Tear Jerker / The Unknown Soldier

• With the Anyone Can Die nature of the story, Tear Jerker moments are plentiful - they take an early start in the first act, are peppered across the second act, and completely wash the third act with sweet, salty reader tears. This was the intention of the author, who wanted to first make the reader grow emotionally attached to the characters, so that he could then kill them off with the maximal emotional effect. He wanted to make the reader ask "Why weren't these men allowed to live?"
• The biggest of all the tear jerkers is probably the death sequence of Hietanen. To start with, Hietanen is The Heart of the story, always feeling empathy for other people and helping them, always cheering others up. At the beginning of the sequence, some New Meat arrives to join the platoon. Very soon they're hit by Soviet artillery fire. One of the New Meat panics and climbs out of his foxhole, screaming in terror. Hietanen tries to yell at him to go to safety, but the boy is too panicked to understand anything, so Hietanen climbs after him and starts dragging him to the nearest foxhole. Then a shrapnel comes and tears open both of his eyes. Hietanen is blinded and in terrible pains. The others gather around him to say their goodbyes. They're all upset by his fate, not knowing what to say. Hietanen senses their uneasiness and once more tries to cheer others by returning one more time to his old upbeat, bantering personality, claiming he doesn't care one bit about such things. However, his pains are so great that he can't help but to cry out in agony. Finally he's helped into an ambulance. Koskela, who's fond of him, says his last farewells and promises to come to see him after the war, if he only makes it out of it alive. While the ambulance is driving away from the front, it's attacked by the Soviets, crashes and catches fire. Hietanen, despite his blindness, manages to find his way out of the ambulance and tries to help others out of the burning vehicle as well, despite enemy fire still targeting them. He promises to a terrified man about to catch fire that he won't leave him... but he's shot and falls down dead. Those left in the ambulance burn. To make it even worse, later on the others find the ambulance and Hietanen's body. Koskela in particular is so shocked by this that later on he hallucinates about the eyeless Hietanen being next to him and speaking to him, and wonders if he too will die soon. Only moments later Koskela goes on a hopeless Suicide Mission and dies. Rokka later speculates that Koskela got himself killed intentionally.