The Good Soldier Svejk

by Jaroslav Hasek

  "They're not supposed to shoot at Red Cross trains, are they?"

  "They're not supposed to, but they can," said Schweik. "Whoever fired that shot scored a bull's-eye ; and then they've always got the excuse that it was at night and they couldn't see the red cross. There's lots of things in the world that you're not supposed to do, but they can be managed all the same. When we were on manoeuvres down at Pisek there came an order that soldiers wasn't to be trussed up while on the march. But our captain, he managed to get round it all right, because there's no sense in an order like that, and it stands to reason that if a soldier's trussed up, he can't march. Well, our captain, the way he managed it was, when a soldier was trussed up, he just had him shoved in an army service lorry, and there you are. So you see there's lots of things you're not supposed to do, but you can do them all the same, as long as you set about it with a will, so to speak."

  "My friends," said the volunteer officer, who had been busily taking notes, "every cloud has a silver lining. This Red Cross train which has been blown up, half burned, and thrown over the embankment will enrich the glorious annals of our battalion by yet another heroic exploit of the future. I can imagine, say somewhere about September 16th, which is the date I've got noted down, that a few simple, untutored soldiers, under the leadership of a corporal, from each company of our battalion, will volunteer to put out of action an enemy armoured train which is firing upon us and preventing us from crossing the river. These

  gallant fellows will fulfil their purpose disguised as peasants -

  "What's this I see?" exclaimed the volunteer officer, suddenly breaking off his narrative and staring at his notes. "How on earth did our Quartermaster-sergeant Vanek manage to get into this little affair? Just listen, Sergeant," he continued, turning to

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  Quartermaster-sergeant Vanek, "to the nice things I say about you in the history of the battalion. I rather fancy I mentioned you before, but this is altogether on a better and bigger scale." And, raising his voice, the volunteer officer read :

  "Heroic death of Quartermaster-sergeant Vanek. Among those who volunteered for the daring exploit of putting the enemy armoured train out of action was Quartermaster-sergeant Vanek, who, like the rest, was disguised in peasant attire. He was stunned by the explosion which ensued, and when he came to, he saw himself surrounded by the enemy, who immediately conveyed him to their divisional headquarters where, with death staring him in the face, he refused to give any information about the strength of our army. As he was in disguise, he was condemned to death as a spy. It had been originally intended to hang him, but in view of his rank, this was commuted to execution by shooting. The sentence was at once carried out by the wall of a cemetery, and the gallant Quartermaster-sergeant Vanek insisted that he should not be blindfolded. When asked whether he had any special wish, he replied, 'Send my last greeting to my battalion and tell them that I die fully persuaded that they will pass on from victory to victory. Also let Captain Sagner know that according to the latest brigade orders the daily ration of tinned meat is increased to 2 1/2 pieces of meat per man.' Thus died Quartermaster-sergeant Vanek, who by the last words he uttered caused at panic among the enemy, who had supposed that, by preventing us from crossing the river, they would cut us off from our supply centres, reduce us rapidly to starvation, and thus cause demoralization in our ranks. The composure with which he looked death in the face is attested by the circumstance that before his execution he played nap with the enemy staff officers. 'Give my winnings to the Russian Red Cross,' he said, with the barrels of the rifles right in front of him. This nobility of character moved to tears the military representatives who witnessed his execution."

  "I hope you don't mind, Sergeant," continued the volunteer officer, "the liberty I've taken with your winnings. I was wondering whether they oughtn't to be handed over to the Austrian Red Cross, but finally I decided that from a humanitarian point of view it didn't really matter, as long as they were given for a charitable purpose."

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  "Poor old Vanek," remarked Schweik, "he might have left his cash to the Prague municipal soup kitchen, but perhaps it's just as well he didn't, because the mayor might have spent it on liver sausage for himself."

  "Yes, they all do their bit of scrounging," said Chodounsky, the telephone operator.

  "And there's more of it goes on in the Red Cross than anywhere else," affirmed with bitter emphasis Jurajda the cook. "I knew a chap at Bruck who used to do the cooking for the messes there, and he said that the matron and the head nurses used to send home bags and bags of sherry and chocolate. That's the destiny of man. All of us pass through countless changes in the course of an endless life, and sooner or later, at definite periods of our activity, we all have to do our turn at scrounging. I've been through that particular period myself."

  Jarajda, cook and occultist, took a bottle of brandy from his haversack.

  "Here we have," he said, opening the bottle, "irrefutable proof of my assertion. I took it from the officers' mess before we left. It's one of the best makes of brandy and was supposed to be used for the icing on fancy cakes. But it was predestined to be scrounged by me, just as I was predestined to scrounge it."

  "And it'd be a nobby sort of idea," observed Schweik, "if we was predestined to join you in this particular bit of scrounging. Anyway, I sort of fancy that's how it'll turn out."

  And it did indeed turn out that they were so predestined. The bottle was passed round, in spite of the protests of Quartermaster-sergeant Vanek, who declared that brandy should be drunk from a mess tin and properly shared out, because there was one bottle among five of them, and with an odd number like that it might easily happen that somebody would get a gulp more than the others ; whereupon Schweik remarked :

  "That's quite right, and if the sergeant wants us to have an even number, perhaps he wouldn't mind falling out, and then we shan't have any rumpus about it."

  Quartermaster-sergeant Vanek then withdrew his suggestion and made a new and generous proposal by which Jurajda, the donor, was to be allowed to have two swigs at the bottle, but this

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  aroused a storm of opposition, because Vanek had already had one drink, having sampled the brandy when the bottle was first opened.

  Finally they adopted the suggestion of the volunteer officer that they should drink in alphabetical order, after which they played cards, and when the game was over, Chodounsky had lost six months' pay in advance. He was very upset about it and the volunteer officer, to whom he owed the money, demanded a series of I. O. U.'s from him, so that he could receive Chodounsky's pay to square the debt.

  "Don't you worry, Chodounsky," Schweik consoled him. "If you have any luck, you'll go west in the first dust-up we have, and then your I. O. U.'s will be worth damn-all to Marek. Sign for him and chance it."

  The supposition that he might go west was extremely distasteful to Chodounsky, and he objected with emphasis.

  "There's no likelihood of me going west, because I'm a telephone operator, and they're always in bomb-proof shelters."

  The volunteer officer, however, expressed the view that telephone operators, on the contrary, are exposed to great danger and it was against them that the enemy artillery was chiefly directed. No telephone operator, he said, was safe in his bomb-prooff shelter. Even if he was at a depth of thirty feet underground, the enemy artillery would spot him just the same. The telephone operators were being wiped out wholesale, and the best proof of it was that when they had left Bruck, the twenty-eighth course for telephone operators was just being started.

  Chodounsky looked very down in the mouth, and seeing his woebegone expression, Schweik said to him affably :

  "You've been properly taken in."

  And the volunteer officer said :

  "Let's see what I've got you down for in my notes on the history of the battalion. Ah, here we are : 'Chodounsky, telephone operator, buried by a mine, telephoned from his living tomb to the staff : "I die congratulating
my battalion on its victory." ' "

  "You ought to be satisfied with that," said Schweik. "What more do you want? Do you remember that telephone operator on

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  the Titanic who kept telephoning into the kitchen while the boat was sinking and asking them when lunch would be ready?"

  "Well, it's all the same to me," said the volunteer officer. "If you like, I'll make Chodounsky say, as he breathes his last: 'Give my best wishes to the Iron Brigade.' "

  * * *

  4.

  Quick March.

  Sanok turned out to be the brigade headquarters of the "Iron Brigade," to which the battalion of the 91st regiment belonged by virtue of its origins. Although the railway communication was unbroken from Sanok to Lemberg and northward as far as the frontier, it was a mystery why the staff of the eastern sector had arranged for the Iron Brigade with its staff to concentrate the draft battalions for a hundred miles behind the line, when at this particular period the front extended from Brody on the Bug and along the river northwards toward Sokol.

  This very interesting strategic problem was solved in a remarkably simple manner when Captain Sagner went to the

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  brigade headquarters at Sanok to report the arrival of the draft there.

  The orderly officer was the brigade adjutant, a Captain Tayerle.

  "I can't make out," said Captain Tayerle, "why you haven't been given definite instructions. It's all settled which way you've got to go, and, of course, you ought to have notified us beforehand about it. According to the arrangements made by the general staff, you've arrived two days too soon."

  Captain Sagner's face flushed, but it never occurred to him to say anything about all the cipher telegrams which he had been receiving throughout the journey.

  "I can't make it out," repeated Captain Tayerle, and mused somewhat. "By the way," he then continued, "are you a regular officer? You are? That's quite a different matter. A chap doesn't know where he is nowadays. We've had so many of these dud lieutenants passing through here. When we were withdrawing from Limanowa and Kraśnik, all these temporary gentlemen got the wind up, as soon as they set eyes on a Cossack patrol. We staff chaps can't stand all those hangers-on. They put on too much side just because they've passed some damn fool examination. They're a lot of bloody outsiders, that's what they are."

  Captain Tayerle spat with contempt, and then confidentially patted Captain Sagner on the shoulder.

  "You're staying here for about a couple of days. I'll show you round the town. We've got a few tasty bits of skirt here, I can tell you. There's a general's daughter, some hot baby she is. We all dress up in women's togs, and you ought to see the stunts she does then. She's a skinny piece, nothing much to look at, but, by Jove, she knows a thing or two. She's a saucy piece of goods. But you'll see for yourself.

  "Excuse me," he broke off. "I must go out and spew. That's the third time to-day."

  When he returned, he informed Captain Sagner, in order to show him what a jolly time they were having there, that it was the after-effects of the previous evening's spree, at which the pioneer section had done their bit.

  Captain Sagner soon became acquainted with the commander

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  of this section. A lanky fellow in uniform with three gold stars dashed into the office, and without observing the presence of Captain Sagner, he addressed Captain Tayerle thus :

  "Hallo, you dirty dog, what are you doing here? You made a fine old mess of the countess last night."

  He sat down on a chair and flicking his thin bamboo cane across his calves, he continued, with a broad grin :

  "The last thing I remember was you spewing into her lap."

  "Yes," assented Captain Tayerle, "we had a jolly time last night."

  He then introduced Captain Sagner to the officer with the bamboo cane, and they all three adjourned to the café. When they had installed themselves there, Captain Tayerle ordered a bottle of brandy and called for any of the girls who were disengaged to be sent in. It now turned out that the café was really a disorderly house, and as none of the girls were disengaged, Captain Tayerle flew into a temper and started bullying the manageress. He wanted to know who was with Miss Ella. When he was told that it was a lieutenant, he blustered more than ever.

  The lieutenant who was with Miss Ella was none other than Lieutenant Dub, who, as soon as the draft had been billeted in the local grammar school, had called together his squad and made a long speech to them, particularly drawing attention to the fact that all along their line of retreat the Russians had left behind them brothels with diseased occupants, for the purpose of striking a treacherous blow at the well-being of the Austrian army. He therefore warned the troops against visiting such establishments. He added that he proposed to visit these places personally to see whether his orders were being carried out. They were now, he said, in the battle zone, and anyone caught infringing these regulations would be tried by court-martial.

  So Lieutenant Dub had gone forth to see personally whether his orders were being obeyed, and as a starting point for his tour of inspection he had selected the sofa in Miss Ella's apartment, on the second floor of what was known as the "Municipal Café," and lolling in his pants upon this bug-infested sofa, he was having a thoroughly good time. While Miss Ella was telling him the tragic story of her life, the usual yarn about how her

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  father had been a factory owner and her mother a teacher at a young ladies' college at Budapest, and how she had been driven to her present life by an unhappy love affair, Lieutenant Dub was helping himself freely to a bottle of gin which, together with two glasses, stood on a small table within reach. By the time the bottle was half empty, Lieutenant Dub was quite fuddled, and thought that Miss Ella was Kunert, his orderly. He kept on addressing her in bullying tones :

  "Now then, Kunert, you brute, wait till you get to know me from the bad side -"

  Meanwhile, Captain Sagner had returned to his battalion. New divisional orders had been received, and it now became necessary to decide exactly where the 91st regiment was to go, because according to the new arrangements its original route was to be followed by the draft battalion of the 102nd regiment. It was all very complicated. The Russians were retreating very rapidly in the northeastern corner of Galicia, so that a number of Austrian units were mingling there, and, in places, units of the German army were also being thrust in like wedges, while the resulting chaos was supplemented by the arrival of new draft battalions and other military formations at the front. The same thing was happening in sectors which were some distance behind the front, as here in Sanok, where a number of German troops, the reserves of the Hanoverian division, had suddenly arrived. Their commander was a colonel of such hideous aspect that the brigadier was quite upset by the sight of him. The colonel of the Hanoverian reserves produced the arrangements of his staff, by which his troops were to be billeted in the local grammar school, where the men of the 91st regiment had already taken up their quarters. And for his staff he demanded the premises of the local branch of the Cracow Bank, which was occupied by the brigade headquarters staff.

  The brigadier got into direct communication with divisional headquarters, to whom he gave an account of the situation. The cantankerous Hanoverian then had a talk to divisional headquarters, and the consequence was that the brigade received the following orders :

  "The brigade will evacuate the town at 6 p. m. and will pro-

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  ceed in the direction Turowa-Wolsko-Liskowiec-Starasól-Sambor, where further orders will be received. The brigade will be accompanied by the draft battalion of the 91st regiment, as escort, thus : The advance guard will leave at 5:30 p. m. in the direction of Turowa, with a distance of 2 miles between the southern and northern protecting flank. The rear guard will leave at 6:15 p. m."

  So a great hubbub arose in the grammar school. An officers' conference was to be held, but was delayed by the absence of Lieutenant Dub. Schweik was detailed to go and
look for him.

  "I hope," said Lieutenant Lukash to Schweik, "that you won't have any trouble in finding him. You two don't seem to hit it off together, somehow."

  "Beg to report, sir," said Schweik. "I'd like to have my orders in writing. Then there won't be any mistake, and, as you say, sir, we don't seem to hit it off together."

  While Lieutenant Lukash was jotting down on a leaf torn from his notebook a few words to the effect that Lieutenant Dub was to proceed immediately to the grammar school for the conference, Schweik continued :

  "Yes, sir, you can safely leave it to me, like you always can. I'll find him all right, because the troops have been told that brothels are out of bounds, and he's sure to be in one to make sure that none of the chaps in his company are anxious for a court-martial, which is what he generally threatens them with. He told his company himself that he was going to search every blessed brothel in the town, and if he copped anyone, they'd get to know him from his bad side and they'd be sorry for it. And, as a matter of fact, I know where he is. He's in that café, just opposite, because all his company watched him, to see where he'd go first."

  The Municipal Café, the establishment to which Schweik referred, was divided into two parts. Visitors who did not wish to pass through the café itself could go round to the back of the premises, where an elderly lady who was basking in the sun would extend a polyglot invitation in German, Polish and Magyar to inspect the female attractions of the establishment. When Schweik entered, he came into contact with this worthy person,

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