ABSTRACT
The Mannerheims were a Swedish family that had taken up residence in Finland whilst it was still a Swedish province. Gustav Mannerheim was born in 1867, in the Manor of Willnas, a large, square, seventeenth-century house built on an inlet of the Baltic. Gustav Mannerheim was determined from his earliest years that he should pursue a military career, and it was appropriate that he should be sent to the Cadet Corps of the Finnish Army at Frederikshamn. Mannerheim served with distinction in the Russo-Japanese War, and travelled back along the Trans-Siberian Railway during the revolutionary aftermath. The outbreak of the World War had been followed by the grotesquely ill-timed and possibly accidental publication of a Russian programme for the final obliteration of all traces of Finnish nationalism. Mannerheim had obtained a large and secure base area, with a line of communication to Sweden. He had also secured vital sectors of the Finnish railway network.
