Amazons Of Northern Europe

Hawera Star, Volume LI, 11 June 1932, Page 14

Amazons Of Northern Europe

WHEN Runeberg wrote the story of the old canteen woman, Lotta Svard — “Charlotte Sword” in English—he could hardly have imagined that today his native Finland would contain 50,000 Lotta Svards organised in a woman's army auxiliary whose like does not exist anywhere else in the world, writes Clair Price in the “New York Times.” Runeberg’s Lotta may or may not have been taken from real life, but the Lottas of today are as real as Finland itself. Uniformed in the same field grey as is worn by the regular army and the militia, a Lotta unit on the march presents the unusual spectacle of the blonde and blue-eyed sex swinging along in a formidably military column of grey caps, grey blouses, grey skirts and belted grey overcoats. Rich and poor, old and young, the Lottas are reduced to the iron-grey level of the coarse homespun stuff which, in army rifle regiments, is associated with the German coalscuttle type of steel helmets. The Lottas, of course, do not wear steel helmets, for they are a volunteer ■women ’s auxiliary attached to the militia and not a combatant force. The arms they bear are splints and bandages, teapots and frying pans, brooms and scrubbing brushes, pins and needles, pens and typewriters. On the march they wear the heavy visored caps which the army and the militia wear, but at work they sometimes take off their caps and put on instead the highly civilian head-cloths which Finnish housewives wear. They have sometimes been described as the “Amazons of Northern Europe,” and there is -in fact a very artillery-like clatter and rattle about a unit of Lotta cooks on the march. Many a militiaman, hard pressed at manoeuvres, has pricked up his ears at the sound of the distapt rumble which indicates that the Lottas are coming; and many a nose has hungrily sniffed the wind-borne smells of sausages and tea which indicate that a battery of Lotta field kitcheps has unlirubered and gone into action beneath the birches of a npar-by l’oadside. They are also trained nui’ses aud stretcherbearers. They run military hospitals and ambulances. They make the militia’s uniforms. They do the “paper work” at militia bases. They raise money for the militia by means of lottei’ies, bazaars, etc. They carry on school work among their members. They hold gymnastic, singing, walking and ski-ing competitions. They obey orders like soldiers. They constitute a disciplined patriotic force so popular that the grey Lotta uniform has become the festival dress of Finnish women. They sometimes help the regular army, but they belong fo the militia, joining up for the two weeks of militia manoeuvres every year, and during the rest of the year carrying out their Lotta duties in their home areas. They do not live in barracks because Finland has no barracks to spare for them, bxxt during manoeuvres they do the same work at the militia’s bai’racks as housewiyes do in their own homes. Like Runeberg’s Lotta, the unlegendary Lotta of to-day is “a pearl on the pathway of war, and a pearl all genuine, too.” Their grey blouses are pinned at the throat with the Lotta brooch—a blue swastika surrounded by grey heraldic roses on a white ground. The swastika in these post-war years has become the accepted symbol of the political ‘ ‘ Whites, ’ ’ and the Lottas, like the militia, are a “White” force. When thei’e are new Lottas to be sworn in, the blue and white Finnish flag is borne into the parish church by the local Lotta association, in its of homespun grey, followed by black-clad grandmothers too old for Lotta and them gi’andchildren who are still too young; and the Lotta oath, administered at the head of the whitewashed Gothic nave, binds the Lotta recruit to the support of “religion, home, liberty and culture.” All tliis is a legacy of the civil war of 1918 between “Whites” and “Reds.” There is a strong Socialist party in the Finland of to-day, but its members are debarred from both the militia and the Lottas. The militia—usually known as the Civic Guard —is the old “White Guard” of 1918. The women who fought on the White side in 1918 are now embodied in Lotta associations scattered throughout the smallest villages and away noi’th to the Arctic Circle, where the pavement ends and Lapland begins. They were not oi’ganised as Lottas until 1920, but they are the same women as those of whom General Mannerheim, the “White” commander, said in 1918: — Some of them have been decoi’ated for valour; others have been under enemy fix*e courageously preparing food for the troops; others have, by their hardiness and bravery, inspired the men with still gi’eatei* courage; othei’s have, under heavy fire, carried wounded to the ambulances. But the dispatches do not tell’ of all the self-sacrificing, tireless work which Finland’s women did during the War of Liberation, do not mention the dangei’s and pi’ivations they suffered. The men who died of their wounds cannot tell of the loving hands which to the last tended them. How many women did not expose themselves to dangei’s which were connected with the distribution of arms in the disti’icts occupied by Red troops; how many did not endure terrible suffering when accompanying the troops during their advances?” Geography has made Finland very much a boi’der State, for her thousand-ipile Red frontier is, for all ordinary purposes, the only land frontier she has. For 600 years Russia and Sweden made her the cockpit of the north. For the ■last fifty years she has not know whether she

Women’s Militia Auxiliary In Finland

Fifty Thousand Volunteers In Cause Of Liberty

was going east or west. She has not yet decided quite where she is going, but she knows by this time where she is not going. A century of Russian suzerainty has been peeled away from much of the old grand duchy almost as completely as if it had never existed. No Russian books are sold in the book shops t no Russian signs remain in the streets; nobody talks Russian if he can help it. White Finland has turned her back on Red Russia so completely that the two seem worlds apart. But this has not altered the map. Helsingfors and Leningrad are still only twelve hours apart by train—-and a very slow train, too. Geography has wedged Finland in between the “barbaric east” and the deep sea. and there she remains. She now has a regular army. Some of its officers are Russian-trained; some are German-trained. It looks a stubborn and effective army, but Finland still retains, in tjie militia and the Lottas, the old “White Guards” of the civil war of 1918. All this women’s heroism of 1918 is now personified in Runeberg’s half-legendary Lotta Svard, Most foreigners know Runeberg best by his “Yart Land,” one of the most-beautiful national anthems ever written. In Helsingfors you hear it sung frequently by mixed choirs without instrumental accompaniment, and it is moving:— Our land is poor; true, we reply, For him who covets gold; The stranger proud may pass us by, But we our land yet glorify; For in each crag and fell and wold A gold-land we behold.

Swedish-speaking though, he was, Runeberg’s whole life was spent in Finland, and all his work was charged with an, intense love of the land and its people. “There is one maiden,” he said in his old age, “whom I have loved passionately ever since my youth, apd to her I have always been true; and that maiden is Finland.” This is the spirit of intense patriotism in which the dim and roughly-sketched figure of his Lotta Svard participates. In every peasant household Runeberg is perhaps best known by his “Songs of Ensign Stal,” which celebrate the heroism of Finland’s defenders in the war of 1808 against Russia, and it is from the pages of “Ensign Stal” that Lotta Svard emerges as an old peasant woman, brown and wrinkled, who sold corn brandy and tobacco to the troops all through that disastrous wftr. The widow of a corporal, according to the poem, she came back to the army as soon as the drums began to roll, setting up her little bar wherever the wounded were and watering her brandy with her tears as she lifted a glass to the lips of a hopelessly wounded dragoon. She was clad in the peasant’s head-cloth, with hpr old shawl tucked beneath her apron at one side. She shines out in Finnish poetry as the embodiment of the strength pnd tenderness of patriotic womanhood. '

The first thing that you see in every Lotta headquarters to-day is Edelfelt’s drawing of Lotta Svard as she was when she went off to the war at her husband’s side. There is nothing else in any Lotta office to suggest' an army, for the civilian sex seems to have flit upon some means of its own for achieving military dis? cipline without military forms. There are no stripes, no medals, no saluting, no heel-clicking. You see only stenographers in the familiar grey skirts and blouses,, and occasionally one or two boys from the militia clad in the much coarser field-grey which the Lottas themselves wear outdoors.

The head of all the Lotta associations—the general of the women’s legion—is Mrs Fanny Luukkonen, one of the famous women auxiliaries of 1918. She did not fight with the combatant troops (the “Reds” used women at the front, but not the “Whites”), hut she smuggled artillery from Russia and commanded a force of women who collected rifles on the battlefield to repair them at their own expense for the “White” troops.

The Finns are never a frivolous people and they are never further removed from frivolity than when you mention their Lottas. Mrs Lmukkonen’s assistants regard her with the military devotion which is typical of the Lottas everywhere. In the army her assistants would he called her “staff/’ but the Lottas are a little touchy on the charge of attempting to militarise women, a charge which has sometimes been made against them in the past. Mrs Luukkonen commands a nation-wide force of 50,000 women who can be mobilised as quickly as any army. The Lottas go out of their way to make it plain that they are non-combatants, a volunteer phalanx which accepts no pay (on the contrary, Lottas pay about 20 cents a year as a membership fee), and which wears the grey uniform as a symbol of its selfless patriotism. Whatever may be the source of their strength, in the cold invigorating atmosphere of Finland the repose Of older peoples and softer climates becomes a form of decadence to which Finnish women have not yet dropped. They were the first women in Europe to obtain suffrage. There were women doctors in Finland long before women doctors existed elsewhere. Go into any of the big banks in Helsingfors and your business will be transacted for you by a woman cashier with a briskness and dispatch that leave you slightly breathless. Go into the dining car on a Finnish train and you find women in charge. In the big pulp mills and on the farms women work side by side with men. They are still debarred from being soldiers —and Lotta Svard is their reply.