The Good Soldier Svejk (11 page)

Austria, O thou noble land, Let thy banners now be scanned, Let them flutter far and wide, Austria must evermore abide.

The last gift consisted of a white hyacinth in a flower pot.

When all this was unpacked and arranged on the bed, the Baroness von Botzenheim could not restrain her tears, so touched was she. The mouths of several starving malingerers began to water. The baroness's lady companion propped Schweik up and

also shed tears. It was so quiet that you could have heard a pin drop, when suddenly Schweik, clasping his hands together, interrupted the hush.

" 'Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name . . .' Excuse me, ma'am, that's not what I mean: 'Lord God, our heavenly Father, bless these gifts which we shall enjoy from Thy bounty, Amen' !"

Whereupon, he took a chicken from the bed and started devouring it, under the horrified gaze of Dr. Grunstein.

"Oh, how he's enjoying it, the brave fellow," whispered the old baroness ecstatically to Dr. Grunstein. "I'm sure he's quite well now and fit to go to the front. I'm really delighted to think I brought it to him just at the right moment."

Then she went from bed to bed distributing cigarettes and chocolates. After which errand she returned to Schweik, smoothed his hair, saying:
"Behut euch Gott"
^4,
the while, and departed with all her retinue.

Before Dr. Grunstein could return from below, whither he had accompanied the baroness, Schweik had distributed the fowls, which were devoured by the patients so rapidly that, where the fowls had been, Dr. Grunstein discovered only a heap of bones, picked as clean as if the fowls had fallen alive into a lair of vultures and their fleshless bones had then been exposed for several months to the blazing sun.

The wartime liqueur and the three bottles of wine had also vanished. The packet of chocolate and the parcel of rusks had likewise passed away. Somebody had even drunk the small bottle of nail polish belonging to the manicure set and had chewed the tooth paste which went with the tooth brush.

When Dr. Grunstein had returned, he again struck up a martial attitude and delivered a long speech. A load fell from his mind when the visitor had gone. The pile of gnawed bones confirmed his idea that they Were all incorrigible.

"If you'd had any glimmerings of sense," he fulminated, "you'd have kept your hands off all that food and you'd have said to yourselves, if we eat all this up, the doctor won't believe we're

⁴
"God preserve you."

seriously ill. What you've done has only showed me that you don't appreciate my kindness. I pump your stomachs ; I give you clysters ; I try to keep you going on absolute diet and then you go and overeat yourselves. Do you want to get inflammation of the intestines? But you're making a big mistake. Before your stomachs begin to digest all you've eaten, I'll clear you out so thoroughly that you'll remember it to your dying day. So now you'll follow me, one by one, just to remind you that I'm not so big a fool as you are, but that I've got more sense than the whole lot of you put together. Furthermore, let me inform you that tomorrow I'm sending a commission here to attend to you, because you've been lolling about quite long enough and there's nothing the matter with any of you. Quick march !"

When it was Schweik's turn, Dr. Grunstein looked at him and a vague recollection of the mysterious visit that day urged him to inquire :

"Do you know the baroness?"

"She's my stepmother," replied Schweik calmly, "she abandoned me at a tender age and now she's found me again."

And Dr. Grunstein remarked curtly : "Let Schweik have some more clyster afterwards."

In the evening the occupants of the mattresses were in a dismal mood. A few hours earlier their stomachs had been filled with various savoury viands and now they contained only weak tea and a slice of bread.

No. 21 called out from the window:

"I say, you mightn't believe it, but if I have to choose between braised chicken and roast, give me braised every time."

Someone growled : "Shove a blanket over him," but they were all so weak after their fiasco of a banquet, that nobody moved a limb.

Dr. Grunstein kept his word. The next morning a number of military doctors from the famous commission made their appearance.

They solemnly passed along the rows of beds and all they said was : "Let's see your tongue."

Schweik thrust out his tongue so far that his countenance produced a fatuous grimace and his eyes blinked :

"Beg to report, sir, that's all the tongue I've got."

There ensued an interesting colloquy between Schweik and the commission. Schweik asserted that he had made that statement because he was afraid they might think he was hiding his tongue from them.

The members of the commission, on the other hand, formed remarkably divergent judgments about Schweik.

A half of them asserted that Schweik was
"ein bioder Kerl,"
⁵
while the other half took the view that he was a humbug who wanted to poke fun at the army.

"I'll eat my hat," the chairman of the commission yelled at Schweik, "if we don't get even with you."

Schweik gazed at the whole commission with the godly composure of an innocent child.

The chief of the medical staff came close up to Schweik. "I'd like to know what you think you're up to, you porpoise, you !"

"Beg to report, sir, I don't think at all."

"Himmeldonnerwetter!"
bellowed one of the members of the commission, clanking his sword, "So he doesn't think at all, doesn't he? Why don't you think, you Siamese elephant?"

"Beg to report, sir, I don't think because soldiers ain't allowed to. Years and years ago, when I was in the 91st regiment, the captain always used to tell us : 'Soldiers mustn't think. Their superior officers do all their thinking for them. As soon as a soldier begins to think, he's no longer a soldier, but a lousy civilian.' Thinking doesn't lead . . ."

"Hold your tongue," the chairman of the commission interrupted Schweik fiercely, "we've heard all about you. You're no idiot, Schweik. You're artful, you're tricky, you're a humbug, a hooligan, the scum of the earth, do you understand?"

"Beg to report, sir, yes, sir."

"I've already told you to hold your tongue. Did you hear?"

"Beg to report, sir, I heard you say I was to hold my tongue."

"Himmelherrgott,
hold your tongue then. When I say the word, you know full well we don't want any of your lip."

"Beg to report, sir, I know you don't want any of my lip."

⁵
"An idiot."

The military gentlemen looked at each other and called for the sergeant-major :

"Take this man," said the chief of the medical staff, pointing to Schweik, "into the office and wait there for our decision and report. The fellow's as sound as a bell. He's malingering and on top of that he keeps on jabbering and laughing up his sleeve at his superior officers. He thinks he's here just for his amusement and that the army's a huge joke, a sort of fun palace. When you get to the detention barracks, they'll show you the army's no frolic."

Schweik departed with the sergeant-major and as he passed across the courtyard he hummed to himself :

"I always thought in the army, I'd have the time of my life: I'd stay here a week or a fortnight, And then go back to my wife."

And while the officer on duty in the orderly room was yelling at Schweik to the effect that fellows like him ought to be shot, the commission was laying the malingerers low in the wards upstairs. Of seventy patients, only two were saved. One whose leg had been blown off by a shell and the other who was a genuine case of caries.

They were the only ones to whom the word
"tauglich"
⁶
was not applied. All the rest, not excepting three in the last stages of consumption, were declared fit for general service, and the chief of the medical staff, in making this pronouncement, improved the shining hour by holding forth on the subject.

His speech was interwoven with the most varied terms of abuse and its contents were concise in character. They were all foul brutes and only if they fought staunchly for the Emperor would it be possible for them to be admitted into decent society again, and for them after the war to be forgiven for having tried to shirk the army by malingering. He himself, however, did not believe this to be the case, and held the opinion that they would all come to a bad end on the gallows.

«"Fit."

There was a very youthful military doctor, a guileless and still unspoiled creature, who asked the chief of the medical staff for permission to say a few words also. His speech differed from that of his superior officer by reason of its optimistic and simple-minded tone. He spoke in German.

He talked at great length of how all of them, on leaving the hospital and joining their regiments at the front, must be gallant and intrepid. He was, he said, convinced that they would be skilful with rifle and bayonet in the field, and honourable in all their dealings, military and private. They would be invincible warriors, mindful of the glory of Radetzky and Prince Eugene of Savoy. With their blood they would enrich the broad fields of the monarchy's glory and victoriously fulfil the task predestined for them by history. With unflinching courage, heedless of their lives, they would rush forward beneath the shot-riddled banners of their regiments to new glory, to new victories.

Afterward, in the corridor, the chief of the medical staff said to this guileless young man : "My dear fellow, I can assure you it's all sheer waste of breath. Not Radetzky, not Prince Eugene of Savoy whom you're so keen on, could have made soldiers out of these skunks. It doesn't matter whether you talk to them like an angel or like a devil. They're a hopeless gang."

9.

Schweik at the Detention Barracks.

The last resort of people who were unwilling to go to the front was the detention barracks. I knew a schoolmaster who was not anxious to use his mathematical knowledge to assist the artillery in its shooting operations, and so he stole a watch from a lieutenant so as to get into the detention barracks. He did so with complete deliberation. The war did not impress or attract him. He considered it stark lunacy to fire at the enemy, and with shrapnel and shells to slaughter unfortunate teachers of mathematics, just like himself, on the other side, and so he calmly stole the watch.

They first investigated his state of mind, and when he said he had wanted to enrich himself, they despatched him to the detention barracks. There were quite a lot of people who served their time there for theft or fraud. Idealists and non-idealists. People who looked upon the army as a source of revenue, all those various quartermaster-sergeants at the base and at the front who committed all kinds of frauds with rations and pay, and also petty thieves who were a thousand times more honest than the persons who sent them there. Then too, the detention barracks contained those soldiers who had committed various other offences of a purely military character, such as insubordination, attempted mutiny, desertion. A special branch comprised the political prisoners, eighty per cent, of whom were quite innocent and ninety-nine per cent, of whom were condemned.

There was a magnificent legal staff, a mechanism such as is possessed by every state before its political, economic and moral collapse.

Every military unit contained Austria's hirelings who lodged information against the comrades who slept on the same mattresses with them and shared their bread with them on the march.

The police also supplied material to the detention barracks. The military censors of correspondence used to despatch there those who had written letters from the front to the ones whom they had left at home in distress. The gendarmes even handed over old retired farmers who sent letters to the front, and the court-martial rewarded them with twelve years' imprisonment for their words of comfort and the descriptions of the misery at home.

From the Hradcany detention barracks there was also a road which led by way of Brevnov to the exercise ground at Motol. In front went a man escorted by soldiers, with gyves on his hands, and behind him a cart containing a coffin. And on the exercise-ground at Motol a curt order,
"An! Feuer
!"
¹
And in all the regiments and battalions they read in the regimental orders that another man had been shot for mutiny.