing ourselves laughing….the NCO's or officers would have had us for breakfast if they'd caught on.....)
In the last story of Fields and Barracks, some conscripts celebrate their approaching discharge by organising a “love party”, bringing prostitutes to the barracks at night. Haanpää hardly intended this story as a sympathetic depiction of military comradeship, but rather as an image of soldiers giving way to pent-up pressures in a crude and orgiastic manner. The commotion of the “partying” keeps awake those conscripts who would only want to sleep. The medic, “a tall and religious boy” is woken up and persuaded to provide his partying “comrades” with protection against venereal disease, in spite of his shock and revulsion with the whole business. A few days later, on their very last night in military service, the soldiers bring smuggled liquor to the barracks and have a noisy drinking-bout, “vomit and pieces of lockers and stools littering the floor”. (Nigel’s comment: again, sounds more realistic to me: as one of my old NCO’s when I was a young guy on my first overseas exercise and partying up in Singapore at the end of the exercise said to us “A soldier who won’t fuck, won’t fight"…and the party we had at the end of Basic Training was something else - to this day I still remember the pain the next morning - one of the worst hangovers of my life.....).
Only the second to last paragraph of Haanpää’s book indicates some kind of positive solidarity among the soldiers, as they bid farewell to their comrades. Together, they had lived a year under the same roof, …endured hardships and shared joys, dragged heavy boots in the dust of summer roads or so often hit the wet ground of the fatherland. Together they had sung a song, laughed and cursed, maybe enjoyed comfort from the pleasures of this world from the same bottle or the same woman. Now they parted possibly never to share the same road again. There is a hint of nostalgia here, yet Fields and Barracks as a whole conveys a feeling of slight distaste for the form that even the non-hierarchical relationships among the soldiers take on in the corruptive world that was Pentti Haanpää’s picture of the conscript army.
ex Ngāti Tumatauenga ("Tribe of the Maori War God") aka the New Zealand Army
-
Philip S. Walker
- Member
- Posts: 1113
- Joined: 06 Jan 2011, 18:44
Re: (Permanent) Army Training leading up to the Winter War?
I may have missed something, but when exactly did Mika Waltari make the quoted statements about this military service? It may be worth remembering that his great novels "The Egyptian" and "The Etruscan" (stupidly abbreviated English titles, by the way) are very anti-militaristic, some would even say pacifist books that go to great lengths to show the futility of war. Quite depressing, actually, but outstanding novels nevertheless. You sometimes wonder what they put in the drinking water in Finland!
Regarding doing Finnish National Service in the 1970s, and old colleague of mine once described it as a kind of hell he wouldn't even expose his worst enemy to. He had two stories to describe this. One had happened a week or two into his service when his platoon of recruits had been dumped in a forest in the middle of nowhere in the winter. Their two sergeants had jumped on a couple of bicycles and said: "Just stay here and wait for us, we'll be back in an hour with some food and stuff." Unfortunately, the sergeants never returned until a week later, when they appeared with big smiles on their faces and said: "How are you doing, pojkar? Unfortunately we got shot on the way."
The other story happened because this guy thought he was really smart to get an indoor job writing for the regimental paper. Unfortunately, he took his job as a journalist a bit too seriously and wrote an article about something that apparently was deemed a "military secret". Since he couldn't be punished according to the rulebook, he was constantly bullied by the NCO's instead. For instance, he had to carry the heavy iron stove for their "korsu" on march. This made him so heavy that his feet went through the snow even when its surface was hard enough to carry everyone else. Since he was a pretty short guy it was a complete nightmare.
He said the happiest day in his life was when it suddenly turned out that too many recruits from his year had been called up, i.e. the Finns was breaking some agreement they had with the Soviet Union on the allowed size of the Finnish army. Hence, they were told one morning at the parade that they had to be dismissed immediately, though they had only done seven out of eight months. He said he was crying with joy.
Another friend of mine avoided all this by becoming a conscientious objector. As a punishment he was sent out to a Finnish school to teach the pupils Swedish
. (It's actually true.) I hasten to add that I personally love the Swedish language, which is like the pretty and musical sister to my own rather more lazy mother tongue (Danish). But it doesn't seem to be the most popular subject in East Finnish state schools, or so my friend tells me.
Regarding doing Finnish National Service in the 1970s, and old colleague of mine once described it as a kind of hell he wouldn't even expose his worst enemy to. He had two stories to describe this. One had happened a week or two into his service when his platoon of recruits had been dumped in a forest in the middle of nowhere in the winter. Their two sergeants had jumped on a couple of bicycles and said: "Just stay here and wait for us, we'll be back in an hour with some food and stuff." Unfortunately, the sergeants never returned until a week later, when they appeared with big smiles on their faces and said: "How are you doing, pojkar? Unfortunately we got shot on the way."
The other story happened because this guy thought he was really smart to get an indoor job writing for the regimental paper. Unfortunately, he took his job as a journalist a bit too seriously and wrote an article about something that apparently was deemed a "military secret". Since he couldn't be punished according to the rulebook, he was constantly bullied by the NCO's instead. For instance, he had to carry the heavy iron stove for their "korsu" on march. This made him so heavy that his feet went through the snow even when its surface was hard enough to carry everyone else. Since he was a pretty short guy it was a complete nightmare.
He said the happiest day in his life was when it suddenly turned out that too many recruits from his year had been called up, i.e. the Finns was breaking some agreement they had with the Soviet Union on the allowed size of the Finnish army. Hence, they were told one morning at the parade that they had to be dismissed immediately, though they had only done seven out of eight months. He said he was crying with joy.
Another friend of mine avoided all this by becoming a conscientious objector. As a punishment he was sent out to a Finnish school to teach the pupils Swedish
. (It's actually true.) I hasten to add that I personally love the Swedish language, which is like the pretty and musical sister to my own rather more lazy mother tongue (Danish). But it doesn't seem to be the most popular subject in East Finnish state schools, or so my friend tells me.Re: (Permanent) Army Training leading up to the Winter War?
Compulsory military service creates traditions and one such tradition is telling tall tales - and it is not quite impossible that the above stories have been improved not only by telling but also by a creative memory.
The length of service has on a couple of occasions been cut short by one month or so, but this has always been due to the government seeking quick solutions to an acute budget crisis. IIRC the last time this happened was in late 1960s, but it could have been in early 1970's (but definitively not later than that).
The length of service has on a couple of occasions been cut short by one month or so, but this has always been due to the government seeking quick solutions to an acute budget crisis. IIRC the last time this happened was in late 1960s, but it could have been in early 1970's (but definitively not later than that).
Re: (Permanent) Army Training leading up to the Winter War?
Pentti Haanpää’s KENTTÄ JA KASARMI (Fields and Barracks) (1928) and VÄÄPELI SADON TAPAUS (1956)and Mika Waltari’s Siellä Missä Miehiä Tehdään (Where Men Are Made) (1931).Philip S. Walker wrote:I may have missed something, but when exactly did Mika Waltari make the quoted statements about this military service?
Published in Finnish, may be available in Swedish, I have no idea....
ex Ngāti Tumatauenga ("Tribe of the Maori War God") aka the New Zealand Army