Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/50

 by giving fire. After that there was brisk firing which lasted for about forty minutes. The prisoners of the Russians ran off towards the wood, but two of them, the Landbrugsraad, Mr. Kordelin, and the manager of a large factory, a civil engineer, Mr. Pettersson, were immediately shot down by their guards before they had made the least attempt to run away. The shots were fired by a sailor sitting behind them in the cart, evidently a Finn in disguise. A valuable ring worn by Kordelin disappeared and was found again a few months after in the possession of a Russian infantryman who was offering it for sale. In the fight two members of the Protective Corps were killed, a photographer and a verderer, while two sailors were killed and several wounded. The Russians fled in different directions, some of them were captured later on after more or less violent conflicts, but they were of course liberated as soon as they were handed over to the military authorities. The Protective Corps of Helsingfors now marched out, but at the same time the Russian military took alarm. They took possession of the important railway junction Riihimaki, in their nervousness fired at a train with exchanged German invalided prisoners, and sent 400 men with rifles and machine guns to Mommila. In order to avoid bigger fights the Protective Corps of Helsingfors retreated.

The murdered owner of Mommila was a very wealthy man. He had made a will by which the whole of his fortune, amounting to more than forty million marks, was left to all sorts of associations and institutions for the education of the people.

Among the bourgeoisie it was believed that the events at Mommila would open the eyes of the labourers and show them the necessity for concord and united action against the Russian outrages and the native ruffianism. All bourgeois papers expressed the hope that the