Ensimmäisen maailmansodan aikaan pikaisesti läpi Suomen

Englantilainen sairaanhoitaja Violetta Thurstan (s. 1879) oli ensimmäisen maailmansodan alussa ambulanssitoiminnassa Brysselissä. Siellä hän joutui saksalaisten sotavangiksi ja päätyi Kööpenhaminaan, jossa tarjoutui vapaaehtoiseksi Venäjän rintamalle. Sinne päästäkseen hän matkusti Ruotsiin ja sitten Haaparannasta Suomen läpi Pietariin. Vuonna 1915 julkaistussa muistelmakirjassa Field Hospital and Flying Column. Being the Journal of an English Nursing Sister in Belgium & Russia Thurstan kirjoittaa

The frozen track was so uneven that we rocked from side to side, and were thrown violently about in the car, like little kernels in a very large nut. But it was a wonderful night all the same, the air was thin and intoxicating like champagne, and the stars up in these northern latitudes more dazzlingly brilliant than anything I have seen before. We had to get out at Haparanda and walk over the long bridge which led to Torneo, where the Finnish Custom House was, and where our luggage and passports had to be examined.

We arrived there very cheerful and well pleased with ourselves, to find all our old travelling companions waiting till the Custom House was open; the bishop and his party; the bad-tempered man and his family; a Russian and a Chinese student who were travelling together, and some others. They had been waiting in the cold for hours, and had not had their papers or luggage examined yet, so we had had the best of it after all.

And we scored yet once more, for "St. Raphael," who spoke fluent Finnish, at once secured the only cart to take our things over the ferry to the railway station about half a mile away.

It was borne in upon me during this journey what an immense country Russia is. From Torneo to Petrograd does not look far on the map, but we left Torneo on Wednesday night, and did not arrive in Petrograd till 12.30 A. M. on Saturday, about fifty-two hours' hard travelling to cover this little track—a narrow thread, almost lost the immensity of this great Empire.

Brittiupseeri Charles Edward Callwell kuittasi saman pätkän, samoihin aikoihin, kirjassa Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 (1920) tekstillä

To the traveller without special credentials, the short journey from Haparanda to the railway-car at Tornea which is to bear him onwards must have been almost a foretaste of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. Even for the members of a military mission with "red passports," whose advent had been announced, it was one prolonged agony; and it would probably have been even worse when the intervening estuaries were not frozen over and when one had to take the ferry. All the formalities had to be gone through twice over because there was an island, although the Russian officials were the very pink of courtesy. One learns a great deal of geography on journeys of this kind; we had not realized the extent to which Finland, with its special money, its special language, and its special frontier worries, was distinct from Russia. The train took three days and nights between Stockholm and Petrograd, and one was supposed to fetch up at the terminus somewhere about midnight; but it always took two or three hours to get through the frontier station between Finland and Russia at the last moment, with the result that one might arrive at the capital at any hour of the early morning.