Swedish War Heroes I - Sven Duva

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Sven Duva (his last name, inappropriately enough, means “dove”) was one of the great heroes of the Russo-Swedish War of 1809, fought over the control of Finland, then under the control of the Swedish crown, where everybody in their right minds know it belongs.

Duva was the youngest of nine children to a sergant in the Royal Swedish Army. He was a giant of a man, broad of shoulder and possessed of a fierce loyalty to the Swedish cause.

However, he was none too bright, and had a hard time even understanding the instructions of his drill sergant. Despite the inevitable ridicule, his comrades saw that Sven Duva was a very patriotic soldier who followed orders to the best of his abilities - which was not, however, saying much.

This seeming disability, however, was also the road to his everlasting glory in the annals of history. In one of his first engagements, while serving under general Sandels, Duva’s unit was surprised by a much larger Russian force while crossing a bridge in eastern Finland. His commanding officer, a sensible man, ordered Duva’s unit to retreat. However, the noble hero misconstrued the order as meaning that they should hold the bridge at all costs (his stupidity was, unfortunately, as great as his selfless bravery!).

Shouting the immortal words “let none of the bastards past the bridge!”, Duva held the bridge single-handedly until his fellow soldiers could join him, and the Russian advance was repulsed, with great losses, against all odds. Duva himself - alas!-was sadly hit by a bullet in the heart in the final moments of the battle, thereby tragically depriving him of further glory.

However, his immortality was already assured, and he was given the honor due to him in the great poem by Johan Ludvig Runeberg, which all Swedish schoolchildren used to know by heart, back when you could get a proper, patriotic education around here.

Here’s a picture of the great man, which I urge you to print out and keep framed above your beds at all times: Sven Duva, noble patriot and hero of Finland.

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Oh sweet Jaysus, an ultranationalistic Swede. I didn’t know they still made those.

Sweden out now! Finland for the Finns!

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Where are the Danes when you need them?

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Woah. Kind of like a real-life Svejk.

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Since you’re kicking a horse that’s been dead for 200 years, shall we resolve the matter with an proper old-fashioned duel. :smiley:

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And, Sven Dufva wasn’t particularly patriotic, he was just dense.

Also note that both J.L. Runeberg and Albert Edelfelt were finns.
The Dufva story works equally deliciously as a comedy, warning and a story of heroism. And the reason it works so well, is of course that it’s a fictional story. :slight_smile:

There seems to be a real life person behind the story, but it is not known if he was equally dim-witted.

Johan Zaharias Bång, born in 1782 and a member of the 100th Company, participated in the halting of the Russian advance at Koljonvirta.
He was was certainly in the thick of it, using his rifle as a club on several occasions, but unlike Sven Dufva, he was only severely wounded and survived to father a child in 1815 according to church records.

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Ha ha ha ha!!! “Bong”.

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You called ? Actually, there’s a snag or two: First you need to convince people that the word “Gøngehøvding” (for instance) actually describes a historic bonafide hero and isn’t made up for amusing phonetic purposes, and then you need to gloss over the fact that for all the heroism, Denmark basically speaking has lost every war since the vikings hung up their non-horned helmets. It’s a tough sell.

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I’m not really a nationalist (though I’m proud of my country), just lampooning all the enormous number of “War Heroes” threads around here lately. As a foreigner, I find it hard to relate to that… as some of you might find it hard to sympathize with the heroism (or whatever it was) of Mr Duva.

Svejk is one of my all-time favorite books, by the way, and yeah, it’s a lot like one of Svejk’s little stories.

My country has a large stock of war heroes, mostly of the tragic kind.

Take Charles XII, for instance, who was gunned down in 1718 while charging a Norwegian fortress - some say by his own troops, who where tired of running around the continent fighting Quixotic wars (Charles was one of these guys who think it’s a good idea to invade Russia in the winter, and one one occasion took his army as far as Turkey).

Or Gustavus Adolfus, whose army invaded Germany in the Thirty Years War (where his name was until recently still used to frighten naughty children in some parts of the country) He got separated from his army during a particuarly foggy day at Lützen in 1632 and was promptly killed.

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I feel the same way, although I must admit I was a bit wooshed by the OP :smiley:

Some of the people who participated in our last wars are still alive, but I see no hero-worship here. Those wars were seen more as a collective effort. Something that you just had to go through and everybody did their part.
The “He killed 500 russkies with his knife, blindfolded and carrying 4 wounded friends!”-type of hero-worship is generally found only in the ultra-nationalist circles.

That might explain some of the actions attributed to him by Mr. Runeberg. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Släpp inte en jävel över bron! I’ve always loved that quote for some reason.

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Bet, Kindchen, bet; morgen kommt der Schwede - “Pray, child, pray; tomorrow comes the Swede”.

You’d probably be interested to know there is a group of military re-enactors who do the Army of Gustavus Adolphus here in the States, aegypt.

I’m only in it for the fiddlin’ and the drinkin’, really, but there’s something about the smell of freshly discharged blackpowder… ahhhh.