1940-02-07 — Page 9

NORTHERN HELL IN ICE The Red Army In Its Arctic Shroud UNKNOWN LEGION

OF THE FALLEN

(By Our Special Correspondent in Finland, Leland Stowe)

Tolvajaeri Battlefield, To-day.

Russian dead.

All

IN THIS SAD SOLITUDE lie the dead-uncounted thou- sands of Russian dead. They lie as they fell-twisted, gesticulating and tortured. But they lie beneath the Now kindly mask of two inches of new-fallen snow. they are one with the cold white shapes of illimitable pine and spruce trees. An unknown legion of the fall- en, they have been sacrificed by winter's hand and cov- ered over with winter's spotless sheet. They will not go back to earth now for many months. But even this profuse virginal coverlet of near-arctic wild- erness cannot quite conceal the anguish of their last movement or the catastrophic suddenness of their end. Here all the pain and all the cruelty of their betrayal has been preserved by the frost king of the far north. It is as if Madame Tussaud of the famous London wax- works museum had decided to preserve one of the war's final horrors-as if she had created this scene of false peace and inexpressable tragedy and, with appropriate simplicity, had called it "Field Battle." Every January, deep solitude hovers above the snows of Tolvajarvi. But to-day it is infinitely deeper than in other years, it is heavy with the ultim- ate loneliness of death, and thousands of the dead may lie as lonely as a single one. Endless, profound and peninsula and then further on and yet voiceless peace where the wounds of | further-among the spruce and beside

and will bleed no war are frozen

the road that leads to Aglajarvi. In this place we have heard more. of a great and magnificent victory. In this place the silence speaks of but which things

destroy may never more restore or ressurect.

When we rode out upon the narrow peninsula finger of the Lake Tolva

It is we were not prepared for this. a thin and twisting road with pines and spruces standing high on either side and the frozen bosom of the lake just beyond. All along this central artery of the battlefield, all along the road that leads to Lake Agla twenty miles away, we saw the shattered tanks and the broken supply of lorries and the heaped debris of the Red army's annihilated divisions.

snow.

have

saw

These were the carried gas masks; they had belonged to a picked shock troop division of the Now they were strewn Red army.

for sides of the road

mile

the along

on both more than

[

All about us lay featureless human shapes, their masks of snow making the more annoymous than death it- self. Beside one of

these I paused. Why did one wonder what these men like and what might looked

their been written on have faces? Slowly I brushed the snow An unshaven face with an away. alabaster forehend emerged and then a stubble of close-cut black hair.

MUMMIFIED

This face was peaceful, as if its owner had fallen asleep here in the blizzard. It was the face of a man of thirty-still and frozen and lifeless. But there were other faces on which was written such suffering as can STRANGE SHAPES

scarcely bear contemplation. One of All along the roadway we

these belonged to a young soldier who strange shapes bulging beneath the had been shot in the right knee. He

with Among the trees these shapes lay

both hands clutched might sometimes

been logs. desperately against his wound. Sometimes, they looked like crooked This had been the young Russian's limbs cast into disorder by the woods- man's axe. Sometimes, heavy felt boots, bared of snow by the stumbling contact of some passing Finnish soldier, protruded suddenly and revealed the naked truth. Sometimes too, we saw soldiers dragging frozen shapes like pieces of cordwood from the forest and here and there bodies lay in crude, contorted piles waiting for their final, nameless, common grave.

a

last

It

#

action and the terrible frost of 25 degress below zero-per- haps 35 degress-had mumified him in the precise attitude wherein he had died. We could not look for long. Never has any battlefield been more deeply saturated with the imploring silence of the dead. It was all about us, that, and the frozen figures, and those motionless, speechless' faces.

Steel helmets

red with a slender, But for the most part of last

etar painted on them lay where they December the snowfall had cloak-

had fallen. From some pockets pro- ed these forms in the Immaculate

truded letters or newspaper clippings far of the anonymity

northern

or membership cards of the Bolshevik winter.

her Nature. had done

Komsomol organization. There were charitable best. That is, it still did

spaces for dues to be paid up to the not quite seem possible that these

year 1946, Oddly enough, beside one had been human beings only

soldier we found a photograph of # .few days ago, or that the mask

young man lying in-his coffin. concealed of Taivajarvi's snow

would be impossible even to dig

for hip

here more and more hundreds of dead.

grave

brother

until Then our white-painted army bus

spring. stopped at a point on the crest of the

Someone also picked up a packet of ridge. We climbed out and followed letters written by a soldier's wife our guide into the forest on the left. back in Leningrad. Although they "There are many of them here,"

were written by an almost illiterate said. "they were all wiped out by our woman, he was able later to translate machine-gun ·fire.” It was true that them. They told how she had writ- there were very many of them there, ten letter after letter, but still had MORE ANONYMOUS THAN DEATH | received no answer since he was tak-

Suddenly we found ourselves among whole groups of white covered figures. Some lay straight on the ground, but mostly the arms were drawn con- vulsively upward or projected stiffly above the shoulder. Mostly their legs, were bent or doubled. Sometimes one body, curiously oversized with Its two inch coating of snow, lay grotesquely a-cross against the surrounding white. | 7th)

he

en by the Red army in October. How she had sent five rubles this time and twenty rubles another. How she had sent

a picture of their little boy, I.jonja. How bills could not be paid and how they waited for him to come home.

PATHETIC LETTER, A

"I spent the holiday. (November very badly, "wrote the soldier's

'Ha-

Groucho Marx, Fritz Feld and Chico Marx in "Marx Brothers at the Circus," which opens at the Queen's and Alhambra Theatres to-day.

Ljonju wife, "I cried all the time. keeps asking when daddy is coming home. He asked Uncle Peter: ven't you seen my Papa?' Uncle Peter said he hadn't seen you, but you were 'Well, soon. Ljonja: coming home tell mother that Daddy is coming

us he home and if he comes at night she must wake me up as comes."

soon

I hope that I did not see this Rus- siun soldier's face. We left him there with countless hundreds of other pro- letarians of the Soviet Union in Tol- forest of dead. vajarvi's snowbound There must have been many Finnish dead also, though we did not see them -perhaps because they have been the first to be carried away. On almost there all these rigid frozen bodies

But must have been similar letters. they will never read again. In this vast solitude, all will return to earth when when another inevitable spring burgeons the pine and spruce forests of eastern Finland.

(World copyright 1940 by Co-Oper- ation and China Mail. Reproduction In whole or part strictly forbidden).

GERMAN EXECUTIONS

IN MEMEL

Lithuanian

According to the press, four Germans have been executed In Memelland for crimes, which included house- breaking during the black-out and Incendiarism,

Two other Germans, woman,

have reported to been executed in East Prussia for "exploiting the credulity of the Inhabitants by complaining of their distress" arising out of the

war.

ura

one

The death penalty in Germany can now be applied to all bur- glars at the discretion of the courts.

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