Manhood and the Making of the Military

Conscription, Military Service and Masculinity in Finland, 1917–39

Anders Ahlbäck

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317101222
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

When Finland gained its independence from Russia in 1917, the country had not had a military for almost two decades. The ensuing creation of a new national conscript army aroused intense but conflicting emotions among the Finns. This book examines how a modern conscript army, born out of a civil war, had to struggle through social, cultural and political minefields to find popular acceptance. Exploring the ways that images of manhood were used in the controversies, it reveals the conflicts surrounding compulsory military service in a democratic society and the compromises made as the new nation had to develop the will and skill to defend itself. Through the lens of masculinity, another picture of conscription emerges, offering new understandings of why military service was resisted and supported, dreaded and celebrated in Finnish society. Intertwined with the story of the making of the military runs the story of how manhood was made and remade through the idealized images and real-life experiences of conscripted soldiers. Placing interwar Finland within a broad European context, the book traces the origins of competing military traditions and ideological visions of modern male citizenship back to their continental origins. It contributes to the need for studies on the impact of the Great War on masculinities and constructions of gender among military cultures in the peacetime period between the two world wars.

Chapter 5
Stories and Memories of Soldiering

At the age of 61, Lauri Mattila wrote down his memories of military training in a garrison in Helsinki 40 years earlier. His reminiscences evidently carried away this farmer from a rural municipality in west Finland, since he wrote almost 200 pages. Recalling his service in 1931–32 from the vantage point of the early 1970s, Mattila marked his loyalty with ‘white’ Finland and underlined that he reported for duty ‘full of the eagerness of youth and military spirit’. His narrative is nonetheless a fascinating depiction of both the dark and the bright sides of military service in interwar Finland.¹

Mattila remembered recruit training as characterized not least by the insulting language of superiors. The recruits’ carefully made beds were ruined daily, ‘blown up’ by inspecting officers. 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 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. The sergeant-major of Mattila’s recruit training unit, who had terrified the recruits in 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 proudly recalled his platoon’s ambition of always being the best unit in the company, 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’. His depiction of the daily changing of the guard is almost lyrical: the military band playing and the sidewalks filled with townspeople who never grew tired of watching the spectacle. ‘Whoever has marched in that parade, will remember it with nostalgia for the rest of his life.’

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 … The barracks must not become a resting home spoiling the inmates …

The memories of this aging farmer account for 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 male 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 the hardships of military training as a necessary civic duty and a wholesome experience for young men.

This chapter moves on from the rhetoric of politics, hero myths and army propaganda, into the garrisons, barracks and training fields, as described by ‘ordinary’ conscripts – not only educated, middle-class politicians, officers or educationalists, but also men of the lower classes. Its ambition, however, is not to investigate what ‘actually happened’ in military training, nor what the conscripts ‘really experienced’, but to study the images of conscripted soldiering and Finnish masculinities that arose from men’s storytelling about interwar military training. Two groups of sources depicting experiences of military service in the interwar period will be analysed; two works of fiction and a collection of autobiographical reminiscences. Pentti Haanpää’s Fields and Barracks: Tales from the Republic’s Army (1928) and Mika Waltari’s Where Men Are Made (1931) were written during or immediately after the authors’ military training, whereas the autobiographical narratives were written down much later, in response to an ethnological collection of memories of military training carried out in 1972–73.

The two books are the testimonies of two single individuals, but immediately reached large national audiences. The images they conveyed were thus made available for others to re-use, confirm or criticize. The collection of reminiscences, on the other hand, contains the stories of hundreds of former soldiers. Most of them never published a text or took part in public debate, but probably told friends and relatives stories about military training and shared memories with each other during the years that elapsed between their military service and the writing down of these memories.

Both the literary works and the reminiscences are complex historical sources. They are compared and contrasted in this chapter in order to bring out how experiences and depictions of interwar military training were shaped by cultural notions, political issues, the social background of their authors and the historically changing contents of individual and collective commemoration. When, how and why these narratives were articulated is essential for the stories they tell. More than in any other chapter of this book, it is necessary to discuss the circumstances in which the sources were created, before entering their narrative world.

The Historicity of Narratives and Memories

Pentti Haanpää’s 1928 collection of short stories and Mika Waltari’s 1931 semi-documentary novel are the best-known and most widely read literary works of the interwar period depicting the life of Finnish conscripts in 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.² Three motion pictures about the conscript army were also produced in 1929–34 in close cooperation between the film company and the armed forces and became a success with the public. However, the images of soldiering these films conveyed were of a similar kind to those in military propaganda materials, such as Suomen Sotilas.³

Pentti Haanpää (1905–55) was born into a family of ‘educated peasants’ in rural north Finland. His grandfather had been a representative of the peasantry in the diet of Finland in the nineteenth century and his father had been politically active within the local branches of both the Social Democratic Party and the Agrarian Party.⁴ 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 first three books received enthusiastic reviews in 1925–27 and critics labelled him the new hope of national literature. All this only made the shock the greater for the cultural establishment when he published Fields and Barracks in November 1928.⁵

Haanpää had done his military service in 1925–26 in a ‘wilderness garrison’ on the isthmus of Karelia, close to the Russian border, serving in the rank and file. During his military service, he developed a deeply felt indignation towards the army’s educational methods. He wrote the fictional short stories of Fields and Barracks during the year after his disbandment. Combining expressionism with psychological realism, they depicted military training as a time of gruesome hardships, sadism and violence that appeared completely meaningless to the conscripts. The book aroused great controversy in Finland in the autumn of 1928 because of its hostility towards the military. 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 on 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.⁶

Mika Waltari (1908–79) came from a rather different background. He was born into a family of priests and public servants. According to his memoirs, a Christian, bourgeois and patriotic ‘white’ spirit impregnated his childhood home. He attended the lyceum ‘Norssi’ in Helsinki, an elite school for the sons of the Finnish nationalist bourgeoisie, and was a member of the YMCA and the Christian Students’ Association. He emerged as a prolific author aged 17 and published several novels and collections of short stories and poems in 1926–30. Entering the University of Helsinki as a student of theology, he switched to science of religion and literary studies after three terms. He socialized in young artists’ circles, most importantly the famous ‘Torch-bearers’ (Tulenkantajat) group that combined 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.⁷

Where Men Are Made is a literary reportage, partly written during Waltari’s military service, resembling a journal or a travelogue. It describes Waltari’s everyday life as a conscript in a very positive tenor. Published only two years after the scandal surrounding Fields and the Barracks, it was received and read as a response to Haanpää’s book. However, Haanpää’s work was certainly not the only negative depiction of army life in circulation ever since the fierce anti-militarist campaigns of 1917. Waltari’s book would probably have been written in the same manner even if Haanpää had never published his. The press reactions it received were 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. ⁸

One might ask to what extent these two works of art mirror the attitudes and understandings of larger collectives, rather than only the original and imaginative vision of two individual artists. From a historical point of view, however, Haanpää and Waltari were both uniquely creative individuals and participants in public debates and collective narrative traditions that they tapped into and used, but also influenced and to some extent transformed. Their army books elaborated and commented upon contemporary notions of masculinity, class, conscription, military training and the cadre army, which are familiar from the contemporary discourses examined in previous chapters. Although Haanpää and Waltari were ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Chapter1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 The Politics of Conscription
• Chapter 3 War Heroes as War Teachers
• Chapter 4 Educating the Citizen-Soldier
• Chapter 5 Stories and Memories of Soldiering
• Chapter 6 Manhood and the Contested Making of the Military
• Bibliography
• Index