Conscript Training in the 1920's .... continued
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.