Evening star., 1940-01-03
Bodies Of Red Dead
Lie Frozenin
Fantastic Forms
Thousands Add to Weird
Aspect Of Silent
Neur-Arctic WiIds
By LELAND STOWE

BY LELAND SlOWE,
Chicago Daily News Foreign Correspondent.
WITH FINNISH ARMY IN THE
EAST; the battlefield Of Tolvajarvi,
Jan. 2 (delayeO In this sad soli-
tude lie the dead: Uncounted thou
sands of Russian dead. They lie as
they fell-twisted, gesticulating and
tortured. But they lie beneath a
kindly mask of 2 inches of new
fallen snow. Now they are one with
the cold, white shapes of the illimit-
able pine and spruce trees. An un-
known legion of fallen. they have
been sacrificed by winters hands
and covered over with winters spot
less sheet. They will not 60 back
to the earth now for many months
But even this profuse, virginia.
coverlet of near-Arctic wilderness
cannot quite conceal the anguish of
their last movement or the catas-
trophic suddenness of their end
Here all the pain and all the cruelty
of their betrayal has been preserved
by the frost king of the Far North.
It is as if Nine Tussaud of the
famous London WaxWorks Museum
had decided to preserve one of the
wars final horrorS-aS if she had
created this scene of false peace and
inexpressible tragedy and with ap-
propriate simplicity had called it
the field of battle"
Every January deep solitude how
ers above the SHOWS of Tolvajarvi.
But today it is infinitely deeper than
in other years for it is heavy with
the ultimate loneliness of death, and
thousands of the dead may be as
lonely as single one. Endless, pro-
found, and voiceless peace where
the wounds of war are frozen and
will bleed no more. In this place we
have heard of great, magnificent
victory. In this place the silence
speaks of things which man may de-
stroy but never more restore or
resurrect.
Shattered Tanks on Road.
When we rode out upon the narrow
finger OF Lake Tolva's peninsula, we
were not prepared for this. 1t is a
thin and twisting road with pines
and spruces standing high on either
side and the white, frozen bosom of
the lake just beyond All along this
central artery of the battlefield, all
along the road that leads to Lake
Agla, 20 miles away, we saw the
shattered tanks, and broken supply
lorries, and heaped debris of the
Pod ArY,ouc onoil,i1otaI ;e;1
All along the roadway we saw
strange shapes bulging beneath the
snow among trees and shapes some
times which might have been logs.
Sometimes they looked like crooked
limbs cast into the discard by the
woodsman's ak. Sometimes heavy
felt boots, barred of snow by the
stumbling contact of some passing
Finnish soldier, protruded suddenly
and revealed the naked truth.
Sometimes, too, we saw soldiers
dragging frozen shapes, like pieces
OF cord wood, from the forest
and here and there bodies lay in
crude contorted piles waiting for
a final, nameless, common grave.
But, for the most part, last De-
cember's snowfall had cloaked these
forms in the immaculate anonymity
of the Far Northern winter. Ma
ture had done her charitable best.
1t still did not quite seem possible
that these could have been human
beings only few days ago, or that
the mask of Tolvaj jarvis snow con-
cealed more and more hundreds of
dead.
Then our White-painted army bus
stopped at point on the crest of
the ridge. We climbed out and fol-
lowed our guide into the forest on
the left. There are many of them
mere, he said. They were all wiped
out by our machine gun fire" 1t
was true; there were very many of
them here.
Shock Troops Lie Dead.
Suddenly we found ourselves
among whole groups of white-cov-
cred figures. Some lay straight on
the ground, but mostly the arms
were drawn convulsively upward or
projected stif1y above the shoulder.
Mostly their legs were bent or dou-
bled. Sometimes one body, curiously
diversified with its Pinch coating of
snow, lay grotesquely across and
against the surrounding white These
were the Russian dead and soon
we saw that most of them wore
heavy overcoats. that their boots
were good, and that all had carried
gasmasks. They belonged to a
picked shock troop division of the
Red Army. Now they were strewn
on both sides of the road for more
than a mile along the extended pen
1nsula and then, further on, and yet
further-among the spruces and be-
side the road that leads to Agla-
jarvi.
All about us lay featureless hu-
man shapes, their masks of snow
making them more anonymous than
death itself. Beside one of these /
paused. Why did one wonder what
these men looked like and what
might be written on their faces?
Slowly I brushed the snow away.
An unshaven face with an alabas-
ter forehead emerged first, and then
the stubble of close-cut. black hair.
This face was peaceful, as If its
owner had fallen asleep here in
the blizzard. 1t was the face of a
man of 30-still frozen and life
less.
But there were other faces on
which was written such suffering as
can scarcely bear contemplation.
One of these belonged to a young
soldier who had been shot in the
right knee. He lay with both hands
clutched desperately against the
wound. This had been the young
Russians last action, and the ter
rible frost of Is degrees below zero
perhaps IS below-had mummified
him in the precise attitude in which
he had died.
We could not look for long. Never