Why you should read Leena Lander's new novel

 At Sunday child Leena Lander shows how civilians faced each other during the Finnish civil war - the Reds versus the Whites - and how this brought out the worst in people.

Three days Arvi is able to spend undisturbed with his horses in the remote barn. On the second day, rumbling can be heard in the distance, making the horses restless for a while, but he is soon able to calm them down. A few times he hears dog barking. On the third morning, he is woken by the tapping of a woodpecker and the piercing song of finches and other birds. From a nearby bog pond, the piercing croaking of frogs can be heard, and the murmur of meltwater running into the pond can be heard everywhere. When he goes there in the morning to wash himself and throws water over his face with his hands, frogspawn also sticks to his hands. Somewhere further on, grouse can be heard cooing when courting, while the females respond with a critical hiss.

Every day, Arvi takes the horses one by one to the fen to drink. The bank is so boggy that he has to walk almost all around the water to find a spot with a sandy bottom that is firm enough and free of frogspawn.

The weather is good and the sun, rising higher and higher, shines brightly all day through the horizontal gaps in the barn wall. At night it still freezes slightly and then he puts blankets over the horses.

Early on the evening of the third day, Arvi's peace was finally disturbed. He had agreed with the stable master that he would send someone when it was safe to return. This does indeed happen. Only it is an intensely unpleasant surprise for Arvi who the bringer of the news is.

He is grooming one of the mares when the horses become restless. As he turns around, he sees a man in uniform approaching, who stops in front of him and greets him in military fashion.

It's Anders Holm.

Anders brings the long-awaited news of the Reds' total capitulation and the count's personal thanks for the feat by which Arvi saved the precious animals. The fleeing Reds took more than 40 horses, some of which they have fortunately already recovered.

Anders also carries a bundle of provisions, the contents of which they share together. He burns with desire to tell of his own adventures. In the course of the account, it turns out that these are of a completely different calibre than having to hide in a remote barn with six horses.

Anders explains that he and his two companions had come to Finland via Åland. In Houtskari, they had joined the Scheren Volunteer Troops. They had been assigned to the fourth company, in which most of the hundred and twenty men were from Åland. The first company consisted of Swedish-speaking men from Turku and the surrounding area, the second from Finstaligen and the third from men from the Scheren area. The command language was the same for all - German.

As his first weapon, Anders was given a rifle that was already warped. He had practised shooting enough to notice immediately that you couldn't hit a target with that rifle. And he was only given a small number of cartridges, of which only three were allowed to be used for practice.

After just a few days of combat training, they were transferred to Korppoo, which was told had just been occupied by a division of more than a hundred Reds. Arriving at Korppoo, the men formed a chain, after which they were ordered to move down the wooded bank.

After they had advanced a piece, the enemy opened fire. Anders had been more than relieved when the old and corpulent commander of their division appointed a young Swedish lieutenant, Count Carl August Ehrensvärd, to lead the attack. The old fellow himself kept following the division's advance with binoculars from a rock.

The lieutenant instructed the men to open fire only when they saw the enemy and then only on the orders of the group commander. They advanced in half groups with short bursts and suffered no losses. This was because the enemy's gunfire was too inaccurate at dawn due to the long distance.

Anders says he had been a bit nervous beforehand about what it would be like to be the target of the shots and to shoot back. He claims he had weathered the baptism of fire well. The 'baptism of blood', he calls it in Swedish.

That word has a strange feel to it, Arvi thinks, a bit ridiculous.

Only after the men reached the bank were they allowed to answer the fire, and the Reds retreated towards the village. When Anders had hidden behind a tree as he advanced into the forest, he heard someone shouting and calling for Jesus and his mother in turn. In front of him lay a wounded Red in a trench. He realised that the enemy was asking him in sign language for a mercy shot. Anders was already docking when he saw the Red's belly wound. Why would he waste one of his few bullets on a man who was combat incapacitated and would die anyway?

At Nauvo, Germans had also taken part in the fight and they had supported them with guns from their warship. All had gone well, by the way, but Anders had lost his rifle when he had crossed a large crack on an ice floe. The rifle had slipped into the sea while unhooking the frozen floe at the edge of the crack. It had been a rotten gun after all. And the next day he had obtained a brand new Russian Mosin-Nagant and forty rounds of ammunition from a Red who had been shot near the cemetery wall in Nauvo.

Anders sits down and chews his bread for a while. He looks at the tops of the leafless alders on the bank and then continues in a softer voice.

Yes... he had been tired after that. Everything had actually been rather chaotic. The fat guy should have been in command, but he had been nowhere to be seen all this time. Ehrensvärd too had not seen Anders for two days. A whole day and night he had wandered around the ice with two companions in the haze without knowing where the others were, or if they were anywhere at all.

In Nauvo, an abandoned horse stood on the bank, tied to a tree. Suddenly a German, a sergeant major, appeared and shouted: 'Sameln, sameln,' or something along those lines. It had all been so damn chaotic, so horribly chaotic and cold...

Arvi thinks the narrative, in which the enthusiasm of the beginning has been extinguished, has come to an end when Anders remains with his head in his hands for at least a minute. But then he moves on again. Arvi is left with nothing but to listen to Anders, who has regained his enthusiasm and continues his long and detailed description of his unit's advance.

The report culminated in the 50-kilometre triumphal march to liberated Turku. The people who had gathered along the roads had cheered and handed out gifts to the heroes. When told that, Anders takes off a boot and holds his foot with a grey woollen sock in front of Arvi's nose. Arvi has to feel how soft the sock is.

'Like petting a kitten, isn't it?'

Anders says he got the socks from a pretty girl from Parainen, who had knitted them from home-spun lambswool. 'And now the company is billeted in Turku. Lieutenant Ehrensvärd gave me two days' leave so I could visit Count and Countess Armfelt, when he had heard they were good old acquaintances. The lieutenant is a count himself.'

'O.'

Anders lies back in the hay with his hands behind his head.

'Jesus, how long it's been since I've been in these parts.'

Arvi, who has been listening to Anders' story almost silently, gets up and says it is time to get their things together and take the horses back to the estate. Anders wants to show off his new rifle and asks if Arvi also has a shooting iron, just to be sure.

Arvi shakes his head.

'What if the Reds who were chasing horses had discovered you?'

'I wouldn't know, because they didn't discover me.'

As Arvi prepares the horses for departure, Anders' attention is drawn to the hay stakes standing against the wall of the barn under the sloping roof. He grabs one and spins the stake around in his hands.

'Are these the only weapons you could have used to defend yourself against those Reds?'

Anders takes a run and, aware of his strength, throws the stake as far as he can into the meadow. The thing lands a long way away and Anders looks at Arvi with a triumphant smile.

'Horse thieves are not to be treated gently, are they?'

Anders says he learned that when he himself had stolen a horse. Although it was a tin horse, it had a general in gala uniform on it. The tin general belonged to Paul. Anders does not remember why he had nicked it, but he was caught and as punishment he had to go to his uncle in Uppsala for a whole year to be corrected. His uncle was a pastor in that town. A brat, to be honest. But for the little horse thief only good. As was the fact that the brat who had committed the crime was only allowed to see his mother once in that whole year, and then only briefly on Christmas Eve in the cold church in Uppsala.

Otherwise, he should have sat on the front pew. His mother had walked back and forth between the rows of pews and the altar. Finally, she had remained under the richly decorated pulpit and had addressed her son. The message from his fur-clad mother was this: as a disobedient child, Anders did not deserve a single Christmas present this year.

Anders laughingly says he was seven and must admit he had learned his lesson then. What he did find annoying was that his cute little kitten had grown into a disgustingly fat male during that year.

Arvi concentrates on packing. Mothers and what they have done or left behind are not a subject he would want to pursue with anyone at the moment, especially not Anders Holm. He picks up another stake and says that if he had been in Arvi's shoes and had wanted to take a Red's horse from him, he would certainly not have got off as easily as he did at the time. Who would have got a hay stake up his ass.

'Good, but now we put that stake back where it came from.'

Arvi also picks up the stake Anders threw into the meadow and puts it against the wall under the canopy as well.

'Maybe we should get on the road soon,' he says, which is more of a command than a suggestion.