It didn't take long, we soon found ourselves enlisted. My father claimed that we didn't need training, and that he knew all the tricks of the trade, so did the Estonian government. There wasn't time for training, not in this war...
That night I rushed down with Jaan, Juri, Tõnis, and Mihkel. The five of us, friends since we were in school. Now we were soldiers in arms. We all rushed out together, leaving behind life, and innocence. I remember how cruel we were, to those who stayed behind. One boy, Mart, we were particularly cruel to.
I could blame drink, or the heat of battle, or my friends, but I was the one who held him down as they hit him. We lured him outside, behind the recruiter's office, held him down, and beat him to a pulp. He survived, thankfully, but I still remember how he moaned and tried to cry out, only to have rags stuffed in his mouth.
But that was only the beginning of the end. more would come. We, my friends and I, were lucky enough to be together in a division, and amazingly enough, my father was our division commander. I was going to war with the world of my youth, and had not learned to grow up. Oh the party we had that night. If I had none my future, I would not have changed a thing.
The next morning we were of course, sick. But that didn't stop us. We marched out to meet the other two divisions, men from all over Estonia, under the command of Johan Laidoner himself. We all saluted, we all were proud...
An army of toy soldiers marching into the furnace of hell. Our shoes shined, our guns were slick and clean, our hats strait, or eyes full of hope. How many of those cleaming eyes I still see, haunting my dreams, I do not know. So many eyes that would never open again. So many dreams shattered.
We all thought the war would be done by December. Even my father forgot the lessons of the Great War, but then again we were right, by December the war had ended, for most of us. We all were ready, except for Tõnis.
Tõnis' father had not returned from the fields of Russia in 1917, and his older brother had died fighting for the Bolsheviks. Now he was alone, his mother dead of the disease the killed so many following the Great War. He only came because we convinced him. I remember his words as if he had said them yesterday.
"We should not go." he said to me, pleading.
"Tõnis, you fool, we are going to win our country a place in the sun! Don't you want to take revenge for the death of your brother? It was the Bolsheviks who sent him into that deathtrap."
"Shut up, my brother never wanted to go fight, and he wouldnt want me to fight as well." Tõnis, a Socialist at heart, believed that, like his brother, war was wrong. He would never come out and say it, because he would have been even more alone.
"Come on Tõnis, we are all going. Jaan, Juri, Kaarel and even Mihkel!"
"Mihkel, he's not even 19! He's too young..."
"Oh come on." Then I knew what to do... "Well, when I come back as a war hero, I know who I'll ask to marry." I said smugly.
"What? No. You don't think she'l want me to go?"
"Oh yeah, she was looking for you earlier at the army post. She wanted to give you her photo."
"Really?" Tõnis was hooked.
He came, of course. Damn me for doing that to him. He got a kiss before he left, and promised to marry her one day. Damn me...
Tõnis and I were tent mates, along with a man from Tallinn, a law student and a farmer's son, Lennart. We settled in for the first night, 2 miles outside Tallinn. Most of our time was spent introducing eachother, and for a while we say and listened to Lennart and Arnold, the man from Tallinn, play music. It was a grand time. The next morning things would be different.
------
We had been camped in the city of Kehra for that night, and in the morning quickly marched east to Aegvidu, where our other two divisions met us. It was amazing, to see all those men, and all those brave souls, now so many laying in the Russian snow. From Aegvidu we marced to Tapa, and then on to Rakvere. In each city more and more people greeted us. Hundreds, no Thousands were there to see us go, over time it began to feel as though we had already won the war!
After Rakvere we marched to Sonda, a small town west of Kivoli, and in the distance we saw something we feared, Russian planes.
While the Germans had been advancing in the south, the Russian armies were still pouring out of Finland. We could hear the sound of a siren in the distance, and see the flashing lights of bombs over Kivoli, and in Johvi further west, and in Kothla-Jarve, and even on the boarder in Narva-Joesuu. Bombs fell all night, luckily we never felt its pounding. We believed the planes had returned to Russia to fight off the Germans, and marched out.
I have never seen such destruction. Homes lay flattened, innocent children and women dead, the crippled and wounded without medical attention. I saw too many dead that day, at first in Kothla-Jarve, where the pounding had been light. But as we reached the cities of Narva-Joesuu and Narva, we found a hideous display. Mothers criying over their children, a hospital destroyed, the industry and farmers of Narva now nearly gone. It made us want to kill the Russians even more.
And so we crossed the boarder, our objective was the town of Pushkin, which would lead us to Pavlovsk, and then, to Lenningrad. This is, for us, when the war began.
