Page:Lars Henning Söderhjelm - The Red Insurrection in Finland in 1918 - tr. Annie Ingebord Fausbøll (1920).djvu/57

 falls down beside his brother's body. Three bayonet thrusts put an end to his life. The ruffians now rush into the house and there find the two youngest boys, the eldest fifteen years old. A gun is raised against him, but the despairing mother has time to throw herself between, and the bullet misses him. A thorough search of the house is now begun, and with revolvers directed against their breasts the boys are ordered to confess "where arms were concealed." There were none. Then the men went out. Mrs. Sahlstrøm asked them to help her to carry in the bodies of her two murdered sons lying in a pool of blood in the yard. But the men only laughed, and when she asked them to remove themselves from out of her sight, they declared that they intended to stay and "guard the house." Against whom?

The strike lasted a week. In this short time the Red force for the maintenance of order murdered thirty-four persons. But besides these there were many wounded, and several of the persons arrested were severely ill-treated in prison. At the house-searches and by the sequestration of various kinds of goods very great values were lost. Articles of gold and silver disappeared, wine-cellars were plundered. At Åbo the funds of the food control committee, 60,000 marks, were stolen, and sugar to the value of 200,000 was distributed among "the revolutionary people."

The general strike was brought to an end when it was found that it did not lead to any actual result. It had been a premature echo of the Bolshevik revolution in St. Petersburg, but it had been started in the wrong way by the official insistence on certain claims on Government and Lantdag. In order that these claims might be fulfilled the latter institutions had to function, whereas the aim of a real revolution would, of course, be their downfall. So the strike ended with the