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On October 27, from early in the morning, the air was suddenly filled with the screams of shells, violent explosions echoed over the horizon, and the rumble of field artillery fire and the dull roar of heavy artillery echoed in the sky. From the Russian coastal fortress of Kronstadt, the distant echo of the fortress's cannons continued to tear through the sky. After a few dozen seconds, the horizon turned into a curtain of fire.

The borders of the Grand Duchy of Finland, the only autonomous region in the Russian Empire, began to burn on this day. Snow-covered branches flew into the sky. The winter morning light reflects stones, dust, dirt and shards of farmhouses. The winding country roads turned into mounds of earth, as if the earth had cracked open and swallowed them all.

Then came the rattling of machine guns and the firing of the Finns firing back.

For this day, from the day the Finns swore that they would continue to pledge allegiance to the Tsar, it was already predestined, they understood that allegiance to the Tsar was not without a price, but the vast majority of Finns knew very well that the past and nearly a hundred years of peace came from the Tsar's patronage, and once they broke away from the Tsar, then Finland would have to face war, and they would rather choose the latter than the unknown independence and the current rich life under the Tsar's protection.

War broke out, just as they expected.

In St. Petersburg, the Finns became "lackeys of the hateful tyrants", while in Helsinki there was a cry of excitement.

For God's sake!

For Finland!

For Russia!

And for the Tsar, of course! Every Finn is going to take up arms!

In contrast to the Russians, who are required to be drafted, the Finns are not actually required to serve in the military, and it can even be said that these Finns have no combat experience at all, and it is only in recent years that the Finns have "had to do military service", but this does not affect the Finns much - in fact, although the life of the Finns is peaceful and affluent, almost all Finns hunt in the forest with shotguns in their youth, although they have not received strict military training, but after hasty mobilization, These Finnish soldiers who joined the Russian Imperial Army had experiences that Russian soldiers did not have, they grew up together, went to school together, received military training together, and were all in good health. They know what to fight for - for their homeland!

It is precisely because of this that when they fight, they appear fierce, determined, and even a little fanatical. And without exception, they are all shrewd hunters and sharpshooters, and they don't need to be told when to pull the trigger and in which direction to shoot. This was undoubtedly good news for the Russian officers who fled from St. Petersburg to Finland, and for the first time they came into contact with soldiers of such good quality that even the Cossacks could not be compared.

Although many of the recruits in St. Petersburg joined the revolution because they were reluctant to go to the front, the vast majority of those officers who had sworn allegiance to the Tsar were not involved in the revolution, they were supporters of the Tsar, and after the Tsar fled to Helsinki, thousands of officers escaped the murder of the rioting soldiers and fled to Helsinki, where they became the main force of the army along with the Finnish soldiers.

The relatively good quality of officers and soldiers made the war different from the beginning, and although the revolutionaries were more numerous than the hastily mobilized Tsarist army, in reality they were also a group of untrained workers, just a group of Red Guards who had just put on their uniforms.

As for the soldiers, who were the main force of the revolution, those who played an important role in the revolution in St. Petersburg hardly took part in the offensive, while the army in St. Petersburg at that time consisted of reserve battalions of front-line combat units, and the personnel of these reserve units were mainly soldiers who had been wounded and were now recovering from their wounds and peasants who had just been drafted into the army. From a military point of view, this is a sloppy, undisciplined, and incapable army. This made them more susceptible to revolutionary propaganda, but in previous revolutions they were launched not primarily for political reasons, but out of a reluctance to leave the "warm barracks", to be reorganized into combat units, and sent to the Siberian front to "die". They are ready to seize any opportunity that might allow them to stay in the safe barracks of the capital and avoid going to the front. Moreover, in accordance with the agreement with the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets, in return for their attitude in the revolution, they were not transferred to the front because of their special "revolutionary merits".

It is for this reason that, in fact, the hundreds of thousands of Red Guards now being used to attack Finland are just a group of new soldiers, and it is for this reason that at the beginning of the battle, it was not so much a battle as a massacre - they were constantly knocked to the ground like targets, but the situation was not optimistic, after all, almost every day, the Red Guards were sending more troops, and as the war progressed, more and more real troops were broken up and reorganized into the Red Guards. Under the cover of artillery fire, the next attack was launched again and again.

The fields and forests trembled with the explosion of shells, and on hundreds of kilometers of the border, the Russian Imperial Army, which thought that the Finns were predominant, was under fire on every road. The trees that had been broken by the Russian shelling fell into a thick cloud of snow, kicking up a white cloud of ice and earth. Black rocks and debris scattered into the sky. For the Finns, who had not experienced war since the time of Napoleon, they had not seen such a sight even in a nightmare. Nothing compares to the horrors in the memory and imagination of the Finns, but in the trenches, everyone is holding on.

Under Russian shelling, several Finnish soldiers slipped into a tomb-like structure made of planks and frozen earth. The bunker was dark and mushy inside, with four warriors in white cloaks, one getting ready to sleep, and the others writing letters in the dim light of a candle, an ambush team of several sharpshooters, who were also known as the White Grim Reaper on the battlefield.

Patrol groups dressed in white coats and sleds sped up and down in the snow, constantly harassing the enemy's marching columns. Most of these northerners have home-made cross-country sleds with leather slings on the toes. Their handmade boots have cocked toes that glide into the sled toe toe straps, allowing them to slip on and take off the sled in seconds. When they crawled and shot in the snow, they put their sleds aside and tied them to a belt.

These sled-clad Finns were out of nowhere, firing a few bullets at the Red Guards with their rifles from a distance, killing a few of them, and then disappearing into the white wilderness, where a few more bullets would fall on their heads when the Red Guards moved again, and so on and so forth, always slowing them down.

For the Finnish soldiers, this bunker in front of them was a novelty. They thought from the future that they needed to hide in such a "cellar" on the battlefield

Eric, who was only seventeen years old, looked at the log above his head and asked:

"Is this top sturdy?"

He pointed with his finger as he spoke. Said one of the soldiers in the bunker.

"If a shell lands next to it, it will collapse."

And another chimed in.

"If a shell falls on it, our comrades don't have to bother burying us."

"Children, don't be frightened by them, it depends on what kind of shell, it is difficult for ordinary shells to blow up such bunkers, our Colonel Nizhkov used to fight with Chinese, and those Chinese always like to build such fortifications......"

The sleeping soldier was now woken up by them, he yawned.

"I thought they had sent us some women."

As soon as his voice fell, someone interjected.

"No...... It was a bunch of children who sent it. Sergeant Major, where did you find these kids? ”

Everyone burst out laughing.

Just as the words fell, the earth began to tremble again, but the sound here was not as intense as it had been outside. But as the earth shook, a few pieces of the round pine ceiling fell and fell on the heads of the recruits, and they all shrank their heads in fright, only a few clods of earth.

"Today's shelling is much more intense than usual!"

The bearded sergeant major said:

"Looks like things aren't going well here."

Another man in the bunker said:

"Oh, the Russians are just having fun, they were well repaired by us 3 days ago. These bitches are like a herd of cattle, they don't know whether they are alive or dead, and in the past few days, we have retreated 20 kilometers. Since then they have been attacking non-stop, and they have been attacking for two days in a row, especially at night. The situation was critical. You can see what I look like now: I'm catching up on my sleep. We haven't slept in days. If you look through this viewing glass, the frozen river is still full of Russian corpses. These pigs have not yet sent anyone to take care of their wounded. I bet some of the people lying on the river are still humming. ”

For these Finnish soldiers, they never imagined that the war would be so cruel, they had repelled Russian attacks again and again, but those Russians kept attacking as if they were tireless and did not know death.

"Hmph, I don't even doubt that they will feel pain, otherwise, why would they attack at all costs!"

"That's because there's a machine gun behind them!"

The sergeant major lit his pipe and said:

"We only have a few machine guns, but they're all in the trenches, aimed at the Russians, but what about them? Their machine guns were behind the infantry, but they were not aimed at us, but at their own men, and if anyone dared to retreat, then what awaited them was machine gun fire. ”

Although the number of machine guns was small, they changed the way warfare was conducted, or at least the way the Warlords fought, and they could form a small force to "supervise" the infantry to attack.

"I have heard that in addition to the officers, there were political commissars in the Red Guards, and those political commissars had even more power than the officers. They can kill anyone at any time if they want to! ”

Their cannons fell silent for a while as the crowd spoke, but the Russian shells continued to fall slowly and regularly on their positions. The soldier with the field scope returned, hunched over and puffing at his fingers. He said to another soldier

"It's your turn, it's snowing outside here, and the temperature is very low, I'm about to freeze to death, and I'm worried that my teeth will be shaken off."

The soldier he had called complained and walked out.

Noticing that there was no artillery roaring from his side outside, the sergeant major asked:

"Our artillery is not firing, are they destroyed?"

"Your ideas are really dangerous, and we'd be miserable without them. A few days ago, without them, it would have been captured by the Russians. I sincerely hope that the lads who operate the coastal cannon are safe and sound. ”

For the Finns, their greatest reliance was on the coastal guns dismantled from the Gulf of Finland, which of various calibers may be bulky and mostly retired, but they can provide them with adequate fire support and, more importantly, they have enough shells.

The sergeant major had realized that he had said the wrong thing, so he quickly changed his tune.

"Of course I hope so. But why didn't they open fire? ”

Matt, who had been just listening to them, a young man in high school in Helsinki, quickly replied:

"I know that, and you should know that we have very limited ammunition supplies because there are no arsenals in Finland. So we had to save every bullet, that is, we couldn't waste a single bullet. Both the infantry and the artillery had to save as much ammunition as possible, because for every shot we had, we had one less shot, and there was hardly any supply ......"

For the Russian army in Finland, this is the deadliest threat, and their ammunition is getting less and less, compared to the rioters who occupy the arsenal need not worry about ammunition.

"Didn't you say the Germans, the Germans had already agreed to support the Tsar?"

The sergeant major with his pipe in his mouth looked at Matt and said:

"When I was young, I worked as a sailor, I went to Germany, and the German arsenals were very large, and if they supported the Tsar, we would no longer have to worry about ammunition!"

For these Finns, they held out in large part because they could see hope that the Tsar had received a lot of support, many countries expressed their support for the Tsar, and Germany and Austria-Hungary were ready to commit troops to help the Tsar restore order in Russia.

"But now the Germans have not come, so, at least, we have to rely on ourselves."

Despite being a rookie, Matt knows more than they do as a high school student.

"And for the Tsar, for every day we hold out here, he will be able to get more support......" (To be continued. )