The Good Soldier Svejk (9 page)

¹
"Three cheers ! Down with the Serbs !"

and possessions for his Emperor. And the fact that his war-cry: "To Belgrade !" met with such warm approval in the streets of Prague is only a further proof that the people of Prague are furnishing model examples of love for their country and the Royal Family.

The
Prager Tagblatt
wrote in similar terms and concluded its report by saying that the crippled volunteer had been accompanied by a crowd of Germans who had protected him with their bodies against attempts made to lynch him by Czech agents of the Entente powers.

Bohemia
published this report and demanded that the crippled patriot should be rewarded, adding that any gifts from German citizens for the unknown hero should be sent to the offices of the paper.

While, according to these three papers, the Czech territory was unable to produce a single lofty-minded citizen, the gentlemen on the medical board did not hold this view.

This applies particularly to Dr. Bautze, chairman of the board. He was a man who stood no nonsense and who regarded everything as a fraudulent attempt to escape the army and the front, bullets and shrapnel.

He is well known for his remarks
"Das ganze tschechische Volk ist eine Simulantenbande."
²

Within ten weeks of his activities he weeded out 10,999 malingerers from 11,000 civilians and he would have collared the eleven thousandth man, if at the very moment when Dr. Bautze yelled at him
"Kehrt euch!"
³
the unfortunate fellow had not had a stroke.

"Take this malingerer away," said Dr. Bautze, when he had ascertained that the man was dead.

And now on that memorable day Schweik stood before him stark naked like all the rest, but bashfully hiding his nudity with the crutches on which he was leaning.

"Dos ist wirklich ein besonderes Feigenblatt,"*
said Dr. Bautze, "there weren't any fig-leaves like that in the Garden of Eden."

²
"The whole of the Czech nation is a gang of malingerers."

³
"About turn."

⁴
"That's a very funny kind of fig-leaf."

"In the lowest category on account of being weak-minded," remarked the sergeant-major, examining the official records.

"And what else is wrong with you?" asked Dr. Bautze.

"Beg to report, sir, I've got rheumatism, but I'll serve the Emperor till I'm hacked to pieces," said Schweik modestly. "My knees are swollen."

Bautze glared ferociously at the good soldier Schweik and yelled:
"Sie sind ein Simulant!"
⁵
and turning to the sergeant-major he said with icy calm :
"Den Kerl sogleich einsperren !"
⁶

Two soldiers with fixed bayonets led Schweik away to the military prison.

Schweik hobbled along on his crutches but with horror he perceived that his rheumatism was disappearing.

When Mrs. Muller who, with the Bath chair, was waiting for Schweik on the bridge, saw him escorted by bayonets, burst into tears and left the Bath chair in the lurch, never to return to it.

And the good soldier Schweik modestly proceeded in the escort of the state defenders.

The bayonets glittered in the sunshine and when they reached the Radetzky monument Schweik turned to the crowd who was accompanying him.

"To Belgrade ! To Belgrade !" he shouted.

And Marshal Radetzky gazed dreamily from his monument at the good soldier Schweik departing with his recruit's nosegay in his coat, as he limped along on his old crutches, while a solemn-looking gentleman informed the people round about that they were taking a deserter to prison.

⁵
"You are a malingerer."

⁶
"Have the fellow locked up immediately."

8.

Schweik as Malingerer.

At this momentous epoch the great concern of the military doctors was to drive the devil of sabotage out of the malingerers and persons suspected of being malingerers, such as, consumptives, sufferers from rheumatism, rupture, kidney disease, diabetes, inflammation of the lungs, and other disorders.

The torments to which malingerers were subjected had been reduced to a system, and the degrees of torment were as follows :

I. Absolute diet—a cup of tea morning and evening for three days, accompanied by doses of aspirin to produce sweating, irrespective of what the patient complained of.

2.  To prevent them from supposing that the army was all beer and skittles, they were given ample doses of quinine in powder.

3.  Rinsing of the stomach twice daily with a litre of warm water.

4.  The use of the clyster with soapy water and glycerine.

5.  Swathing in sheets soaked with cold water.

There were dauntless persons who went through all five degrees of torment and had themselves removed in a simple coffin to the military cemetery. There were, however, others who were faint-hearted and who, when they reached the clyster stage, announced that they were quite well and that their only desire was to proceed to the trenches with the next draft.

On reaching the military prison, Schweik was placed in the hut used as an infirmary which contained several of these fainthearted malingerers.

"I can't stand it any longer," said his bed-neighbour, who had been brought in from the surgery where his stomach had been rinsed for the second time.

This man was prevending to be shortsighted.

"I'm going to join my regiment," decided the other malingerer on Schweik's left, who had just had a taste of the clyster, after pretending to be as deaf as a post.

On the bed by the door a consumptive was dying, wrapped up in a sheet soaked in cold water.

"That's the third this week," remarked Schweik's right-hand neighbour. "And what's wrong with you?"

"I've got rheumatism," replied Schweik, whereupon there was hearty laughter from all those round about him. Even the dying consumptive, who was pretending to have tuberculosis, laughed.

"It's no good coming here with rheumatism," said a stout man to Schweik in solemn tones, "rheumatism here stands about as much chance as corns. I'm anaemic, half my stomach's missing and I've lost five ribs, but nobody believes me. Why, we actually had a deaf and dumb man here, and every half hour they wrapped him up in sheets soaked in cold water, and every day they gave him a taste of the clyster and pumped his stomach out. Just when all the ambulance men thought he'd done the trick and would get

away with it, the doctor prescribed some medicine for him. That fairly doubled him up, and then he gave in. 'No,' he says, 'I can't go on with this deaf and dumb business, rny speech and hearing have been restored to me.' The sick chaps all told him not to do for himself like that, but he said no, he could hear and talk just like the others. And when the doctor came in the morning, he reported himself accordingly."

"He kept it up long enough," remarked a man, who was pretending to have one leg a quarter of an inch shorter than the other, "not like the man who was shamming a paralytic stroke. Three quinines, one clyster and a day's fast was enough for him. He owned up, and before they got as far as pumping out his stomach there wasn't a trace of any stroke at all. The man who held out longest here was the one who had been bitten by a mad dog. He bit and howled, not half he didn't; he could manage that a fair treat, but he couldn't foam at the mouth. We helped him all we could. We used to keep on tickling him for a full hour before the doctor came till he got spasms and went blue in front of our very eyes, but there wasn't a trace of any foam. It just wasn't in him. Oh, it was something shocking. Well, when the doctor comes, up he stands by the bed straight as a dart and says : 'Beg to report, sir, that the dog that bit me don't seem to have been mad.' The doctor gives such a funny look at him that he begins to shake all over and goes on talking : 'Beg to report, sir, that I wasn't bitten by any dog at all. I bit my own hand, myself.' After he'd owned up to that, he was had up for biting his hand so as not to get sent to the front."

"All diseases where you want to foam at the mouth," said the stout malingerer, "take a lot of shamming. Take epileptic fits, for instance. There was a chap here who had epileptic fits and he always used to tell us that one fit was nothing to him ; he could do ten of 'em a day, if necessary. He used to twist himself in spasms and clench his fists, make his eyes start out of his head till they looked as if they was on the ends of wires, and he could kick and put out his tongue—well, I tell you, it was a first-rate epileptic fit, the real thing. Suddenly he got boils, two on his neck and two on his back, and he had to stop twisting himself and knocking his head on the floor, because he couldn't move his head

or sit down or even lie down. Then he got fever and that made him light-headed, and he gave the game away while the doctor was there. And he gave us a dickens of a time with his boils, because he had to stop among us with them for another three days on diet number 2 : coffee and roll in the morning, gruel or soup in the evening. And we with our stomachs pumped out and starving on diet number nought had to look on while this chap gobbled up his grub, smacked his lips, fairly puffing and belching through being so chockful of food. He dished three others through that, and they owned up too. They was trying their luck with a weak heart."

"The best thing to do," said one of the malingerers, "is to sham madness. In the next room there are two other men from the school where I teach and one of them keeps shouting day and night : 'Giordano Bruno's stake is still smouldering ; renew Galileo's trial !' and the other one yelps, first three times, slowly : 'Bow, wow, wow,' and then five times in quick succession : 'Bowwow-wowwowow,' and then slowly again and so on without stopping. They've kept it up for more than three weeks. I meant at first to act the fool too and be a religious maniac and preach about the infallibility of the Pope, but finally I managed to get some cancer of the stomach for fifteen crowns from a barber down the road."

"I know a chimney sweep," remarked another patient, "who'll get you such a fever for twenty crowns that you'll jump out of the window."

"That's nothing," said another man. "Down our way there's a midwife who for twenty crowns can dislocate your foot so nicely that you're crippled for the rest of your life."

"I got my foot dislocated for five crowns," announced a voice from the row of beds by the window, "for five crowns and three drinks."

"My illness has run me into more than two hundred crowns already," announced his neighbour, a man as thin as a rake. "I bet there's no poison you can mention that I haven't taken. I'm simply bung full of poisons. I've chewed arsenic, I've smoked opium, I've swallowed strychnine, I've drunk vitriol mixed with phosphorus. I've ruined my liver, my lungs, my kidneys, my heart

—in fact, all my inside outfit. Nobody knows what disease it is I've got."

"The best thing to do," explained someone near the door, "is to squirt paraffin oil under the skin on your arms. My cousin had a slice of good luck that way. They cut off his arm below the elbow and now the army'll never worry him any more."

"Well," said Schweik, "you see what you've all got to go through for the Emperor. Even having your stomachs pumped out. When I was in the army years ago, it used to be much worse. If a man went sick, they just trussed him up, shoved him into a cell to make him get fitter. There wasn't any beds and mattresses and spittoons like what there is here. Just a bare bench for them to lie on. Once there was a chap who had typhus, fair and square, and the one next to him had smallpox. Well, they trussed them both up and the M. O. kicked them in the ribs and said they were shamming. When the pair of them kicked the bucket, there was a dust-up in Parliament and it got into the papers. Like a shot they stopped us from reading the papers and all our boxes was inspected to see if we'd got any hidden there. And it was just my luck that in the whole blessed regiment there was nobody but me whose newspaper was spotted. So I was had up in the orderly room and our colonel, silly old buffer, God rest his soul, starts yelling at me to stand to attention and tell him who'd written that stuff to the paper or he'd smash my jaw from ear to ear and keep me in clink till all was blue. Then the M.O. comes up and he shakes his fist right under my nose and shouts: 'You misbegotten whelp ; you scabby ape ; you wretched blob of scum ; you skunk of a Socialist, you !' Well, I looks 'em straight in the face, without moving an eyelid, and there I stood keeping my mouth shut and with one hand at the salute and the other along the seam of my trousers. There they was, running round and yelping at me like a couple of puppies, and I just kept standing there and saying nothing. I keeps my mouth shut, salutes and holds my left hand along the seam of my trousers. When they'd been carrying on like that for about half an hour, the Colonel dashes up to me and yells : 'Are you an idiot or ain't you?' 'Beg to report, sir,' I says, 'that I'm an idiot.' Well, after a lot of rushing about the Colonel decides to give me twenty-one days' solitary confinement