Stories and Memories of Conscript Soldiering in Finland in the 1920’s

Before I start, a note on sources: the content of this Post is largely taken from a Doctoral Thesis by ANDERS AHLBÄCK, ÅBO AKADEMI UNIVERSITY, entitled “Soldiering and the Making of Finnish Manhood: Conscription and Masculinity in Interwar Finland 1918-1939”. (see here for the source, available online). I have largely stripped out the gender/masculinity content as being superfluous to my Alternative History. However, if you’re interested, do refer to the source. Also note, all photos and associated commentary in this Post have been added by me. All of that aside, Ahlbäck has authored a magnificent historical study which is well worth reading.

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) 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.

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.

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.

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.

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: “[U]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 story’s, 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.

Tensions and Divisions among Conscripts

The memories of Albert Lahti (b. 1907) illustrate an entire set of division lines among the conscripts that also recur in other stories. Lahti was a politically “white” young man who had been a member of the civil guards and was intent on fulfilling his service in an exemplary manner. This, however, repeatedly brought him into conflicts with his “comrades” where political differences were mixed with different attitudes taken to military discipline. In 1927–1928, as Lahti did his military service in the garrison town of Kuopio in Eastern Finland, Finnish society was still highly polarised. The efforts of army officers to screen off their conscripts from leftist agitation and educate them into a proper “patriotic” non-revolutionary mindset had the unintentional side-effect of deepening the political rifts among the soldiers. Similar to many other units throughout the period, recruits in the Kuopio regiment who had military experience from the civil guards were given two weeks leave from recruit training. This practice stirred up much resentment, partly because a membership of the Guards was still a source of animosity to many working class conscripts in the 1920’s, and in part because this special treatment caused envy among the other recruits. Albert Lahti applied for and got extra leave for having received basic military training in the Guards, but later regretted ever applying. He felt he “got into deep shit” because of his special leave. He especially remembered a corporal who for this reason took to the habit of always giving him the most repulsive tasks, saying, “Since you have been on leave for special competence, you surely can perform this assignment too.”

Neither did Lahti’s eagerness to comply with military regulations and demand the same of others go down well with his comrades. He was labeled “war crazy” and made fun of by his comrades. As explained by another informant in the collection: “A real soldier tries to shirk always and everywhere even as a recruit, which means that nothing is ever done without orders, since the chief is always right according to regulations. There are always some “war crazy” people in the crowd, but they were rather frozen out from the group, you did not talk much with them etc., they attempted to take revenge for this when they returned from [NCO] school, by bullying and such.” Albert Lahti remembered with obvious bitterness an incident from his time as a conscript NCO where one of his “comrades” fastened a so-called “hunger cord” on his collar without his noticing. The ‘hunger cord’ was the badge of rank marking a regular NCO. When the other soldiers noticed Lahti’s cord, they started to roar with laughter at him. He rushed away from the group highly offended. “My life was disgusting and sickening then and quite a while afterwards.” This episode brings out the feeling of contempt for the regulars and the ridicule of conscripts taking the “war games” of military training seriously, familiar from Pentti Haanpää’s short stories – with the important exception that Lahti did not himself share this attitude. He was hardly the only one taking military service seriously. In many units, life was thus more complex than in the literary worlds of Pentti Haanpää and Mika Waltari, as soldiers with quite different stances on military service had to live closely together and somehow get along with each other.

Lahti’s zeal to follow regulations brings the regional and social tensions between conscripts to light as well. He was irritated with the conscripts in the older age class who were natives of Kuopio, since they took French leave much more impudently than the country boys. They knew the routes into the city and had places to go. This, he writes, caused disputes within the group and envy towards the town boys. When Lahti was in charge of the guard patrol, he was draconian in controlling permits and “scorched”, i.e. reported, even conscript NCOs who were on unlawful errands, increasing his reputation as “war crazy” and “regular NCO”. In general, however, regional tensions are not mentioned as often in the 1972–1973 collection as political and social divisions among the soldiers. Juha Mälkki has observed tensions between conscripts from urban and rural areas in the memory stories, but concluded that these tensions eased once the men got to know each other better. Conscripts from different parts were strange to each other in the beginning, but mostly soon settled in together as they got used to each other. Class differences seem to have been harder to ignore. In the memories of some men who came to military training from very poor homes the awareness of one’s own underprivilege still resounds. In Albert Lahti’s case, class differences emerge in association with the ‘hunger cord’ incident. It turned out that the “perpetrator” was one of his best comrades, who was envious because Lahti had been appointed vice platoon leader instead of him. According to Lahti, this corporal V. “thought himself to be vastly superior to a poor country cottage boy like me, since he was ‘big and handsome like a gypsy’s horse’ and of very wealthy parents.”

Albert Lahti’s 121 pages of army memories furthermore broach the tensions between the soldier collective and aberrant individuals. There were, as many informants recall, two fundamental unwritten rules among the soldiers; not to steal from each other and never to inform on another soldier. Some add a third rule, which was that such shirking that affected the other soldiers negatively was uncomradely. Lahti recalled that a clerk in NCO school was considered an informer by the other soldiers and castigated by being ridiculed. His comrades each night put a baby’s feeding bottle under his pillow. The clerk twice moved to other squad rooms to escape this harassment, but was treated in the same way by his new “comrades”. When he finally made a complaint and the sergeant-major made an inquiry into the matter, the other soldiers explained that the clerk “is such a big baby that he snitches on the slightest prank, so we try to make him a man”.

Group Pressure and Group Cohesion

Christof Dejung has pointed out that “military comradeship” had a double nature among the Swiss soldiers in the emergency service during the Second World War he studied. On the one hand, the “ideology of comradeship” constituted an attempt by the military authorities to weld the soldiers together with emotional bonds into a cohesive and supportive unit. It was supposed to create group pressure, forcing the individual conscript to comply with the military collective. On the other hand, the comradeship between soldiers could develop a dynamic of its own and result in mutual solidarity among the soldiers directed against their superiors. A military sub-culture emerged among the soldiers, diverging from rules and regulations and difficult for the officers to control. This duality between group pressure emphasizing conformity within the group and group solidarity outwards is clearly visible in the Finnish stories surrounding the institution of the remmiapelli [belt call]. This was the most institutionalised, famous and violent form of “comrade discipline”, where a soldier who broke the unwritten rules of comradeship and offended the group solidarity was subjected to physical punishment. In the belt call, the victim was held fast on a table and a group of other soldiers thrashed him with their belts. In different variations the victim could be stripped naked, wrapped in a wet bed sheet or forced to run the gauntlet. Vilppu Eskelinen (b. 1897) who served in Hamina in 1919 commented, “they were hard punishments to be sure, to make you remember that you had committed an offence, there would have been no discipline without it although it truly was a rough game, some got so much that they fainted.“ According to some informants, the belt call could cause grievous bodily harm, confining the victim to his bed next day or even causing fractures and internal injuries. However, it was impossible for the victims to formally report the abuse because of the “law” against informing. The “belt call” was mostly administered without the officers’ knowledge, but was evidently tolerated or even approved of by the officers. In spite of the often visible traces, nobody recalls it ever having been investigated and punished by superiors. (Nigel’s comment: we had something similar in the NZ Army and there was no real term for it as such, but “grievous bodily harm” was out – I recall our Officer and one of the NCO’s walking in on one such session in Basic Training and calling a halt to it because it was getting a bit out of hand, but nobody was ever disciplined for these…. They must have kept an eye on what was happening because this was the only time I recall things going a bit too far, and it was also the only time they intervened. Nobody who was subject to “group discipline” ever complained about it either).

As historian Thomas Sörensen has pointed out in his study of enlisted hussars in Sweden around 1900, the informal rules of solidarity among soldiers could serve to conceal and perpetuate severe abuses among the soldiers. Describing how Prussian training officers delegated disciplinary measures against “maladjusted” soldiers to their “comrades”, Ute Frevert concludes that this was a way of implicating the soldiers in a “collective of perpetrators” that ensured collective silence. (Nigel’s comment: To which I would say “rubbish,” as any grunt would tell you, it’s the unit’s way of making sure they don’t suffer because of someone not pulling their weight or complying with the rules in a way that adversely affects everyone else…). Just as in the Swiss army as studied by Christof Dejung, the Finnish officers tried to harness group pressure among the soldiers for their own disciplinary purposes. In the 1920’s especially, in the heydays of the “Prussian discipline”, collective punishments for the infringements of individual soldiers were widely in use. This put enormous pressure in the form of the comrades’ anger on conscripts who did not swiftly conform to the group – whether out of defiance or inability. In many cases of comrade discipline, the men punished had drawn down suspension of leaves over their comrades by taking French leave or other breaches of regulations. In some cases, the officers more or less candidly encouraged the conscripts to exercise ”comrade discipline” on especially troublesome individuals. If the victim was unpopular among the other soldiers they might be happy to comply, but invitations to comrade discipline from above could also spark off resistance among the conscripts and weld them together against their superiors.

Former soldiers bring up group solidarity mainly in connection with their squad’s, company’s or regiment’s relationship to military and civilian outsiders. Many mention that they regarded their own regiment or unit as an elite corps or superior to neighbouring units. The officers encouraged the conscripts to feel pride in their own unit. This building of group identity and cohesion through symbolic hierarchies was manifested in forms that ranged all the way from scuffles between the inhabitants of different squad rooms in the barracks and good-hearted exchanges of insults with neighbouring units to huge gang fights and bloodshed between soldiers from different regiments, during evening leaves in the garrison towns. (Nigel’s comment: typical of any Army – read some of the accounts of fights between British Army units – esp. the Para’s or say, regiments with a good number of Glaswegians. We had the same thing in the NZ Army, in my day usually involving the Territorials doing Basic Training and the Regular Force Cadets. All good fun….). Kalle Arola who served in Helsinki in 1928–1929 remembered that there were such street fights between soldiers from the different regiments stationed in Helsinki. Since the honour of one’s regiment was at stake, there was an unconditional rule that one had to join in if one’s comrades became involved in a fight. The soldiers in Arola’s regiment took weapons along for this purpose when they left the garrison for any evening leave – even bayonets, hidden down a bootleg. In garrison towns where no other units were present, there was always the possibility of soldiers and local civilian conscripts picking fights with each other. In those cases, the same rule of solidarity with one’s unit applied.

“Oldies” and “Catfish” – the Age Hierarchy among Conscripts

Finally, the memories of Albert Lahti describe one more axis of tension of great significance among the soldiers, namely the informal hierarchy between the “oldies” and the “catfish”. Because there always had to be a certain number of trained soldiers in military preparedness, there was an overlapping system for the call-ups. At least one age class of “old” soldiers were always in service during the months it took to give the new recruits, the “catfish”, basic military training. These older and younger soldiers formed two distinct soldier groups, with the previous arrivals extremely keen on maintaining and demonstrating a hierarchical difference. In Lahti’s unit, this started before the new recruits had even stepped off the train that brought them to Kuopio, as some older soldiers boarded the train and ran through it shouting at the new arrivals, in an imitation or parody of their officers: “Bugs, get out in the yard – you should have been out already!” From that day, the older soldiers were the “bane and bullies” of Lahti and his fellow recruits. In his unit, it was not the superiors in the formal hierarchy, but the oldies who “blasted” beds or tied the bed clothing together into tight knots when the recruits were out on duty. The catfish could buy “protection” against this by buying their seniors tea, buns and cakes. This blackmailing was especially directed at the most timid boys among the recruits who were terrorised into getting the “oldies” buns all the time from a nearby bakery. Recruits in most interwar military units were insulted by the “oldies” as “mackerels”, “catfish”, “bugs”, “bloodyheads” (referring to the recruits’ new-shaved scalps), “pisshead-catfish” and many other imaginative invectives. “When you met a recruit you always showed them a gesture with the hand as if sawing off the neck. In other words, you had better cut your throat! Seeing a recruit coming towards you in town you felt he certainly is such an idiot! A recruit, a pisshead catfish.” The recruits were also often told to go hang themselves; they might as well kill themselves, because unlike the oldies who were soon to be disbanded the catfish would, they were told, never get out of the army.

The older soldiers arranged various “welcomes” for the recruits, such as putting bricks, barbed wire, logs of wood etcetera in their straw mattresses; or treating them to a “piss alarm call” which meant waking them up in the middle of the night with some hellish noise, having them fall in a formation and taking them to the lavatories – sometimes repeatedly. The “oldies” seized parts of the younger soldiers’ food, such as the pieces of meat in the soup, leaving only the broth to the “mackerels”. They tried to trick recruits to buy all kinds of army equipment or simply stole their equipment forcing them to buy it back, and so on. The bullying of recruits by their conscript squad leaders could be seen as a part of this hazing of the younger soldiers by the previous age class, although with one significant difference: the squad leaders could use or abuse the absolute power of command they had over the recruits and disguise hazing as training or disciplinary measures. Those who did their military service towards the end of the interwar period remembered the conscripted squad leaders as the worst tormentors of the younger conscripts, not the regular NCOs, officers, or the older private soldiers. Arvo Virtanen who was called up in 1933 wrote, “The [conscripted] corporals’ power was total – one corporal had a recruit wash the gaps between his toes with the recruit’s own toothbrush. Making someone dance with a broom or closeorder drill with empty boots were amusements of the corporals, together with many other forms of bullying.”

The hazing rituals in the Finnish conscript army have been extensively studied by ethnologist Pekka Leimu (1985). He observes that hazing by the “oldies” in most units mainly took the form of “welcome ceremonies”. The older soldiers wanted to immediately establish a firm informal hierarchy between them and the younger soldiers. Once that was taken care of there was no need for theatrical rituals, apart from verbal abuse. Normally, material hazing was repeated or prolonged only if the younger soldiers somehow resisted or challenged the informal hierarchical order. However, in some branches of the armed forces, especially the field artillery and cavalry, hazing was especially ingrained and often took on brutal forms. Leimu explains the differences in cultures of hazing between different service branches with the fact that officers educated in imperial Russia dominated the cavalry and artillery and somehow disseminated old hazing traditions from Russian military academies among their conscripts. The infantry, on the other hand, dominated by Jäger officers educated in Germany, was relatively free from hazing until its forms slowly spread there too, due to officer circulation and an emergent culture of hazing at the new national cadet school in Helsinki. Increasing measures were taken to stamp out hazing, such as lodging recruits and older soldiers in different corridors or buildings. However, Leimu thinks many officers probably tolerated the older soldiers’ hazing of the recruits because they thought it was a necessary and beneficial form of initiation and socialisation into military life. However, as Leimu points out, military hazing was not a true initiation rite, since the recruits were never taken up into the older soldiers’ community and never accepted as their equals. The hierarchical relationship between oldies and catfish prevailed until the oldies were disbanded.

In the words of Albert Lahti, “only then [the catfish] were admitted to be human beings”, meaning that only then could they move up the ladder to become oldies themselves – and manifest their position by oppressing the new recruits in their turn. Leimu interprets this progression as a reflection of the fact that the conscripts in the peacetime army organisation were never allowed to pass the borderline running between conscripts and regulars. In a kind of imitation, the soldiers therefore constructed a borderline and hierarchy among themselves, at least allowing the conscripts to feel a sense of advancement and superiority in relation to the recruits. To phrase it slightly differently, I would say the oldies could lessen their own sense of being subjugated, and ease the tension between their sense of masculinity and soldiering, by erecting a relationship of masculine domination and superiority in relationship to the “un” catfish. In the final analysis, it is not possible to draw definite conclusions from these materials about how Finnish men in military training related to and felt about their comrade soldiers and whether some deeper and more coherent solidarity among them emerged from the barracks. What we can observe, however, is how men used or refrained from using particular images of comradeship in their story-telling. On that account, it is striking how the memories collected in 1972–1973 do not celebrate military comradeship in any way even remotely reminiscent of Mika Waltari’s depictions. It seems plausible that comradeship is not as important to narration about peacetime military training as it is to telling stories about war experiences. In his study of comradeship among German soldiers and war veterans during the twentieth century, Thomas Kühne suggests that the celebration of military comradeship is a way of directing attention away from the destruction, killing, and atrocities committed by men in war and conjure a deeply human image of soldiering. Since no killing takes place in peacetime military education, that at least constitutes no reason to emphasise comradeship in army stories. The soldiers in stories about peacetime military training always appear as victims of bullying and other hardships, not as perpetrators.

Mika Waltari and Pentti Haanpää harnessed depictions of the nature of comradeship to obvious political purposes. Waltari wanted to defend the military system and the spirit of collectivism inherent in “white” nationalism and found use for images of close, warm and happy military comradeship. Haanpää was intent on criticising the system and its corrupting impact on conscripts and therefore painted a less rosy picture of comradeship. All this said, it is evident that Waltari’s and Haanpää’s depictions also reflect real differences in their personal experiences of military comradeship, in part owing to the different socio-cultural composition of their units. Their active participation in the interwar politics of conscription nevertheless amplified these differences and made them significant for their story-telling. The men writing down their memories of military training in the 1970’s wrote in a different temporal period where the political heat around the issue of how to organise military training had abated a long time ago. Enthusiastic images of military comradeship were not necessary for the stories they wanted to tell, not the way Waltari needed it for his defence of the existing cadre-army system. Yet neither were their stories Haanpää-like dystopias of how they had been morally corrupted or abused by this particular way of organising military training. None of the 1972–1973 narrators seem to have been intent on criticising the cadre army’s very foundations the way Haanpää did. As will be discussed further in the next section, an important guiding principle for their story-telling was rather to tell something about themselves, about the hardships they had endured and their own strategies for coping with the paradoxes and challenges of military training. They certainly wanted to convey a true picture to posterity about what military training had really been like in their times, but to many of them, army stories were essentially a part of their own life stories. Theirs were essentially individualistic stories about one man finding self-confidence and strength to be independent from others. In those stories about soldiering and manhood, close comradeship could not be the most central element.

Submission or Resistance: Coping with Military Service

How did Finnish conscripts respond to the challenges facing them in the military? What strategies of coping did they choose? Here, the different strands of this thesis become interwoven. There are connections between how conscripts described the comradeship among the soldiers, how they depicted the soldiers’ reactions to military discipline, and how they attempted to solve the paradoxical demands of military service.

One strategy of dealing with the humiliating experiences of being forced into subordination was to use the available space for resistance – and tell stories about that resistance for years after. This strategy is found in many of the 1970’s memory stories. The memories abound with stories about how the conscripts managed to shirk duties, fool the officers, leave without permission, give smart repartees to dumbstruck officers or even physically fight back. Although some informants proudly describe how they themselves stood up to abusive officers, most tell the stories of “resistance heroes” observed and remembered with fascination – although not always undivided admiration – by the other, more cautious soldiers. One typical such story of resistance is Karl Rosenberg’s (b. 1901) recollections of how three ”merry rogues” were to be punished for drunkenness. They were lined up in the front of the rest of their company with full backpacks for santsi, extra duty, but they had fooled the officers by filling their backpacks with tin washbasins and other lightweight objects. When the sergeant started commanding them to run, hit the ground, etcetera, they obeyed orders, but did it in slow-motion “like a slowed-down sports film”, making the whole company roar with laughter. The captain was furious, “jumping up and down fists clenched in front of those boys screaming they were going to jail every one of them”. Rosenberg commented, “The Jäger captain had hardly seen anything like it on his journey to Germany, it was something only Finnish humour could bring by.”

Memories of how the soldiers could strike back against some particularly disliked superior by group solidarity were cherished in the narrative tradition. For example, in Kiviniemi in 1932, a loathed sergeant major in Vilho Lepola’s unit had just been transferred to another unit, but had to pass by the barracks of his previous subordinates on his way to the office. The first morning he walked past, the conscripts gathered by the window and hurled insults over him, telling him to “climb that tree, arse foremost, and without using your hands!” In spite of the sergeant major’s threats of reporting them, the shouting only intensified. The next morning, the same spectacle was repeated, after which the sergeant major started taking another route to his office. Comradeship in the reminiscences thus displays elements of both pressure on individuals to submit to army discipline and a solidarity making resistance possible. It is akin to Pentti Haanpää’s muddled depiction of a coarse and individualistic comradeship between soldiers, ambiguously both supportive and corruptive; a bond that was not in itself the cause of the soldiers’ resistance and recalcitrance, but still incited them to defiance.

Among Pentti Haanpää’s soldier comrades, the obvious response to being forced into submission was to attempt resistance in any form possible. The conscripts he portrayed have no personal motivation for a military service that appears meaningless to them and offers them nothing in return. Therefore, they try to reclaim at least some of their personal autonomy, or just make their existence a little bit more comfortable, by lying, cheating, shirking and malingering. As the conscripts are prevented from doing “honest” work, they find more dignity in doing nothing at all than in fooling around in the exercise fields playing war games. They brag to each other about how they have fooled and cheated the officers. They compete over who is most skilled in shirking duty without being caught. Behaviour such as sleeping while on guard duty becomes a matter of refusing complete subordination and regaining some control over one’s own life and affairs. As a narrator, Haanpää was obviously fascinated by those characters among the soldiers who dare strike back against the officers, be it only by putting itching powder in a hated lieutenant’s clothes without being caught. (Nigel’s comment: we did similar things in the NZ Army: with one young Officer who was a complete asshole, we went to a great deal of trouble on an exercise to track down the platoon he was in command of, find the latrine area and wire it with trip-flares and thunderflashes (practice grenades for exercise which I’m sure you’re familiar with) and then have a couple of guys there to command detonate them when he came out for a crap – he did and it was spectacular – talk about the shit hitting the fan ….. A lot of official time was spent trying to track down the perpatrators of that one but funnily enough, no-one had any idea, not even the guys in his platoon who saw the perps doing a runner immediately afterwards. One of those things that exists in every army without a doubt).

Several of the individual conscripts he describes are soldiers serving extra time because of repeated breaches of regulations. They have ceased to care about their ever renewed punishments and prolonged military service. Their sole remaining purpose in life is to demonstrate their defiance, unyieldingness, willpower and individualism to the officers and the other soldiers. In one story, one of these sotavanhus [~old man of war] characters commits suicide in order to take his revenge on a hated officer, blowing them up together with dynamite. In another, a sotavanhus spends his third Christmas Eve in the army, serving extra time and freezing in a cold and lice-infested prison cell. Yet he is still filled with pride when he overhears the younger soldiers on guard talking about him with admiration mingled with terror, calling him one of the wildest men ever known. These characters are die-hard individualists. Their resistance against military discipline and abusive superiors is not based in the group solidarity among comrades. They wage their private wars against the system, only occasionally bonding together with their comrades in collective actions of defiance. The prestige as tough guys that they enjoy in other men’s eyes probably spurns them on, although they certainly are not model men. Their destinies are more frightening than attractive to the “ordinary” conscript.

The most common forms of resistance described in the 1972–1973 collection were, however, passive ones: shirking duty, pretending to be stupid in class, saluting slowly and half-heartedly, leaving without permission and trying to return unnoticed. According to the informants, these strategies were specifically aimed at especially disliked officers and NCOs. Thus, they are not presented as an all-pervasive attitude to soldiering among the conscripts like in Pentti Haanpää’s tableaux of military life. Even if the informants liked to celebrate isolated instances of resistance in their storytelling, an all-out story based on how they had shirked their way through the entire pre-war military training was probably not an image of themselves they could be comfortable with after the wars they had fought in 1939–1944.

Adjusting to Military Service

Resistance was not the only way of preserving one’s dignity in face of the military system. There was an opposite way, making adjustment and submission into a achievement in itself, as illustrated by Mika Waltari’s army book. Among his comrades, conscripts from the educated, urban upper middle classes, submitting to army discipline was evidently not at all as problematic as for Pentti Haanpää’s lumberjacks and farmhands. The reasons had much to do with class and social background. Waltari and his comrades were well adapted to benefit from the military system they had entered. They had been brought up and trained within a social environment and a school system that largely put the same demands on them as the army – a sense of duty, self-restraint, obedience and discipline. Just like the families that brought them up and the schools that educated them, the army motivated these conscripts by the promised reward of elite membership. The army confirmed their sense of being predestined for future leading positions by automatically picking them out for leadership training. It stimulated their sense of competition – a central element for middle-class boys and young men since the nineteenth century – by putting the prestigious reserve officer training within reach for those with the best performance. When Waltari has reached the stage of reserve officer training, he describes how their superiors now treat the cadets like young gentlemen. “We feel proud to be part of the elite among Finnish youth. It strengthens our self-respect and stifles presumption and boasting. We must really become men, who are able to fulfil the task we have been given.” That task is both to hold the reins in society and public life and to lead the troops, to “die among the first, be an example to others.”

According to historian Veli-Matti Syrjö, students from bourgeois families in interwar Finland coveted the status of reserve officer, since it was evidence of both personal ability and proficiency and a patriotic sense of duty – shouldering the responsibility going with being a member of the elite. The boyish “games in the sun” that Waltari and his comrades play during recruit training therefore have a competitive edge. Although these conscripts certainly revel in small breaches of regulations and shirking minor chores, such as cleaning or potato peeling, peer group pressure among them is directed towards showing that they are fit to pass any test, “making it where the others do”, always keeping up with the others and preferably even outperforming them. Exhausted by tough marches and exercises, the pupils of NCO school jokingly shout to each other: “Se tekee vain terää!”, a Finnish saying meaning “It only does you good!” but that also could be understood as alluding to sharpness, the sting of a blade or the maturing of crops. Mika Waltari resolved the issue of subordination by presenting the conscripts as boys on the threshold of real manhood and cast submission not as passive, oppressive and forbidding, but as active and productive of a more mature and disciplined citizenship. Contrary to the strong individualism among Haanpää’s rural workers, Waltari’s notions of maturity were connected with a collectivist view of society. He contrasted the immature selfishness of youth with adult responsibility which is about conquering oneself, adjusting to the demands of real life in a society with others, and “learning the hardest and greatest skill of all” – submitting oneself to another’s will, for the sake of the common good. The military, he claimed, furthers this development, by “grinding away the defiance of false self-respect and immature individualism”.

He thinks back at the follies of his youth, such as showing off on the dance floors of Paris jazz clubs, thinking, “thank God that is all past now. I have entered a new, manlier life. My individual foolishness and troubles do not mean anything anymore. I am only a small, insignificant part of a powerful whole.” This “powerful whole” is for Waltari in some instances the nation, country or fatherland, but first and foremost the community of soldier comrades. Manhood is achieved through taking part in the world of the military and coping with its demands. In this respect, there is an anxiousness in Waltari to prove something to himself and to other men and demonstrate that he can pass the test of soldiering. “(…) I am secretly proud of myself. Proud that I can make it where the others do. That I have been able to submit even in the tightest spots. I have conquered myself, – I am proud that I am taking part, here, where men are made.” The comradeship and community of conscripts fulfilling the tasks and duties set by the military seems to constitute the “making of men” that Waltari marks as the central topic of his book in its very title. Just as in the rhetoric of the Suomen Sotilas magazine, he claims that men leave the army with more vigour, strength and courage. “A new sense of self-confidence and responsibility has slowly grown within us, a consciousness that after these days life opens up before us in its entirety and freedom with its own commitments. And if we have coped here, why should we not cope in the larger world.”

Subverting the notion of a “school for men”

Pentti Haanpää made ruthless satire of that very same notion of the army as a ‘school for men’ that Waltari happily used. The men in Haanpää’s stories certainly change during their military service, yet not the way idealistic army propaganda such as the storys in Suomen Sotilas would have it. In Haanpää’s army stories, military training produces defiance, underhandedness, cynicism and programmatic indolence. A recruit in one of Haanpää’s stories who witnesses the cunning of an older soldier malingering realizes that “this is how things are done in this firm. “(…) A real man prevails and a real man helps himself.” His squad leader tells him, “Tricks are what works in the army! No use yearning or moaning here. To be sure, a man will be trained and taught here. Everyone is a catfish [tenderfoot] at first, but here at last an ordinary man learns, becomes overly learned, knows his tricks, knows how to arrange things for himself…” The recruit learns his lesson; you cannot get by in the army without lying and cheating; “you will not live long if you try to follow all the regulations and all the bosses’ fancies”. In spite of this, the recruit stubbornly tells his squad leader that he still believes that the army is “a good school for a man: your reason develops and your nature is hardened.”

For Haanpää’s conscripts, who had apparently been doing adult men’s work and supporting themselves for years before the call-up, manhood was not something the army could confer on them, but rather something it could offend, diminish or take away through the humiliation of exaggerated subordination. For the middle-class town boy Waltari, manhood evidently still had to be reached or at least proven to a sceptical world – parents, teachers, peers, and not least men from the lower classes. For the artist and intellectual, the army provided a valuable opportunity to increase his social prestige. The soldiers portrayed by Haanpää, however, did not see military training in the same light. Being men from the working classes, with elementary education at the most, the prestige of officer training was out of their reach. To them, the obvious answer to the contradiction between submission and their own independence was to resist submission to the military order, at least to some degree. Pentti Haanpää did not attempt to find a solution to the paradox between autonomy and military submission within the military system. The only solution he offered consisted in leaving this corrupting world. The Jäger sergeant-major in the opening story of Fields and Barracks manages to turn his life around for the better in the end – by resigning from the army and going home to take over his family’s farm after his father’s death.

In spite of everything, Haanpää never criticises the principle that men should bear arms and defend their country when needed. Rather, his train of thought bears remarkable similarity to the Finnish Agrarian Party’s criticism of the cadre army system and its arguments in favour of a militia army. To the Agrarians’ thinking – and obviously Haanpää’s as well – a sound Finnish citizen-soldier should not be isolated from society in barracks and garrisons, but live in civilian society, doing his proper work to support himself and his family. He only now and then should be trained in the use of weapons together with his fellow men, for a day or two, or perhaps a few weeks each year. Thus, he should stay within a man’s true place in peacetime, instead of entering the abnormal and corruptive social world of the cadre army, with its militaristic ideology and aristocratic heritage from Russia and Prussia.

The attractive story of growing through hardships

There are many indications that entering the interwar army was a shocking and painful experience for many men. According to Albert Lahti, a visible transformation of the conscripts took place over the course of their military service. The starting point, a recruit with his head shaven and the regiment’s worst and most worn-out equipment, was a sorry sight: No wonder that the poor recruit’s face was fearful like a hare in the field and thus easily recognisable as a catfish with [hundreds of days] left. Then when you had started to grow up in age and wisdom and become a man in the second oldest contingent, you could exchange your clothes for better ones, your hair could start to grow a little bit (…) and your step grew more secure, and then even your face started showing “signs of life”. Lahti further remembered that as a conscripted NCO you could be very demanding with the recruits. Yet ”when it came to a man who dared yell out ”only a few more days”, which you could see anyway by his longer hair, the angle of the cap, the relaxed and carefree behaviour etc., he would not [salute you], and many conscripted corporal or sergeant (…) did not bother or – to be honest – dare to demand it.”

Lahti’s formulation that a recruit’s “frightened” face only started “showing signs of life” roughly halfway through military training was perhaps articulated tongue-in-cheek. The humorous, a bit causerie-like style Lahti uses here runs through large parts of many men’s military stories. In his study of folklore concerning Finnish lumberjacks, Jyrki Pöysä writes that humour within folklore is often a way of protecting oneself and the audience when difficult things are touched upon. Within the military and other primarily-male groups, humour can also be a way of marking affinity without forgoing the personal distance required among men. Humour in army stories can thus be a method of providing emotional distance from memories and experiences that were truly hurtful at the time, but also a way of masking the positive emotional significance of closeness to other men during military service. Eero Tuominen, who journeyed to his regiment under dark skies in April 1919 and who felt like he was in jail two weeks into his service, serves as another rather explicit example of this. Tuominen writes that started feeling better about his military service when summer came, recruit training ended and he was ordered to NCO school. The alumnus of a rural folk high school, he enjoyed the company of the other pupils, “a select body, more developed”. He made friends among other sportsmen at NCO school, “even some townsfolk” who introduced him to the sights of Turku. As autumn fell, he still felt depressed and especially Sunday afternoons at the barracks were “hopelessly dreary”. In October he was promoted to corporal. “I was quite a boss in the recruits’ eyes. (…).” However, I never got used to that bowing to me, it felt repulsive.” In February, he was put in charge of the regiment’s equipment stores. He got his own room, which he turned into a meetingpoint for conscripts from his home district and sportsmen from different units.

Then, finally, disbandment day arrived. Tuominen remembered he felt that this was the happiest in his life so far: “As I looked back on my almost one and a half year long military service, which took up two beautiful summers and one winter of my best youth, I noticed, that even if it was a mentally very difficult time for me, I eventually took to it like a duck to water. I noticed that I got along and succeeded in whatever I was confronted with. I felt my self/confidence grow. I noticed how well I got along with all kinds of people. (…) Freedom gone, homesickness, longing and bitterness all made that life so repulsive. But little boys were made into men there. That must be admitted. Although not everybody became a conscript NCO and few ever had their own room, the narrative of slowly improving conditions throughout military service is typical for the whole body of army memories. Recruit training was often remembered and described as the hardest and toughest time, not only in terms of everything being new and unfamiliar, but also because the focus of the military curriculum in this time period was on disciplining the recruits by means of close-order drill and indoor duties. To make things worse, the hazing of recruits by older soldiers mainly occurred in the first weeks of service. Throughout the first months of training, the soldiers’ squad leaders were conscripts from the older contingent, intent on paying back through their juniors what they themselves had suffered as recruits. As the older contingent was disbanded and the conscripts were led by squad leaders from their own contingent who could not boss them about in the same manner, many of the hierarchical tensions in the soldiers’ everyday life eased. Moving on from the close-order drill of recruit training to field training, NCO school or different special assignments were usually described as a great improvement – although NCO school could also mean even harsher discipline and “being a recruit all over again”. According to Juha Mälkki, a “mechanical barracks discipline” was replaced by freedom from routines and group-discipline during field exercises. Evidently, the regulars were also in general somewhat laxer in disciplinary matters when dealing with older soldiers.

The informal hierarchy between older and younger soldiers provided rich materials for articulating the experience and crafting the narrative of conscripted soldiering as a story of development and growth. The disparagement of the younger soldiers served to make the “catfish” a kind of counter image, a foil against which the “oldies” could stand out as mature and magnificent. The closer disbandment day grew, the stronger did the “oldies” manifest that they had served their apprenticeship and were now skilled warriors. On disbandment day, the process had reached its terminus. Valtteri Aaltonen’s company commander – just like his officer colleagues writing in Suomen Sotilas – encouraged this thinking as he delivered a farewell speech to Aaltonen and his comrades, telling them they certainly were “handsome men” upon leaving. As Eino Sallila and his comrades returned to the train station in their village and stood on the platform saying goodbye, they felt “we were now fully men”. Remembering how they had departed from that very station one year earlier, they laughed at their own childishness back then. Other men as well embraced the notion that what they had been through had given them self-confidence and made them men. “That time was not wasted. There during one year a shy and timid country boy grew into a man who held his ground in the struggle of life.” “Afterwards my military service has shimmered in my mind as one of the memory-richest times of youth. Sometimes I have recalled it as the time when I was raised to be a man. I have heard many who have been to the army say: ‘Only when he has done his military service does a little boy become a man”.

Overall, however, only nine informants out of the 56 analysed here explicitly mention and co-opt some version of the maxim about the army as a “school for men”. These nine are not obviously different from the average in terms of age, education, profession or whether they got leadership training or not. It is impossible to say, whether the large majority who did not write about the connection between military service and manhood repudiated the notion. Some of them just never made it to the end of the two hundred questions where the ethnologists finally asked what attitude they had taken to their military service afterwards. However, Jorma Kiiski (b. 1903) was actually the only informant in my sample to summarise his memories in a decidedly negative tenor, obviously embittered by the bullying, “Prussian discipline” and misappropriation of the soldiers’ rations and pay that occurred in his unit; “I feel that the service and practices in my time were rather a failure. Pointless pomposity without end, pointless demands and showing-off to the point of brutality that I am the one who commands here and who knows everything. (…) When you are on a common mission, learning to defend the fatherland, there should be some humanity on both sides, also on part of the superiors towards their subordinates. Too much harshness and contemptuous arrogance only fosters anger and bitterness.” Kiiski might be voicing the opinion of many who did not participate in the writing competition or did not bother to speak their mind. Yet even if most men did not explicitly write that it “made them men”, a general impression of reading the stories, is that most informants had a positive attitude to their military service as old men despite their tough experiences at the time. To sum up their memories, they used expressions such as “I have looked back with gratefulness”, “a trouble-free time of my life”, “a fascinating time (…) new exciting things happening every day”, “rich with memories” or “I proudly remember…”

There is a pattern in the army stories of initially emphasising the toughness, even brutality of military training and discipline and still end the narration on a positive note. Several informants comment on the same mechanism of memory that Mika Waltari described: one remembers the positive things; time heals all wounds. Emil Lehtoranta (b.1900) wrote, “My diary gives an even much more austere picture of that form of life than in these memories, time has levelled out one’s opinions.” Eino Kuitunen (b. 1915) reflected, “Even if there was a ‘sting in your breast’ and you were disgruntled over meaningless hammerings [~punishment exercises] in the army (this was called the recruit’s disease), on the whole and now with hindsight it was not at all too bad and the years 1939–1945 demonstrated beyond dispute the necessity of being in the army.” As indicated by Waltari, this process of re-evaluation already started during the military service and speeded up as the men were disbanded. Yrjö Härkälä (b.1912) wrote that in spite of all the soldiers’ fantasies about taking revenge on beastly superiors after disbandment, nobody ever did; “Those small extra exercises, already in the past [on disbandment day] were part of a young man’s life, they only made him a man, and once he had become a man he would not remember them in anger.”

Many narrators obviously took pride in having been “under the roller” and endured a military training that they actually made an effort to portray as extremely tough. Heikki Kolehmainen wrote that during the time of his service, in 1919–1920, the conditions and treatment of soldiers felt horrible, but with time he had come to see that the reasons lay in the primitiveness of the newborn army. The hard exercises hardened those who coped with them, wrote Kolehmainen, who claimed he could still, as a 75 year-old, sense their positive physical effects. Johannes Lindberg (b. 1900), one of the most critical voices in the collection, described very harsh superiors and resentment among the soldiers in the Karelia Guards Regiment in Viipuri, commenting, “to our mind such a hard training was not likely to foster a patriotic spirit”. Yet “it did not leave behind any lasting bitterness (…) it was strange to hear how [former soldiers] later mentioned with a kind of pride that they had served in the Karelia regiment.” Once the “hammering”, the rough treatment, had been endured and was bygone, it could be used to support a narrative identity of oneself as one who could cope with the hardest demands of manhood. Some mention it as a way of marking that their own military training was superior to military training in the 1970’s. “They certainly made a youngster into a man, according to the discipline in those days, nowadays it is inadequate, they go home every week (…) it is easy nowadays and a short time and bad discipline compared to the old days.” “Nowadays the [soldier] material is weak, long hair, hairnets to keep their hair together. Back then they often shaved the head bald using a razor.” Even Jorma Kiiski, who was uncompromisingly bitter and negative over what he had experienced, wrote at the end of his account that in spite of everything he had never tried to frighten boys about military service, “on the contrary I have thought it to be necessary and even useful [for them]. Now it is completely different there [in the army]. Now it is as far as I know needlessly easy and comfortable in every way.”

There are striking similarities between these stories and the understandings of military service advocated by interwar military rhetoric, such as pioneer Kellomäki’s speech about growing in self-confidence and maturity through hardships and submission, published in Suomen Sotilas in 1922. “You have been forced to rely on your own strengths and abilities and thereby your will has been fortified and your self-reliance has grown. (…) You leave here both physically hardened and spiritually strengthened.” (See p. 154 above.) Yet the former conscripts did not just imitate official propaganda from the interwar years. They used some of it elements, but put them into the much bleaker constory of their personal experiences. Unlike Mika Waltari’s path, their route led through the “dark stories” of hardships, conflicts and bullying, which drew both on their own memories and a popular tradition of understanding military service as oppressive of men from the lower classes. The key motive of their stories was not, like in Pentti Haanpää’s army critique, to bring out the inhumanity of the military training system, although they seem to display the same rather individualist notions of masculinity as Haanpää did. They demonstrate how they prevailed, not primarily by force of the support of a tightly knit homosocial collective, but by force of their own growing strength and hardiness. The stories of their hardships are, above all, the epic story of their own coping.

Conscript soldiers and women

Up to this point we have studied Finnish conscript soldiers with reference only to military hierarchies and comradeships, the disciplinary methods and strategies of resistance or submission and their army experiences, with almost no reference made to women. This reflects how most men chose to recollect their military service. Their social relationships to women who were important in their lives at the time – mothers, sisters, female friends, girlfriends or wives – are largely left out of the narrative. However, this exclusion is not complete. In brief passages, even mere sentences or subordinate clauses, women are glimpsed now and again. In the 1972–1973 collection, some men mention in passing that they had a girlfriend or a wife either in their home district or in the garrison town. E.g. Kalle Leppälä (b.1913) had a girlfriend and even became engaged to her during his year in military training. He only mentions her existence as if by accident when accounting for the number of leaves of absence he obtained during his service. In his 357 pages of army memories, the longest story in the material examined by the author of this thesis, he writes nothing at all about what the forced separation from his partner felt like, how he coped with it or how they stayed in touch. Eero Tuominen, whose narrative is extraordinary in its emotional openness and articulateness, is an absolute exception, as he describes the longing for his girlfriend after reporting for service, the bliss of spending time with her on his one precious home leave, the anxiousness that she should find someone else while he was gone, and his sorrow and bitterness as her letters grew increasingly infrequent and their contact eventually flagged.

In Mika Waltari’s otherwise so open-hearted army book, the author only mentions the existence of his own girlfriend on page 91. According to Waltari’s autobiography, he met and fell in love with the woman who later became his wife one month before he reported for military service. In Where Men Are Made, however, he never tells the reader anything about her more than that she has blue eyes and a blue hat. It is not clear whether this was to guard his privacy or because he felt she did not really have a place in a book about his military service. Nevertheless, Waltari effectively omits the woman he chose to share his life with, although she evidently was an extremely important element in his life during his military training. He only hints at the happiness of four days on home leave having something to do with being in love, but he is rapturous in describing his return to camp after “a short sad goodbye” from his fiancée. It is ambiguous whether his happiness that night, back at camp, is due to being in love with his girlfriend or with the return to his groupd of soldier-comrades: “I undress in the dark, in the midst of sleeping boys breathing, the familiar smell of foot cloths and boots. Oh, everything, everything is beautiful.”

Seducers, beaux and innocents

An important part of the military culture reigning in interwar Finnish Army barracks seems to have been the repertoire of “naughty” marching songs. These songs ranged in content from raw pornographic and sometimes misogynist imagery to joyful celebration of the mutual pleasures for both man and woman of sexual intercourse. In all of them, however, a self-image of soldiers was cultivated – sometimes soldiers in general, sometimes the soldiers of one’s own unit in particular – as irresistible seducers of women, always on the move towards the next conquest. The soldier’s relationship to women in these songs, sung on heavy marches to cheer up the mood and copied in the soldiers’ autograph albums, was that of a classic Don Juan. This was also the image of soldiers’ relationships to women in popular Finnish films of the 1930’s. Advertisements for military farces alluded to the power of attraction military uniforms had for women. Using military metaphors for soldiers “conquering” women was usual in the screenplays. Recounting their own time as conscript soldiers, however, men gave a much more diverse picture of the conscripts’ force of attraction on women than in the wish-fulfilling fantasies of indecent songs. Some did not mention the soldiers having had any contact with women during their year of Service – apart from the “Sisters” at the service club, who were usually older than the soldiers, extremely highly respected and regarded as sexually out-of-bounds – whereas others mention that dating local women was common among the soldiers.

In these army memories, men do not brag about having been successful among women as they were soldiers. Some point out that it was hard to find female company in a large garrison town, with a considerable surplus of conscripts. An ordinary penniless infantry man had great difficulty competing with conscripts in the artillery, cavalry and navy who had fancier uniforms – not to mention the NCOs and officers with their well-fitted uniforms and golden insignia of rank. The class barriers in interwar society reoccur in some stories about how girls in finer clothes had to be “left to the officers” at a large ball at the theatre of Kuopio in 1929, or how ordinary soldiers from the countryside mainly dated country girls who worked as housemaids in the town houses of Oulu in 1925–1926. Many conscripts seem to have been rather sexually innocent at 21, as mention often is made of “experienced” or “more experienced” comrades, “womanisers”, who told their comrades wild stories about their sexual adventures or were observed with obvious fascination by their comrades. Contacts between soldiers and prostitutes are mentioned in a small number of stories – although none of the informants admit having paid for sex themselves – but they were evidently extensive enough to worry the military authorities, because of the spread of venereal disease. In this regard, the military system sent the conscripts a double message; the military priests demanded self-restraint and abstinence, lecturing the soldiers on the irresponsibility, filthiness and devastating effects on future marital happiness of contacts with prostitutes. The army medical service, however, took a more pragmatic approach, instructing conscripts who had sexual intercourse during leaves to visit the hospital when they returned for preventive treatment. Concealing venereal disease was punishable.

Mika Waltari, who was the most enthusiastic describer of warm and close comradeship among male soldiers in the author’s material, is also the only one to write at length about the significance of women within the military. His soldiers talk and dream about women when they are in camp and they eagerly date girls when they are back at their town barracks in Helsinki. However, women appear as distant and exotic in this world of men. To some they are creatures to be pursued, seduced and conquered, big game to brag to one’s friends about. Yet to Waltari and his close friends, who are middle-class and with a “good upbringing”, they are above all associated with a vision of the future, of marriage, of emotional satisfaction and security in a stable partnership. One night in camp, Waltari and his comrades lie around talking shyly about these things. “Of course we could talk and brag about the most incredible erotic adventures we have had, which are more or less fantasy. In fact most of us are very innocent, in the dangerous borderlands of manhood. Now that we are healthy and a new strength is growing in our limbs, we all feel distaste for brute erotic looseness. A dark night in some bushes or naked hostel room would be a heavy fall for us. Now that we have something to give, we want to keep ourselves pure – that same word that made such an irritating and banal impression in Christian morality lectures. Now we want to some day, when our true moment has come, give our whole strong youth. Get engaged and married when that time comes. In all of us glitters the beautiful illusory dream of a home of our own. Without our knowing, we are growing closer to society. Free, unfettered youth and the social system are always each other’s enemies. But here, through submitting, a deeper and greater solidarity has unconsciously been impressed upon us.”

In the depiction of this scene, Waltari reproduces an image, familiar from the storys by middle-class men writing in Suomen Sotilas, of conscripts as “pure” young men, living a stage of their lives centred on the community of conscripts, predestined although not yet ready for marrying and heading a household. This image was actually a vital precondition for the notion that the army was the place ‘where men were made’. If the recruits were already living in mature relationships, they would already have been real men and military training could not have been legitimised by claiming it brought them into this state of being. Waltari also makes an association here between submission, military service, becoming a loyal, responsible and useful male citizen, and getting married. Soldiering and fatherhood – in the sense of being responsible for a family of one’s own – thus join each other as two significant currents taking the young man towards adult, mature manhood and patriotic useful citizenship. The silence around marriage and serious partnerships in the other sources does not mean that they were not an important among the lower classes as well. In Pentti Haanpää’s army book, this is only hinted at through a few clues in his stories, yet in analysis it emerges as a key factor behind Haanpää’s criticism of military life. The Jäger sergeant major in his opening story not only goes home to take over his family’s little farm, as previously cited. He “fetches” a girl from the garrison town to live and form a family with her. She is not mentioned before the third to last sentence of the whole story although the Jäger evidently has had a lasting relationship with her. Haanpää lets the reader understand that the Jäger eventually finds a fulfilment that army life can never give him in a classic rural Finnish lifestyle based on marriage, fatherhood, land ownership and productive work. Twice he uses the word “barren” to describe the gritty military training fields, implicitly contrasting them to the proper place of a Finnish man, a field of corn or a timber forest where his labour bears fruit.

One explanation for the omission of girlfriends and wives in army stories and memories might be the habit of “undercommunicating” one’s marital status that ethnologist Ella Johansson has noted in the barracks and working camp culture of Swedish mobile workers in the early twentieth century. Being married and thus head of a family was strongly a part of the ideal for adult men. Yet this was played down among the workers, together with social and economic differences, in order to create a conflictfree atmosphere (one might say an illusion) of equality between men. This would seem to apply to both army barracks culture and the narrative tradition stemming from it. Sexual adventure with women was over-emphasised in army stories, whereas serious commitment with women was under-emphasised.

Finally, the silence of most men on what it was like being separated from one’s mother, sisters and possible female partners – sometimes for a whole year without a single home leave – should probably also be understood as informed by the narrative tradition of commemorating military service. This tradition was reflected and reproduced by the ethnologists organising the 1972–1973 collection. Among the more than two hundred questions they asked their informants, the only one touching upon the existence of women in the conscripts’ lives was a subquestion’s subquestion, under the topic of how evenings off-duty were spent in the barracks: “Was alcohol ever brought into the barracks? What about women?” The otherwise exhaustive questionnaire omitted any references to how the soldiers’ families related to their departure; if and how the conscripts stayed in touch with their families during the service; how they took care of possible problems arising at home due to their absence; or what home-coming was like. These subjects evidently did not belong to the story of a military experience shared by all conscripts. In a sense, leaving out women from the story of Finnish soldiering had a similar effect of strengthening the taken-for-granted notion that women and military matters had nothing to do with each other.

Conclusions: Class, Age and Power in Conscript Stories

Memories and stories about military training in the 1920’s show that popular images and notions varied and partly contradicted the pro-defence viewpoint. Many depictions of the disciplinary practices in use lie closer to the critique of the cadre army delivered by Social Democrats and Agrarians in the period, although men who recounted their own experiences of military training did not subscribe to the notions of its morally corruptive effects on conscripts. Class and age affected how men’s army experiences were formulated. Comparing Pentti Haanpää’s and Mika Waltari’s army books, the contemporary class divisions and politics of conscription serve as an explanatory pattern for the differences between them. From the vantage point of the 1970’s and old age, other men mixed the polarized interpretations of the interwar period into a kind of synthesis that did not serve the purpose of defending or criticising the cadre army, but of crafting a part of their own life-history.

Through his description of military comradeship, Mika Waltari conveyed an image of Finnish conscripts as boyish youngsters, blue-eyed boy scouts on the threshold of manhood and adult life. This was a prerequisite for the notion that military training could project them on a path to a higher level of being, to mature citizenship. That effect gave a positive meaning to the hardships they had to endure along that path. Through forming a community of comrades, a brotherhood-in-arms, Waltari’s citizen-soldiers supported and spurred on each other to learn and train for the task of men, defending the country. At the same time they were taught the self-control and unselfishness needed to submit. This experience, Waltari claimed, endowed conscripts with the self-confidence to face adult manhood with its responsibilities. The effect of Waltari’s narrative – whether it was his intention or not – was to defend the cadre army system by offering an attractive solution to the paradox between adulthood and submission, and claiming that it only changed men for the better.

Pentti Haanpää, on the contrary, suggested an image of Finnish conscripts who were no compliant young boys when they arrived for military service, but rough-hewn adult workmen. Military training had no personal value for them, and without a war to fight the hardships and humiliations involved appeared to them as meaningless sadism and oppression. Haanpää’s soldiers felt offended by military discipline and reacted by resistance and recalcitrance in any form available – shirking, cheating and lying. Haanpää had no use for the sedative notion of supportive comradeship that lessened the strain of life in a cadre army. In his portrayal, comradeship was more about an inflicted life together. He did not attempt to idealise military comradeship or even describe the conscripts’ ways of being men as particularly sympathetic. The message emerging from his stories was rather that this was what common Finnish men are like, like it or not, and if the cadre army system stood in contradiction to it, the military system had to change. To Haanpää’s workmen, the army was an oppressive interruption robbing them of autonomy and dignity, but to Waltari’s middle-class students it offered an opportunity to boost their white-collar self-image with the prestige of being not only warriors, but also the military leaders of their generation. Waltari wrote in the “white” tradition, describing an affinity between men in military service, united across all other differences by gender, nationality and soldiering. Haanpää’s images of soldiering were closely aligned with the political critique of the standing cadre army as an institution corrupting men, both through the oppressive violence of a detached officer caste and through the roughness of comradeship in the “unnatural” circumstances of men living isolated from society in an all-male military hierarchy.

These differences are interestingly congruent with those between the ‘modern’ middle class and traditional rural and working class views. Industrialisation and urbanisation, it has been argued in previous research, robbed the middle-class of its traditional stable foundations: landownership or autonomy as a self-employed artisan. In the emerging modernity, every middle-class man had to prove and demonstrate through “making himself” in the fierce competition of the marketplace. This notion of a need to demonstrate an ability that was not inherited as a social position from one’s father is strikingly similar to Mika Waltari’s eagerness to demonstrate that “he can make it where the others do”. Pentti Haanpää’s conscripts, on the other hand, navigate within a largely rural value system where great value is put on the autonomy based on controlling one’s own labour. The soldiers depicted by Haanpää try to claim a degree of self-determination by using strategies of obstinacy and wilfulness, similar to the contemporary culture in teams of male workmen, for example in forestry or railroad construction, as described by Ella Johansson.

The culture of shirking and malingering could also be conceptualized as Eigensinn, a term that Alf Lüdtke has used to describe how contemporary industry workers on the continent temporarily distanced themselves from the hierarchies and demands of the workplace, refusing co-operation and gaining some sensation of pleasure through teasing fellow workers, walking around, talking to people, taking unauthorized breaks or just daydreaming; anything one was not supposed to do during working hours. Eigensinn or wilfulness, as outlined by Lüdtke, is thus not a form of resistance against the system, but rather attempts by individuals to temporarily ignore or evade the system, to create moments and places of independence from and disregard of the surrounding social order, insisting on time and space of one’s own. Conscripts displaying Eigensinn thus did not necessarily want to challenge or change the military system. Rather, they needed some space to breath within it. In spite of the variations and differences across the 1972–1973 reminiscences, and the evident development towards better treatment of conscripts over the course of the interwar period, the collection as a whole reflects many experiences of military discipline, especially during recruit training, as containing elements of meaningless harassment reminiscent of Haanpää’s imagery. The explanations offered for superiors’ bullying, in terms of NCOs and officers taking out their personal frustrations and aggressions on their subordinates, are also in line with Haanpää. Yet none of the men who wrote about their military training after the Second World War really attacked the pre-war cadre army system in the same wholesale fashion as Haanpää. The cadre army had proven its worth in the war, and even if some men expressed bitterness over how they had been treated and wanted to expose the power abuses that had occurred, the general tenor in 1972–1973 was that interwar military training in its very hardness was necessary and useful.

Since it was not necessary any more to either attack or defend the institution itself, the stories written down in the 1970’s are actually less black-and-white than the interwar literary depictions. They needed neither the demonising story about an officer corps rotten throughout, nor the idealised myth of conscript soldiers’ unreserved solidarity and comradeship. Accounts of bullying and sadistic superiors could be accommodated in the same narrative with very appreciative descriptions of well-liked officers. Good comradeship and group spirit were mentioned in the same breath as violent conflicts among the conscripts were revealed. In the final analysis, many former soldiers evidently adopted the notion of military service as “a school for men”, a place where conscripts grow, harden and develop self-confidence through the very hardships they suffer, in order to invest a largely disagreeable or partially even degrading experience with a positive meaning. However, they did not idealise submission in itself nor the collectivist fusion with the group as Waltari did; theirs were individualist stories of their ability to cope.

Historian Thomas Rohkrämer has found the same pattern of a “growth narrative” surrounding nineteenth century German military service. The training, Rohkrämer claims, was intentionally laid out with an extremely hard and even humiliating recruit training in the beginning followed by slowly ameliorating circumstances. Once the soldier had adjusted to army discipline and taken on the behaviour his superiors wanted, he could enjoy certain rewards; a high social status in relation to civilians, an economically carefree existence, and a boosted attractiveness with women due to the “military bearing” and the gaudy uniforms of the epoch. Rohkrämer asks why so many men rallied round the cult of the military in the Kaiserreich and offers the explanation that military service was understood as an initiation that was accepted and celebrated afterwards. Once the hardships of military training had been endured they could reap the benefits from public notions of men with military education as characterised by energy, vigour and resolution.

From the early 1930’s on, a political consensus over the military system gradually emerged. As we have seen, the conscript army of independent Finland started out with severe image problems. Some of these were inherited from the standing armies of the authoritarian monarchies that served as organisational models for the Finnish cadre army. Other problems burdening the Finnish Army derived from the fact that it had been created in the midst of a civil war where its main task was to crush an internal socialist revolution. This initial ballast was further exacerbated through reports of the bad conditions that conscript soldiers were exposed to throughout much of the 1920’s. The pro-defence debate in interwar Finland must largely be understood against the background of widespread negative images of the existing military system. While pro-defence advocates made great efforts to disseminate positive images of military service, they had to compete with popular notions of the conscript army as a morally and physically unhealthy place for conscripts, as well as a culture of story-telling about personal experiences of military training that often highlighted the brutal treatment and outright bullying of conscripts.

Military service was described as strongly formative of conscripts’s physical and moral development, both by the critics and by the supporters of the existing military system. As the military system became a part of cultural normality, as the worst conditions were corrected, and as people grew accustomed to conscription and increasingly came to accept it – although not necessarily to like it – there was less need to talk about its impact. However, this was more the case in the political arena and the ideological propaganda of “civic education” than in the popular culture of telling stories about individual experiences of military training. Even if the notorious bullying of conscripts obviously diminished over the period, men still found personal use for the claim that going through a harsh and demanding training had made a positive difference to their personal life history.

Analysis of the parliamentary debates over the conscription system shows a prolonged scepticism and reluctance within civilian society towards the conscription system created by professional officers during the Civil War. There was a swift transition during the Civil War from widespread pacifism and doubtfulness over the expediency of any national armed forces towards a broad acceptance of the general principle of conscription. The need for maintaining a Finnish army was no longer disputed. However, peacetime military service within a standing cadre army was initially criticised by the parties of the political left and centre. They drew on a long international tradition of republican, liberal and socialist critiques of standing armies. The liberal and conservative MPs, on the other hand, were conspicuously restrained as they presented the existing military system as a grim necessity. They largely refrained from celebrating any character building effects of military service. In spite of their glorification of the feats of the White Army in the “Liberation War” of 1918, politicians at the centre and right were wary of expressing any opinions that could be labelled as militarist. They were susceptible to public concerns over bad conditions in the garrisons and the maltreatment of conscripts and throughout the 1920’s resisted the military’s requests for more money and increased conscripted manpower.

Those politicians who wanted a people’s militia centred their critique of the cadre army on its alleged moral dangers for conscripts and the threat to democracy of a closed caste of professional officers. However, their reasons for doing so evidently had much to do with other issues of a political and economic nature; namely, the control over the armed forces in society, the enormous costs of creating and maintaining national armed forces, and the importance of conscripts in the workforce of a poor and largely agrarian society. In their rhetoric can be identified references to both idealised images of the Finnish national character and visions of egalitarian citizenship in the new democratic republic. The Agrarians alluded to a stereotype of Finns as autonomous freeholders, with a natural patriotic instinct to defend their property and families, yet averse to authorities and submissiveness. The Social Democrats expressed a more anxious notion of working-class men as susceptible to indoctrination and political corruption through military service. Nonetheless, they simultaneously tried to describe young workers as class-conscious, strongwilled men who would fight only for the good of the people and not the for the bourgeoisie.

Over the course of time, the parliamentary debates demonstrate a slow movement from strong scepticism towards acceptance of a conscripted standing cadre army; from strong notions that such an army could form a threat to democracy towards embracing it as a safeguard of the democratic republic; and from intense concerns that army life would corrupt conscripts towards confidence that it would at least do them no harm. One objective of the interwar commemoration of the “Liberation War” was to portray a view of the recent past that supported interwar patriotic mobilisation and military preparedness and counteracted the scepticism and reluctance surrounding the conscript army.

The heroic stories about the Jägers conveyed images of the Finnish nation as ready for action, notions that national freedom and prosperity were based on military force and valorous heroism, and a message of the invincible strength of passionate, self-sacrificing patriotism. According to the heroic stories, the Jägers were zealous young warriors, driven by flaming patriotism and antithetical to old-school aristocratic officers, such as the older and more experienced Finnish officers who had served in the Russian army before the war. In the campaign to oust “Russian” officers from leading positions in the armed forces, it was claimed that the Jägers represented a new kind of officer, capable of motivating and filling conscripted soldiers with enthusiasm for military service and patriotic sacrifice. The Jägers of heroic stories were living examples of a Finnish military readiness that was now demanded of every young conscript in order to secure national independence. The national-warrior attitude to soldiering incarnated by the Jägers was made the objective of the military education of conscripts – with Jägers as models, planners, executors and leaders. Military thinkers within and associated to the Jäger movement claimed that Finland’s military and political situation demanded soldiers who had received a moral
education instead of being drilled into mechanical obedience. These “new” national soldiers had to be strong-willed soldiers, motivated by patriotism, self-discipline, a sense of duty and a spirit of sacrifice. Moreover, they had to be led by officers embodying these same virtues to the highest degree; officers like the Jägers themselves.

The project of idealistic officers and educators to morally train a “new” kind of Finnish citizen-soldier was put into concrete form with the project of giving the conscripts a “civic education”. The magazine for soldiers, Suomen Sotilas, used the rhetorical technique of associating the wished-for, well-disciplined citizen-soldier with strength and courage in an attempt to influence the readers’ self-understanding and behaviour. The magazine offered its readers images of military training as a process where conscripts matured into adult citizens marked by vigour, a sense of duty and self-restraint. Acquiring the skills and virtues of a good soldier, the young man would simultaneously develop into a useful and successful citizen. The hardships he had to endure would be meaningful and rewarding in the end, both for the nation and himself as an individual.

The magazine wrote abundantly on Finnish military history, challenging the readers to honour their forebears’ sacrifices and meet the standards set by previous generations, but also reassuring present-day conscripts by conjuring a sense of sameness, affinity and a shared national character, marked by hardy, valorous and unyielding character among Finnish men in both the past and present. However, the notion that army life could be corrupting of conscripts’s morals was also surprisingly conspicuous in the magazine, mainly in storys written by clergymen. These “moralist” writers obviously regarded “false” notions among the young conscripts as a great challenge to their educational project and attempted to push their own definitions of true character, centred on self-restraint and dutifulness.

Finally, this study has contrasted the official rhetoric surrounding conscription with the stories that conscripted men told about their personal experiences of military service. The analysis of Pentti Haanpää’s and Mika Waltari’s accounts of military service connected the stark differences between them to both contemporary political disagreements over conscription and the class background and social prospects of the men they served with. As demonstrated by Haanpää, Waltari, and the collection of reminiscences written in 1972–1973, the social practices of military service in the 1920s were often divisive as they confirmed the class hierarchies and political conflict lines in civilian society. Educated young men such as Mika Waltari were confirmed in their consciousness of belonging to the nation’s elite. They were given an opportunity to prove their physical fitness and leadership qualities. Men from working-class environments, on the other hand, could find that disciplinary methods perceived as bullying and harassment confirmed their understandings of the “white” army and capitalist state as oppressive of lower-class men. Most men did not find much use for the trope of military comradeship in their army stories. It was important to Mika Waltari in his construction of military service as a development process within a tightly knit collective, but not to either Pentti Haanpää who attacked the military system by portraying it as corrupting human relationships, or the men writing down their memories of the army in the 1970’s, who essentially wanted to tell a story of their individual ability to cope and their personal development.

As this analysis has shown, the images of soldiering in oral popular culture largely contradicted the loftiness of military propaganda. These popular images underscored the hardships and abuses that conscripts had to endure. Superiors’ incessant shouting, formal and distant relationships between officers and men, exaggerated emphasis on close-order drills, and indoor duties such as making beds and cleaning rifles, gratuitous punishments and widespread bullying of subordinates – these were all central elements of a “dark story” about soldiering especially in the 1920’s. Even those with positive personal memories indicated an acute awareness of these negative popular images. It was usual to ascribe seemingly meaningless harassment to “Prussian” military customs unsuitable in Finland and ineffective on Finnish men. Individual superiors prone to bullying could be disparaged as weak in character and lacking real leadership qualities. Another strategy was to belittle and play down the harassments as only “proper” to military life and something a man could take with good humour.

The dominant narrative form in the army reminiscences was, however, to construct the story about soldiering as a process of personal growth, through hardships and even humiliating experiences, towards selfconfidence, independence and adult citizenship. Here, the rhetoric of military propaganda and popular stories met. Although the origin of this narrative model is uncertain, military educators and army authorities undoubtedly worked hard to repeat and reinforce it in official military ideology. Yet to the extent that men accepted this offering of prestige and recognition in exchange for their allegiance, they put it into the much bleaker constory of their own experiences of hardships, conflicts and bullying. Thereby, they maintained a counter-narrative to official images of soldiering. The fact that politicians and military educators abstained from playing on language nationalism in their rhetoric on conscripting conscripts is more intriguing. In a sense it is natural that national defence would be a constory where national unity was emphasised and internal differences in domestic matters were downplayed. Yet as we have seen, internal class differences did push their way into debates on conscription and even military propaganda. In this particular constory, the class divide was evidently deeper and more poisoned by mutual distrust than the language divide. In the wake of the Civil War, it was perhaps easier to imagine a national community of “white” Finnish- and Swedish-speaking soldiers once more defending the country against the Bolsheviks than to imagine the workers and the bourgeoisie as brothers-in-arms united in valorous patriotism.

Modernity and tradition

The mass parties of the political left and centre at first associated the standing conscript army with authoritarian, warlike monarchies of the past, an insular aristocratic officer caste and oppressive treatment of the rank-and-file. The Social Democrats and Agrarians saw the cadre army as an obstacle to democratisation and antithetical to a new era of equality, social progress and societal reforms – the kind of modernisation they themselves envisioned. In the Agrarian’s arguments for a militia, no need to change or modernise Finnish men was expressed. On the contrary, they argued against the cadre army by celebrating a timeless masculine national character, an inherent aptitude for warfare in Finnish men, which they claimed had been proven once again in the Civil War of 1918. The Finn’s love of freedom and fighting spirit would only be stifled and corrupted if he was incarcerated in barracks and drilled into mechanical obedience by upper-class officers. In a people’s militia, on the other hand, soldiers would remain inseparable parts of civilian society, mainly occupied with productive labour and impossible to corrupt morally or politically. In their own vision of social progress, the Social Democrats hoped that conscripts would form part of a politically self-conscious workers’ movement that would force through a modernity marked by social justice. The cadre army system threatened to put a check on that movement by defending capitalist interests and drilling young workers into compliant tools of the propertied classes.

The war hero cult surrounding the Jägers, as well as the military propaganda aimed at giving the conscripts a “civic education”, included powerful images of the “Liberation War”, marking the dawn of a new era of Finnish military. The heroic stories about the Jägers supported notions of the brand new national armed forces as representing something new and progressive in Finnish society. They powerfully associated the “liberation” of Finland from Russia with a national “coming of age” manifested in military action. Military reformers wrote about a “new” age of warfare that needed strong-willed, self-propelled and self-disciplined soldiers who fought for their nation out of their own free will and patriotic conviction. In nationalist propaganda, the Jäger officers were constructed as a “new” kind of youthful and modern military leader who could fulfil the moral and technical requirements of a new era. The military propaganda directed towards conscripts in training strongly connected this “new” military image with citizenship. Military training was supposed to educate the conscripts for modern citizenship. This not only included preparing for defending the new nation and enduring the horrors of modern warfare. It also meant acquiring the energy, discipline and precision that characterised a member of an industrialised civilised nation. The army was ‘a school for men’ – the kind of men that the new Finland needed.
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The stories of men who did their military service in the 1920’s testify that the “corporal spirit” criticised as old-fashioned and dysfunctional by contemporary military educators was alive and well in the Finnish armed forces. The “dark stories” about tyrannical superiors browbeating the conscripts resonated with critical claims about the questionable ideological and moral impact of this particular military training on conscripts. Their persistence through much of the 1920’s was highly problematic for those who wanted to represent the cadre army as part of national modernity and progress. The literary scandal surrounding the publication of Pentti Haanpää’s Fields and Barracks in 1928 provides an ample illustration of the frictions between those in Finnish society who hoped the army would change Finnish men and those who thought the army itself was the problem, not the solution. The press reviews deserve some attention, since they present us with a condensed picture of how conscription was connected with conflicting visions of modernity.

The socialist press lauded the book as a truthful and realistic depiction of army life from the perspective of ordinary soldiers. The non-socialist press, on the other hand, greeted the book with dismay. The magazine of the Civil Guards, Hakkapeliitta, accused Haanpää of downright lying, “poisoning young souls” with mendacious and coarse rubbish. The reaction it evoked in the pro-defence establishment was summarised in the headline of an editorial in Suomen Sotilas: “A desecration of the army”. Yet many book reviews and commentaries in the centrist and conservative civilian press also admitted that there was some truth to Haanpää’s stories. There were nuanced comments made, for example by the military philosophy teacher Hannes Anttila, about undeniable deficiencies in the conscripts’ conditions and the need for officers to read Haanpää to understand some of their conscripts better. Still, the non-socialist press claimed that Haanpää had limited his description to only the bleakest and gloomiest aspects of military life. It was said that he lacked self-criticism, “true education” and the analytical capability of putting his observations into a larger constory. Professor V.A. Koskenniemi, one of the greatest literary authorities of the era, dismissed the book as “sketch-like minor art” and noted that Haanpää’s laudable prose was tainted by the cheap trick of “boyishly defiant exaggeration”.

To many non-socialist reviewers, the types of men Haanpää portrayed seem to have been a greater concern than his images of the bad treatment of conscripts. The conservative newspaper Uusi Suomi criticised him for having identified himself with “the worst and most immature sections of the conscripts”. An editorial in Suomen Sotilas claimed that there was a minority among the conscripts who lacked “a clear understanding that military service is not meant for pampering and enjoyment, but a severe and difficult school preparing for war”. These elements among the soldiers, wrote the editors, were “morally often quite underdeveloped, unpatriotic, even criminal”. A columnist in the agrarian Ilkka newspaper branded Haanpää’s book as mostly expressing “hatred of lords and masters” and its author as “one of those men still serving in the army who are impossible to educate because they do not comprehend what it means to be under somebody else’s command”. The critic Lauri Viljanen wrote, “In accordance with his nature as a writer [Haanpää] feels the greatest sympathy for those individuals who find it the hardest thing in the world to grow accustomed to any form of societal discipline.” These reviews implied that beyond some fine adjustments, it was not the military system that needed fundamental change. Haanpää’s obstinate conscripts were the ones that really needed to be thoroughly reformed. They were seen as remnants of a primitive Finnish society of isolated villages, characterised by wilfulness and a smouldering hatred of any authority, unable to adjust to a new and changed society and citizenship.

On this point, the young modernist author and critic Olavi Paavolainen was the most outspoken, as he reviewed Fields and Barracks for Tulenkantajat (The Torchbearers), a cultural magazine and mouthpiece of young artists oriented towards Western European culture and modernity. Paavolainen had done his own military service at about the same time as Haanpää. He found Field and Barracks “disgusting” because its author never rose above “the same low and unintelligent level of thinking and feeling” inhabited by the human types he depicted. Since Haanpää was no town dweller, but “the disciple of untamed conditions” – i.e., underdeveloped rural regions – he lacked “the intellectual and theoretical passion to solve problems”. Nevertheless, Paavolainen asserted that “anybody who has served in the army can testify that the majority of conscripts think and feel like Private Haanpää”. Yet he continued, “How one learns to hate [the Finnish] people during military service! Not because it is supine, incapable and slow, which qualities are offset by its honesty, tenaciousness and toughness – but because it has an insurmountable dread of any order, regulation and – without exception – any commands. It holds resisting any instructions as a matter of honour. (…) This desire for recalcitrance expresses a basic trait in the Finnish national character.”

Paavolainen thus actually agreed with Haanpää’s description of Finnish men and their reactions to military discipline, but saw the reason for their mentality not in some deep-rooted folk culture, but in nineteenth century nationalist agitation by the educated classes. The Finns, he wrote, had always been told in speeches and historical works that their hallmark was not to obey orders and not to accept the yoke of any masters – because these masters had always been foreign. The notion that every command and all lords and masters were bad things had been impressed upon the Finns by both national romanticism and socialism, claimed Paavolainen. It was time for Finnish men to liberate themselves from “the idealisation of a nation of virginal people living in the wilderness and a national culture of lumberjacks”, replicated by Haanpää. Paavolainen saw the cure in modern military training: “Look at the boys who come home from the army: how differently they move, walk, talk, eat and think. Their brains, used to executing orders, work keenly, their bodies shaped by exercises and sports are lithe and obedient. In them is the stuff of a modern civilised nation. Military service has been a first-rate school. (…)”

For want of anything better, Paavolainen found military training to be an excellent instrument for implanting a notion of “a new rhythm of life” in the Finnish people. Life in the modern world, he wrote, with its “telephones, offices, newspapers, street traffic, universities, radios, sports, transatlantic liners, train timetables and stock exchange news” was impossible if people had no concepts of discipline, exactitude and timetables. In the wake of the traumatic events of 1918, optimistic and idealistic visions of the Finnish citizen shaped by military training held out the promise that such military training would defuse the threatening revolutionary potential in Finnish men from the lower classes and mould them into self-disciplined, dutiful, patriotic soldiers ready to sacrifice themselves for the nation. Their sense of comradeship with their fellow soldiers from all layers of society would ensure their loyalty to the existing social structure and direct their armed force outwards, towards a common enemy. The Jäger myth displayed how the dangerous passions of youth could be channelled and disciplined through nationalism and military training into a force that had a burning zeal, yet protected existing society against inner and outer foes instead of threatening it. The editors of Suomen Sotilas assured their readers that when the well-trained and self-disciplined citizen-soldier returned from the barracks to civilian society he was indelibly marked with characteristics that would support the nation’s progress towards modernity and prosperity without internal strife.

Yet a neat dichotomy cannot, after all, be made between a modernist middle class supporting a thorough re-education of Finnish men in the fields and barracks of the cadre army on the one hand, and recalcitrant peasants and workers resisting change on the other. The same circles that envisioned the military producing patriotic and useful male citizens often – whenever it suited their purposes – referred to the heroic national past, military traditions and an inherent unyielding bravery and coarse fighting skill in Finnish men. For example, the Jägers stood for the new nation and its ideal citizens, but in their strong and bold manliness also evoked memories of the Finnish forefathers, linking the modern nation to a mythical past. “The spirit of the forefathers” was presented as binding obligation on conscripts to show that they were not lesser men.

On the other hand, the political opposition and resistance to the cadre army and prolonged peacetime military service were not necessarily based on an opposition to modernity or modernisation as such – although Pentti Haanpää did idealise an archaic, agrarian way of life. Social Democrats and Agrarians also wanted progress into modernity, only they each had different visions of what kind of modernity was desirable for Finland. Neither of these parties really resisted the militarisation of Finnish manhood, although conscription would have looked very different if the militia army they proposed had been realised. The militia project expressed another view of the relationship between a man’s task as a soldier and his task as a productive peasant or worker, a son, a husband or a father, where only open war was reason enough to tear a man away from his proper and primary places as a man. In this sense, the militia model implied a weaker polarisation and separation of male and female citizenship than the cadre army model that was realised.

Cultural conflict and compromise

The scandal surrounding Fields and Barracks appears as the last great furore of the tensions surrounding conscripted soldiering in the early years of national independence. A gradual movement from an atmosphere marked by conflict towards political and cultural compromises can be discerned throughout the interwar period. In the political sphere, the politics of conscription slowly converged as first the Agrarians and then the Social Democrats gave up on the idea of a people’s militia and embraced the existing regular army, as the apparently most realistic protection against Bolshevik Russia and a safeguard of parliamentary democracy in the face of rising right-wing extremism. The professional military establishment met the Agrarians halfway by incorporating the Suojeluskuntas movement ever more firmly into the national armed forces.

A great deal of the officer corps obviously only realised very slowly how radically the conditions for the military training and the treatment of soldiers had changed after 1918, when universal male conscription was combined with national independence and parliamentary democracy. Incompetent NCOs were allowed to terrorise contingent after contingent of conscripts and severe hazing of younger soldiers was tolerated or even thought to serve the recruits’ adjustment to the military world. However, the material scarcity and shortage of officers and NCOs with adequate training that had plagued the army in the early 1920’s slowly eased. In the face of massive public criticism as well as the emergence of new ideas about military philosophy, the armed forces eventually seem to have responded and made some partial adjustments to how conscripts were trained and treated. As a result, the regular armed forces’ image in the public improved towards the end of the 1920’s and was mainly positive in the 1930’s. Conscription and military training became less controversial as the population became used to its existence and ever more men returned from their year in the army without having been noticeably corrupted.

Over the 1930’s, the public image of the Finnish conscript army improved, as it became associated with the protection of positive national values among ever broader layers of society. Men’s (and in the last half of the 1930’s, many young women’s) experiences of military service became ever more positive and surviving its hardships and challenges became a matter of pride. Society was undeniably militarised to some degree as ever more men and women thought of military service as “a natural part of every citizen’s duties” and “a matter of honour for a Finnish man or women”. However, the political compromises and easing tension around conscription did not mean that Finnish men from all layers of society suddenly and wholeheartedly embraced the army’s civic education curriculum. At least within military training, the antagonisms between young conscripts and the disciplinary projects of both moralist educators and drillmasters continued, albeit in gradually less harsh forms. Writers in Suomen Sotilas continued to complain about the “false ideals of manliness” among the soldiers. Conscripted men continued to report on experiences of abusive treatment or excessive disciplinary harshness.

The interwar period was a period of contest between different notions of the military. Yet to judge by the materials studied, there was no clear winning party in that contest, no unambiguous persuasion to consent, no evident hegemonisation” taking place. The proponents of the cadre army system and the particular form of a self-disciplined military associated with it certainly benefited from the factor of institutionalisation; military training in the cadre army was a fact throughout the period and most conscripts had to undergo its practices, whether they wanted to or not. However, the comprehensive picture of developments in the 1930’s is one of incomplete convergence and persistent lines of division. Army stories display how both conscripts and officers often reproduced the social and political demarcation lines of civilian society within the military sphere. Many men certainly enjoyed the training and comradeship in the military, but few wanted or were able to verbalise friendship and intimacy in their reminiscences. Instead, their stories highlighted how group solidarity often meant either violently establishing outward boundaries towards civilians, other contingents or other units, or “comrade discipline” within the group in the form of ritualised group beatings. When the fact is added that the military treated conscripts differently depending on their educational background and political outlook – barring suspected socialists from officer’s training – one must question to what extent military training in practice really served the cause of a greater national unity.

There was a recurrent notion that the Finnish common man was a brave soldier, but jealous of his self-determination, reluctant to conform to hierarchies and suspicious of “lords and masters”. This unyieldingness was sometimes criticised, but actually more often idealised as evidence of a particularly Finnish manliness. This becomes apparent in images of the civil guardsmen in the Civil War, in the political rhetoric of the Agrarians, as well as in Pentti Haanpää’s and many other men’s army stories. Men who were too eager to comply with the military educational objectives were derided as “war crazy” by their comrades in military training. According to the army stories, exaggerated expressions of dutifulness and patriotism were shunned among the conscripts. Sociologist Knut Pipping described a similar mindset among the soldiers in his own machine gun company during the Second World War in his 1947 dissertation. Heroism or bravery was appreciated only to the extent that it served the wellbeing and survival of the group, not as an end in itself. Historian Ville Kivimäki has analysed Pipping’s account as displaying how the soldiers used their own standards for evaluating each other, including heavy drinking and womanising, certainly not the ideals of the “conservative” military. The most iconic Finnish post-war Finnish war novel, Väinö Linna’s The Unknown Soldier (1954), depicted Finnish soldiers in the same vein as Pipping, brave and tough fighters, scornful of ostentatious discipline and lofty patriotic rhetoric. However, Kivimäki points out that even if Finnish soldiers in the Second World War openly rejected many of the values of the military, their own values took for granted that a man had to, and would, fight and defend the nation.

This concludes the Post on Conscript Service in Finland in the 1920’s.

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