Sausage War
Nick and I recently took an Autumn ride to a farm in Helsinki, and sat down for a farmhouse lunch of soup and bread rolls. Our soup options were leek and spring onion soup or sausage soup. This reminded me about the Sausage War.
I don’t know if the word makkara in Finnish is quite so silly-sounding as the word sausage in English. But certainly in English, the idea of a sausage war, and the absurd possibilities that it conjures, is giggle-inducing. Unfortunately, in this so-called sausage war, actual people actually died, and horrifically so: mostly by bayonet (that knife you stick on the end of a gun), desperately hungry, and ill-prepared for a freezing Finnish winter. And this is because the Sausage War happened during the Winter War, a war between Finland and Russia that, as the name suggests, occurred in Winter.
My knowledge of Finnish-Russian relations is almost entirely derived from one book (A frozen hell: The Russo-Finnish Winter War of 1939-1940, by William Trotter) which details events on the Finnish side of the border during this Winter War: … The rest of my knowledge derives from a basic understanding of geography, eating Karelian pies and reading about the term Finlandization. So, what I’m trying to say is it’s limited, simplistic and mostly war-related. You might want to take my following description of the Sausage War with a little grain of salt; although, I did go back and fact check my description against that one book.
Living outdoors during the winter, with the expectation of killing or being killed, is clearly not as nice a way to spend winter’s day as a ski trip with the expectation of coffee or doughnuts (my plans for winter). But under unpleasant conditions, during the Winter War, Finns had access to hot food, fur-lined dugouts, saunas on the front line, and they also had quite a bit of experience with harsh winters.
The Russians had hunger. I mean, hunger and some guns and whatnot, but I’m focussing on the hunger, because if those Russians had been anything like me, once hunger sets in, all capacity for resilience, intelligence, skill and strategy evaporates. The particular Russians of this story were apparently not like me, because despite their hunger, they actually managed some stealthy manoeuvring, through some thick, wintery forest, past the main line of Finnish defence and were able to take a bunch of cooks and medics of a Finnish supply line by complete surprise. For those of you who are not particular war-minded, taking control of a supply line can be a pretty big deal. In this case, however, it ended up not being much of a deal, because of what happened next.
What happened next was that the Russians smelled sausage soup on the simmer, their hunger became irrepressible, and they promptly began to eat. The Finnish medics and the chefs saw their opportunity, got their hands on some guns, and killed most all of the soup-eating Russians. According to Trotter’s book, the next day, some of the corpses lying in the snow had sausage frozen to their lips. A detail which I find somehow terribly haunting.
