Second Lieutenant Koskela led Walter and Simo to a semi-subterranean log bunker.
"1st Squad, all of you! Fall in!" the Lieutenant barked.
A series of sluggish movements echoed from inside the bunker. Moments later, nine soldiers wearing camouflage smocks, stained so heavily they were nearly black, filed out, lining up crookedly in the bitter wind.
"This is the Platoon Sergeant, Sergeant Simo Häyhä." Koskela gestured to Simo before turning his gaze to Walter. "And this is your new Squad Leader, Corporal Walter Ilves. From now on, drop the attitude and follow his orders. Is that understood?"
"Understood, sir," the soldiers replied, their voices thin and listless.
Koskela glanced at Walter, patted his shoulder as a signal to take over, and then led Simo away. Once the Lieutenant had departed, the scene fell into an eerie, dead silence.
Walter stood in the snow, in no hurry to speak. His calm gaze swept across every face. The nine men before him were divided by a clear boundary.
To the left stood three veterans. Their beards were unkempt, their collars shiny with grease, and their eyes held a hollow coldness; the look of men who had seen too much death and held nothing but contempt for authority. The one leading them eyed Walter askance, a faint, mocking smirk playing on his lips. To them, Walter was too young. Though the Order of the Cross of Liberty, 4th Class on his chest was striking, veterans often viewed medals as the products of blind luck or a commander's favoritism.
To the right were six recruits. They were huddled inside oversized greatcoats, their noses beet-red from the cold. Their eyes were wide with a lingering terror and a profound confusion about the future. One of the boys looked no older than seventeen; the hand holding his rifle was trembling slightly.
"I am Walter," he said finally, his voice not loud but firm. "I have only two requirements."
"First: when an order is given, it is executed. I don't need reasons. Second: maintain your rifles. If I find a bolt frozen shut, I will make you lick it warm with your own tongues. Am I clear?"
"Heh, Corporal."
The man in the center of the three veterans let out a scoffing laugh. He lazily wiped a layer of black soot from his face with his sleeve. He was scruffy, his grey greatcoat a patchwork of repairs, the collar worn smooth. He lifted his eyelids, taking in Walter's clean uniform with a gaze full of battle-worn exhaustion and irony.
Clenching an empty pipe between his teeth, he muttered indistinctly, "The rules out here are set by artillery, sir. If that Cross of yours can stop a mortar shell, we'll gladly worship you as a saint. If it can't... then let's drop the schoolroom act."
The two veterans beside him exchanged a glance. Though they didn't speak, the disdain practically snorted from their nostrils. The recruits, meanwhile, shrank into the corner, not daring to breathe.
Walter didn't move. He stood silent in the bone-chilling wind, his eyes locked onto the veteran. He quietly activated the Eye of Death.
In an instant, the world bled of all color. The howling wind receded, and the swirling snowflakes hung suspended in mid-air. Walter first looked at the hand gripping the pipe. The knuckles were a bruised purplish-blue from chronic exposure to the cold, the skin cracked like withered bark. Though the man, Vatanen, was trying his best to project an air of careless relaxation, his fingertips were trembling with a micro-oscillation nearly invisible to the naked eye. This was physiological damage, yes, but it was also the irreversible nervous twitch of a man under prolonged artillery pressure.
Walter narrowed his eyes and shifted his gaze upward, locking onto Vatanen's clouded eyes. In that moment, beneath that shell of mockery, Walter caught a glimpse of a deeply hidden, overflowing tremor. It wasn't cowardice; it was something far more profound. It was the despairing exhaustion of a man who had watched countless comrades blown to red mist and felt a near-hopeless weariness at the fact that he was still alive. It was the terror of the next shell, the one that could land at any moment.
The veteran before him was like a bowstring pulled to its absolute limit, ready to snap. His arrogance and mockery were merely the last pieces of armor he used to preserve his sanity in this frozen hell.
Walter saw through him. Vatanen was no longer a prickly old scoundrel, but a scarred husk that had wandered the battlefield too long, longing for release, yet instinctively fearing death.
Walter took a step forward. He didn't draw his gun, nor did he roar. He simply stopped in front of Vatanen and leaned in, his head lowering until their noses were mere centimeters apart.
The lingering scent of blood on Walter, mixed with the raw aura of cold earth and deep-seated gunpowder, seemed to explode in the confined space. It was the presence of a man who had personally ended dozens of lives and crawled out from the belly of a dead donkey.
The pipe in Vatanen's mouth wobbled, nearly falling to the ground. He had expected the youngster to pull rank or explode in anger. But Walter's eyes were too cold, devoid of all emotion, like a bottomless dry well that threatened to pull him in and bury him alive.
"Name," Walter said.
Vatanen's Adam's apple bobbed. His veteran slickness was forcibly suppressed by this palpable murderous aura. He instinctively straightened his slumped shoulders, his voice dropping an octave: "...Vatanen, Private First Class."
Walter shifted his gaze to the six trembling recruits. "Now, introduce yourselves one by one. Name, hometown, and what you did before the war."
The recruits grabbed onto the order like a lifeline. The first, a boy with the look of a student, snapped to attention and shouted: "Reporting, Squad Leader! I am Kalle, from Tampere. I was a student before I enlisted!"
"Reporting... I am Heikki, a logger from Salla."
"I am Jari, a postman from Helsinki..."
The recruits' introductions were detailed, carrying a desperate urgency to seek protection. Walter committed each name to memory; these men would be his comrades in the time to come, or names on a casualty list.
When it came back to the three veterans, the atmosphere chilled again.
"Vatanen. Already told you," the leader said, spitting out a fragment of tobacco leaf dismissively. "These two are Ojala and Lindholm. They're with me."
The two veterans gave only symbolic nods. Ojala even kept his head down, picking dirt from under his fingernails, treating the roll call as a complete joke.
Walter nodded. He knew these three would be excellent killing machines in the heat of battle. But in terms of management, they were a cancer. They would offer only malicious compliance, believing they knew how to survive better than any new squad leader.
Most of the time, they were right. In a winter where even souls could crack from the cold, a "young and capable" officer often signaled fatal danger. These veterans had seen too many new commanders, armed with nothing but a sense of honor and a tactical manual, turn into shredded meat in the snow during the first barrage, taking half a squad with them in their misguided courage.
To men like Vatanen, rejecting a new leader wasn't about arrogance; it was a survival instinct. They didn't believe in luck. They only believed in eyes that had crawled through the mud.
———————
Want to read ahead of schedule? Head over here ——— pa-tre-on.c-om/AlexandrusTL [remove the hyphen for normal access]