Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/138

 fight had been troubled several times already in the summer of 1917 by the Red. The farmer and his many sons were much hated by the ruffianly element at Björneborg. And quite right. On the 10th February, first a notice is found in the papers of "Great Spoils of War," which consisted of the hundred and twelve cows and forty-eight horses of the above farm, and later a report of a soldiers' meeting at Björneborg. Here the Russian soldiers eagerly protest against the plundering of a solitary farm and murdering of unarmed prisoners. This outrage has been committed by Finnish Red Guardsmen and a few soldiers. The garrison at Björneborg now demand that all the plunder be given up "to the Red Guard as the property," of the Finnish proletariat," but at the same time the garrison demand that the robbers, as well as the murderers, should be severely punished. For itself the paper expresses the hope that the members of the Red Guard who have committed the murders and robberies may be dismissed from the Guard; as may be seen, a very mild wish. It is little credible that it was fulfilled, or that it was but seriously meant.

A more melancholy proof of the brutality of the Red Guard than this of Russian soldiers protesting against its cruelties can hardly be imagined.

As already stated, the Protective Corps at Helsingfors had left the city the day before the insurrection broke out. The greater part of it proceeded to the little town Borgå, east of Helsingfors. A "White" territory now came into existence in this place. Another arose west of the capital, in the parish of Kyrkslätt. The White Corps were very incompletely armed, and could not make a stand against the Russian artillery of the Red. First the eastern corps was disrupted, and the men dispersed in the Skerries, where they suffered terrible hardship. Several of the White fugitives who had had