Just past three that afternoon, the Russians attacked in perfect stealth. No sirens went off this time; there was just the deafening rumble of their bombers, zeroing in on a small section of the city. Nine planes in a narrow diamond formation came in at two hundred meters. In the hotel, we couldn’t hear anything for the roaring. I lunged under a marble table in the restaurant, hugging my knees as the floor shook convulsively. Everything rocked and shuddered with the explosions. The windows concussed. I felt my teeth jarring and clacking as the bombs fell.
The attack lasted one minute, the longest single minute of my life. It was November 30, 1939. The Russo-Finnish War had just begun.
42
When I opened my eyes again, black smoke was everywhere.
“Gas. Gas!” I heard someone screaming, and I thought, We’re all lost now. But they hadn’t dropped poison. At least not yet. The smoke was just the calling card of high explosives. The sign of a city being blown apart.
In an odd, echoing stillness, I stood up and walked with a group of stunned others back out into the street. Everything was on fire. The avenue was an ocean of bright glass. Four large apartment buildings had collapsed as if made only of papier-mâché, or of air. A bus had been forced over onto its side like a downed bull elephant. The driver lay in the street. I guessed he was the driver, in any case, as he’d been spit through the wreckage and glass of the front windshield, his head wrenched with force from his body.
I looked at him and then away. He was no different from the hundreds of casualties I’d seen in Spain, except for his shoes. They weren’t rope soled like the peasants wore in Madrid, but leather that had been very carefully patched who knew how many times, so that he might get more use from them. Somehow those shoes broke my heart like nothing else that day, and I wondered what I could say or write that would give his life and death the value they deserved. He had a wife, probably, a family, and where were they in this burning city? The dark was falling already, or not falling so much as pushing at you from the edges of the horizon as if it were always crouched or hovering there, like something calculating and predatory. Suddenly I wanted to be home in the sunshine so badly I almost couldn’t bear it. To be sitting with Ernest side by side on our terrace—just that—the simplest possible thing, and the most unreachable.
Everything—the whole skyline—was veiled in flames, and a steady migration had begun. Straggling girls and boys, old men and mothers, moved away from their smoldering houses and shops and schools and out of the city. Of course they would leave, but what was peculiar was the silence. No one screamed or wept, not even the children as their mothers packed them into prams and carts and sledges. No one ran. There wasn’t anything like panic, just a weary, frozen, resigned retreat. Heaps of blankets. Canned food in pulled wagons. A steady stream of faultless souls headed into the forests, hoping to be safe there.
On my way back to the hotel, I walked past young men trying to dig bodies out from under the rubble with snow shovels, and sometimes their hands. They would be at it all night, I realized, and the next day, too. In my room, I didn’t take off my coat or even turn on the light, just lit a candle and sat on the side of my bed with a book for a desk and a pen and paper.
All this while, I hadn’t been able to write Ernest somehow, but now the words poured out in a rush as my hands shook. Dear Rabbit, I wrote. I love you. That’s what absolutely matters now. I can try to tell you how it is here, but first you need to know this. I love you. I love you. We should never have left Cuba.
43
Later, much later, this would be called the Winter War. From the last day of November until the iced-over middle of March, Russian planes came again and again while Finnish machine guns spit fire up at them into the dark sky.
The Soviets had three times as many soldiers as the Finns, thirty times the number of bomber planes, and one hundred times as many tanks, but the Finns had their resources. They knew how to use their weather to their great advantage, hiding in white coveralls on white skis, flicking through the forests invisibly to catch the Russians unaware. The landscape was on their side. Whole villages could be camouflaged beneath snowy bows of fir trees, further insulated by fog, invisible and quiet as the snow itself.
In Helsinki, the evacuation went on and on, with children being carted off in railcars and buggies and even hearses, anything with wheels. As the bombing continued, the Finns moved from their huddled forest camps toward nearby villages. From the villages they moved north and west, toward the Baltic Sea, in a rolling exodus that pushed out and out in waves. The people didn’t seem frightened to me. They had a frozen resolve that seemed as much a part of Finland as the snow and the dark. Every afternoon the light rinsed away, as if a great blanketing shroud dropped from on high. I didn’t know how they got used to the eerily short days, but perhaps anyone could get used to anything.
One day a fireman took me into a bombed apartment building, through a knee-high river of water from fire hoses, and up several flights of concrete steps that seemed untouched, though the walls around them sagged in ruins. We went into one apartment where the door had been ripped from the hinges. Inside, the splintered wet black wreckage of someone’s life, a bed and desk crushed under ceiling tiles, the curtains like cobwebs, a framed photograph of two small children on top of an icebox that had toppled to its side. The fireman explained that they had been digging here for bodies for three days, and that it might be another week or more before they found everyone.
Down the street was a technical school that had taken a bomb through the center of the roof, and now the entire building was a crater, all the floors and the cellar disintegrated so that you could see through to the sewers. A teacher had witnessed the collapse and seen most everyone in her classroom become pinned under the wreckage. Her husband, a plumber, was in one of the hospitals with a hole in his throat from a length of copper piping. She had a son, who was fifteen, but hadn’t seen him since the last attack. When I spoke with her, I made sure to make a note of his name, his height, the color of his hair, the clothes he was wearing. “In case I should see him,” I said, though I knew, with a lump in my throat, that I wouldn’t. We were both playing at optimism, at resilience. At hope. But how else could anyone get through such a thing?
“Don’t forget,” she said as I walked on to the next bombed place, the next battered person.
“No.” I lifted up my notebook like a promise. “I won’t.”
* * *
—
There was a routine to the bombing, which depended on the weather, and also on the light. Thick snow generally meant safety, and so did thick fog. Dark was the best of all, and we mostly felt safe until eight-thirty or nine in the morning, when the planes came roaring over from the east to drop their bombs or sometimes just propaganda leaflets. The most terrifying thing they could do was drop gas, of course, and we continually wondered if they would.
Rumors flew all the time that this would be the day, but I stayed in my hotel as long as I possibly could—stubbornly, I suppose. One night when I was sound asleep, Geoff Cox came pounding on my door to say that everyone had to leave the hotel immediately. Gas was going to be used in the morning. They were sure this time.
“It’s time to beat it, Gellhorn,” he said when I opened the door.
I was still half asleep, my nightshirt probably on sideways and my hair bent in every direction. “What the hell, Geoff? Have you been drinking?”
“Sure, but what does that have to do with anything? Everyone English speaking is pulling out.”
“They’ve done that twice already, and just end up coming back.” I rubbed my eyes. My head was throbbing. “Please go away. I’ll be fine.”
“Suit yourself,” he said, and went to the room next door, and began pounding there.
Thankfully, it was another false alarm, but we were all evacuated just the same. Sixteen Russian planes had been shot down, and a powerful retaliation was imminent.
We went into the woods with everyone else. It was warmer there, and when it started to snow seriously, it was warmer still—a muffling, blanketing wet snow that flocked the fir trees and our canvas tents so that the sides bowed.
It felt like being in another, older world out there. We slept under stiff furs, like characters in a Tolstoy novel, while the thick-muscled horses all around steamed with the heat of their bodies, and stamped the snow. Their coats were shaggy, and they had matted chunks of ice in their long tails, so different from Blue, in far-away Sun Valley, that they might have been different animals altogether.
In the inner pocket of my jacket I carried two cables from Ernest that had reached me on December 4, and that I’d already reread so many times the paper had gone soft as cotton. He was proud of me, he wrote, and thought I was the bravest woman alive. I can come over, he insisted. Say the word and I’ll drop everything.
I didn’t feel brave, though. It wasn’t bravery when you did what you had to do.
I was sick with missing him, yes. I felt so alone here, and more frightened than I’d been in a long time. But none of that changed the truth. There were stories here that needed telling, and I couldn’t leave until I’d done that.
Grabbing a steamer over to be near me would be terribly dangerous for Ernest, but also a waste of precious time. The book he was writing mattered more than it ever had, I realized. It would outlast all this chaos and senseless death. It would live long after all the stupid things humans did to one another had healed over. That’s what great art was for, I thought.
44
At daybreak, several days in, I rubbed my fingertips on the base of a lantern to get some feeling back in them, and waited for the car that was coming for me—a military chauffeur that had been assigned to take me to general headquarters for the Karelian front, four hundred kilometers to the east.
“It must be nice to have Roosevelt in your pocket,” Geoff Cox said. He was still irritated that I’d ignored him in Helsinki, and he knew I carried a letter that allowed me special access to all sorts of places that were usually off limits to journalists.
“Don’t be stupid. This isn’t about privilege, or calling in favors. If I didn’t have it, I’d never get anywhere as a woman, and you know it.”
“You’re right. I’m being an ass,” he said.
“It’s all right. With this cold, we’re all barely human.” I took up the lantern I was using to warm my hands and gave it to him. My driver had arrived.
The car was long and white, aiming to disappear in the landscape. I’d been granted a young civilian chauffeur for the trip. He had a schoolboy’s face and a thin straight neck dotted with pale freckles, and was also to act as a translator between me and my military guide. The guide’s name was Viskey, a young lieutenant so sharply and cleanly turned out he could have been carved from a bar of soap. He wore high black boots trimmed in fur, and a charcoal wool greatcoat, with a black astrakhan collar. His hat was fur as well, and sort of magnificent, with high stiff sides and earflaps. I wondered briefly about the likelihood of pilfering one and smuggling it home for Ernest, but there was the actual business of the war to think of. For fifty kilometers or more we fell in behind a battalion of Finnish soldiers in heavy ammunition trucks. The line of trucks rumbled ahead in the dark, filled with supplies and sledges and bicycles and soldiers hunched on benches, their field rifles lying atop their knees.
It wouldn’t be light for hours yet, and later still if there was fog, as there so often was. For the moment, the forest pressed black and dense from both sides of the road, and the driver was translating for the lieutenant about Karelia, which had apparently been fought over as a territory since the twelfth century or even before, with Sweden and the Novgorod Republic claiming and ceding it, again and again.
“Now others will have to die wastefully and stupidly,” Viskey said in Finnish, and the driver then relayed to me in French. I had managed to learn very little of their national language, which rose and dipped and curled, with complex elisions that had me wondering even where one word stopped and another began. “Hopefully more Russians than Finns,” he went on. “The Soviet infantry attacks in one solid line. Did you know that? We hide in the trees. We’re everywhere out here.” He gestured toward the dense inky forest. “They make it too easy. One column, and we mow them down before they even spot us. It’s sickening.”
“Sickening, yes.” It was. “But perhaps you’ll win this way.”
“No one will win,” he said simply. “This is war, after all.” Then, “Tell me, what do you think of Adolf Hitler in America?”
“In America? I hardly know. I haven’t been home in a long time. I’ve lived in Cuba for quite a while now, and before that I was in Spain and other places in Europe.”
“Spain? On which side?”
“Madrid’s, of course.” I felt myself prickling at the question. “Do I look like a Fascist?”
“Who looks any way?” he asked, shrugging. “Take off the uniform and remove the crowds and Hitler is a small, unremarkable man. Think of him at home in his bathrobe.”
I knew he was right, but I couldn’t. It should have been impossible for him to do as he did and think as he did, and be at home anywhere, be loved or cared for by anyone.
* * *
—
An hour later the dawn came, wan and cold in a way that pressed through the car door, my wool trousers, and heavy jacket to get at my bones, so that I always seemed to be clenching. We drove without stopping, maneuvering over unmarked roads and tree-shrouded lanes, pushing forward where I didn’t think there was a path at all. Often we drove in first gear, eking our way through wet snow, and I kept thinking the driver was awfully young to be so intrepid. At one point, he took us across a heavily mined bridge so slowly it seemed we were making our way inch by inch.
“It’s only really dangerous if you skid,” he explained.
“Well,” I said, and then fell silent, my shoulders tense as trip wires. The bridge was only wide enough for the car, with less than a foot clear on either side. The road surface felt different here than before we’d met the bridge, glossy and flat as glass. Slick enough to set us spinning like a coin, I thought, but somehow we managed in a crawl and reached the other side. That’s when we finally breathed.
“Last week one of our cars hit a mine on such a bridge,” Viskey said. “Nothing was left of it afterward. The men were never found.”
I felt myself go clammy. “What?”
“I don’t mean to frighten you. I only thought you might be interested, for the story you’re writing. Besides, Virtanen here is the very best.”
“I’m sure he is,” I said to be polite, but couldn’t help looking again at the spattering of pinkish freckles on his neck. His hands were gloveless and pale, and his fingers were thin—even bony. Was he twenty? Twenty-two? How could he possibly have the experience and cool head required, I wondered, for this sort of driving? But then I felt my breath catch and every small question flew away from me. We’d come round a long slow curve and were pointed at yet another bridge.
* * *
—
All that day and through the night, we drove on and on while I slept as well as I could, sitting up and propped against the shuddering door, swaddled under blankets of scratchy gray military wool. Near dawn I had a snatch of a dream of being in St. Moritz, swimming through a forest of seaweed that seemed conscious of me, somehow, and even tender, accepting. When I woke, it was such a loss not to have St. Moritz, or even the warm glove of the dream, that I felt I might crack into pieces.
Viskey must have noticed my fragile state. He gave me a chocolate bar, which seemed a reasonable breakfast under the circumstances, and a small bit of aquavit, since there was no coffee to be had. The white countryside continued to flicker by. Sometimes we heard the rumbling of a battle, a blurred sound from miles and miles away. Every now and again, lightnin
g flashed against the thick low sky, but it wasn’t lightning. It was rifle fire.
Finally we came to Viipuri, a city on the Karelian front that had been heavily damaged by bombing. The houses that were still standing were gray, and the sky was a heavier gray, and I thought I was too cold to get out of the car when Viskey gave the sign that we’d arrived. At one edge of the city, a rail terminal had been turned into a barracks, with frosted windows and long lines of cots, and a coarse temporary commissary—everything bare and terribly sterile—but at least there was coffee.
My fingers aching, I shook hands with a young colonel. He had very thick, nearly white-blond hair and a cheerful manner as he unrolled a field map onto his breakfast table to show me where the infantry was, in what positions, with what reinforcements. Viskey had explained to him that I was going to write articles for an American audience, and also that I had published books. I assumed that was why he blasted off lists of specifics as if he were lecturing—how this number of guns was in each battery, and how that sort of shell was used. I took notes dutifully as he spoke, but this wasn’t really the story I wanted.
More coffee came, and more maps were unfurled. The colonel was just getting started on a description of the Mannerheim Line, explaining how the southern front was perfectly situated in the geographical bottleneck of the Karelian Isthmus, when I stopped him and asked if I might see the prison. Viskey had told me they had Russian POWs, and I was eager to see them.
“Perhaps the airfield instead?” he suggested, looking at me with some pity, as if I wasn’t sharp enough to know what was worth paying attention to. “We have five new pursuit planes from Oslo.”
“I’m interested in people,” I said, insisting. “All sorts of people.”
The colonel permitted the visit in the end, though he was shaking his head as we left, rolling up his maps and muttering, probably, about who would send a woman to a war front, when she took no notice of artillery?