Lehto’s moods grew ever darker. Once a grenade exploded beside him, but he escaped unharmed. He went deaf for a little while, and was, indeed, still deaf when he proceeded to shoot a wounded enemy soldier, saying that he couldn’t take the man’s moaning any longer. No one took much notice of the incident. They were soldiers now.

The matter-of-fact description of absurd events looks like moral outrage sometimes, sarcasm at other times.

He had tried to forget about death - his own or anybody else’s - and to maintain a certain tranquility. This tranquility was dear to him, and he was angry now that it had been upset. Nothing had been quite brutal enough to desensitize him to the insanity of war. He fought, and he fought better than countless others, but each despicable deed and show of pride in killing awakened the judge in him. He had tried to fulfil his duty, blocking out its insanity, and now this equilibrium had been upset – which was why he was walking jerkily several yards in front of his men. But soon his heaving breath evened out. He calmed down. The lingering shock of the experience fell away and Koskela was his former self once more. The baseness of what Lehto had done had affected him most deeply of all of them probably but after a few minutes, it ceased to trouble him. And so one more incident receded into the past. Nobody learned anything from it, and everybody, by forgetting, condoned it.

Then there is the fine description of the numerous and expandable characters, each having their own way of dealing with war. This is the main attraction, besides the usual attributes of the war novel: each character has a voice and a tongue.

The translator tries to render the many dialects of the soldiers, always a counterpoint to war propaganda for the one Finland, and to the very newly standardized Finnish written language used by the narrator. How do they coexist? The stories of friction and adaptation seem to be the result of fine observations:

“But do you think those bourgeois gentlemen up there can understand your rumbling stomach? This nation’s guts have been rumbling so damn long those guys have forgotten what that sound even means. Especially since their own bellies are full.”

Lahtinen was just a die-hard proletarian, but Hietanen burst out laughing and said, “Hey, I got it! Aren’t there some kinda actors who make it sound like their stomachs are talking? Let’s train ourselves guys! Then every time we’re all out there in front of the officers see, we’ll have all our bellies belch out, “'Brehhhd!””

Vanhala was literally shaking with laughter. Lahtinen’s lesson for the day was drowned out once again, just as it had been thousands of times before.

And right there a limit appeared - drawing a line between griping and any actual idea of rebellion. They were all ready to howl in protest and jeer at their country and its ‘stuffed shirts’ however they wanted - but if somebody tried to steer the sneering into something that smacked of an agenda, they would drown him out with roars of laughter. There was a degree of seriousness that remained off-limits, that lay behind a line the men would not transgress. It was the very same aversion that made them avoid that particular type of patriotism that bears glimmer of mania. “Fuckin’ fanatic” was their preferred term for the even the tiniest welfare officer guilty of this particular sin.

On a side note: this was the war novel I imagined (from the noise) Catch 22 to be.