The Good Soldier Svejk (60 page)

Ten minutes later it turned out that the staff officer at brigade headquarters was a complete nincompoop, because a cipher telegram arrived inquiring whether the 8th draft of the 75th regiment were speaking (military cipher G. 3). The nincompoop at brigade headquarters was astonished by the reply that it was the 7th draft of the 91st regiment, and asked who had given orders to proceed toward Munkacevo, along the military railway line via Stryj, when the proper route was through the Lubka Pass via Sanok into Galicia. The nincompoop was staggered to learn that they were telegraphing from the Lubka Pass, and sent a cipher message : "Route unchanged, via Lubka Pass to Sanok, where further instructions."

When Captain Sagner returned to the staff carriage, a debate ensued on the muddle-headedness of the Austrian authorities, and hints were dropped that if it were not for the Germans, the eastern army group would be entirely at sixes and sevens. Lieutenant Dub thereupon proceeded to defend the Austrian muddle-headedness and came out with some twaddle to the effect that the region in which they had arrived was considerably devastated by the recent hostilities and it had therefore not yet been possible to restore the line to proper working order. All the officers looked at him pityingly, as much as to say : "It's not his fault that he's dotty." Finding that his views met with no contradiction, Lieutenant Dub went on jabbering about the magnificent impression

which the battered landscape made upon him, for it bore testimony, he said, to the formidable character of our army's iron grip. Again nobody contradicted him, and he added :

"Oh, yes, there can be no doubt that the Russians retreated here in a thorough panic."

Captain Sagner made up his mind that at the first opportunity, when they were having a hot time in the trenches, he would send Lieutenant Dub out on patrol duty into no-man's-land to reconnoitre the enemy positions.

It seemed as if Lieutenant Dub would never stop talking. He went on explaining to all the officers what he had read in the papers about these Carpathian battles and the struggle for the Carpathian passes, during the Austro-German offensive on the San. He talked as if he had not only taken part in these operations, but had directed them himself. At last, Lieutenant Lukash could stand it no longer, and remarked to Lieutenant Dub :

"I suppose you discussed all this with your district chief of police before the war?"

Lieutenant Dub glared at Lieutenant Lukash and went out.

The train was standing on an embankment, and at the bottom of the slope various objects were scattered about, evidently thrown away by the Russian soldiers who had retreated through this cutting. There were rusty tea cans, cartridge pouches, coils of barbed wire and more bloodstained strips of gauze and cotton wool. Above this cutting stood a group of soldiers, and Lieutenant Dub was not slow to perceive Schweik was among them, explaining something to the rest.

Accordingly he went there.

"What's the matter here?" inquired Lieutenant Dub sternly, coming to a standstill right in front of Schweik.

"Beg to report, sir," replied Schweik on behalf of all, "we're having a look."

"Having a look at what?" shouted Lieutenant Dub.

"Beg to report, sir, we're having a look down below into the cutting."

"And who gave you permission to do that?"

"Beg to report, sir, we're carrying out the orders of Colonel Schlager, who was our C. O. at Bruck. When he said good-bye

to us, when we were leaving for the battle field, as he said in his farewell speech, he said we was to have a good look at the places where there'd been any fighting, so as we could see how the fighting was done, and find out anything that might be useful for us to know. And now we can see in that ditch all the things a soldier has to chuck away when he's doing a bunk. Beg to report, sir, it shows us what a mug's game it is for a soldier to cart all sorts of useless junk about with him. It only loads him up without doing him any good. All it does is to make him tired, and when he's been dragging all that heavy stuff about with him, it stands to reason he can't fight properly."

A ray of hope darted through Lieutenant Dub's mind that at last he'd manage to get Schweik up before a court-martial for anti-militaristic and treasonable propaganda, and so he quickly asked :

"So you think a soldier ought to throw away the cartridges that are lying about in this ditch, or the bayonets that we can see there?"

"Oh, no, sir, beg to report, sir, not at all," replied Schweik with a sweet smile. "But just have a look down there at that tin chamber pot."

And, right enough, at the bottom of the cutting lay defiantly a chamber pot with the enamel all chipped, eaten away with rust, among shards and other objects which, being no longer fit for domestic purposes, had been discarded by the station master, as material for arguments in future centuries by archaeologists who, having unearthed this settlement, would go quite crazy about it, and school children would be taught about the age of enamelled chamber pots.

Lieutenant Dub gazed at the object in question and he was unable to gainsay Schweik's designation of it. He therefore said nothing, and Schweik launched out into a long anecdote in which a similar object played a prominent part. If Lieutenant Dub had followed his personal inclinations, he would have pushed Schweik over the edge, but he overcame this temptation, and interrupting Schweik's narrative, he shouted at the group of soldiers :

"Don't stand there gaping at me like that. I tell you, you don't
know me yet. But wait till you do get to know me !"

And when Schweik was moving away with the others, he bellowed :

"You stay here, Schweik !"

So there they stood, looking at each other, and Lieutenant Dub tried to think of something really terrifying that he could say. But before he had a chance to speak, Schweik remarked :

"Beg to report, sir, I hope this weather'll last. It's not too hot in the daytime and the nights are quite pleasant. That's the best sort of weather for soldiering."

Lieutenant Dub took out his revolver and asked :

"Do you know what that is?"

"Beg to report, sir, yes, sir. Lieutenant Lukash has got one just like that."

"Then just you remember, my fine fellow," said Lieutenant Dub in solemn and dignified tones, "that something extremely unpleasant will happen to you, if you keep carrying on this propaganda of yours."

And he departed, repeating to himself :

"Yes, that's the best way to put it to him : Propaganda, that's the word I wanted ; propaganda."

Before Schweik got back into his truck, he walked up and down a little longer, muttering
to
himself:

"Well, I'm blessed if I know what sort of a label ought to be shoved on him."

But before he had finished his stroll, Schweik had devised a suitable designation for Lieutenant Dub: "Bloody old belly-acher."

After which discovery he returned to his truck.

Half an hour later they continued their journey towards Sanok. When they got beyond Szczawna, they again began
to
see small military cemeteries in the valleys. Below Szczawna there was a stone crucifix with a headless Christ, the head having been shot away during the bombardment of the railway line. The train now began
to move
at express speed as it pounded along down the valley towards Sanok. The horizon became wider and the number of shattered villages on both sides of the landscape

increased accordingly. At Kulashna a Red Cross train, smashed to pieces, was lying in a stream at the bottom of the railway embankment from which it had tumbled. The funnel of the engine had got rammed into the embankment and peeped forth from it like the muzzle of a cannon. This sight attracted much attention in the truck where Schweik was. Jurajda, the cook, was particularly indignant.

"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

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."

"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 :