Faces of Nordic Reunification
Welcome to Åbo, or Turku, or, whatever you want to call this place, I-...
Oh, you're offering cigarettes? Sure, why not? Would be discourteous of me to turn down-...
Ah-...
Nah, on second thought, I think I'd prefer not.
No offense, you smoke what you want, but those you have there are those new French things, those
cheminées, that you're supposed to inhale in your lungs. I can't stand them. Tobacco is supposed to be tasted in the mouth, at least in my opinion, so I think I'll prefer my own, thanks.
Oh, you want to know about Reval, that whole mess? Sure, I can tell you.
I admit I didn't really know what I was expecting when I signed up, if it ever came to war, what I'd be doing. Maybe, I dunno, running around in the Karelian forests, looking for Russians running around looking for us, like had been the case in the Napoleonic Wars, like had been the case in the War of the Long Winter. The way these wars used to be fought...
But, no, they got us together and decided to ship us off to Reval for some proper strategizing. This was just after Palmstierna had moved the capital to Helsingfors, well, Helsinki, for the remainder of the war.
They sat us down and explained it to us. If we could just take this, this, this, and that point, then Reval would be ours, and it would just be marching to St Petersburg from then on, and the Russians wouldn't be able to stop us, because they would never be able to send enough troops back in time from the Black Sea, and the war would be over in a week.
I didn't believe it for a single moment: that plan was suicide, I thought. But, you know, I had my orders, so I didn't protest. I trusted in my superior officers that they knew what they were doing.
Then of course, we found out that our superior officers also thought it was suicide, but, you know, they counted on that the generals and the marshals and the government up in Helsingfors, they knew what they were doing, there was some grand plan here, everything would make sense in the big picture.
It was first after the war that I found out that the government and HQ up in Helsingfors had also thought it was suicide all along, but apparently, the request for the assault had actually from London, and there they didn't think it was suicide, they
knew it was suicide, they never thought we'd be able to take Reval, they just figured that if one could create a bloody mess up there, that could distract the Russians properly, making them re-evaluate the overall strategy what with it being a two front war, and, I dunno-...
See, that was the thing with the Brits in the late war, they weren't really trying to
win the war as such, they were merely aiming for a protracted struggle to
bleed the Russians for as long as possible, decimate them in the Black Sea.
But, yeah, so they shipped us over, and-... well, it was a fucking bloodbath.