'Medical experts are swine,' the short man with a stoop broke in.
'Not long ago quite by chance they dug up a skeleton in my meadow, and the medical experts said that it was murdered forty years ago by some blunt object on the head.
I'm thirty-eight and I've been gaoled, although I have my birth certificate, an extract from the parish register and my identity card.'
'I think that we should be fair about everything,' said Svejk.
'After all, anybody can and must make a mistake, the more he thinks about a thing.
Medical experts are human beings and human beings have their faults.
Once in Nusle, just by the bridge across the Botic, a gentleman came up to me in the night, when I was coming back from U Banzetu, and hit me over the head with a knout. And when I was lying on the ground he flashed his torch on me and said:
"It's a mistake. It's not him."
And he got so angry because he'd made a mistake that he hit me on the back again.
It's only human nature that a chap should go on making mistakes until he dies.
It's just like that gentleman who one night found a mad, half-frozen dog, took it home with him and put it in his wife's bed.
As soon as it had got warmed up it bit the whole family and tore to pieces and devoured the baby in the cradle.
Or I can give you an example of a mistake a turner who lives in our house once made.
He opened the chapel at Podoli with his key, because he thought it was his kitchen, and lay down on the altar because he thought that he was home in bed. And then he pulled over himself some cloths with holy inscriptions and put the New Testament and other sacred books under his head to make it higher.
In the morning he was found by the sexton and when he came to himself he told him quite goodhumouredly that it was only a little mistake.
"A nice little mistake," said the sexton, "when all because of it we shall have to have the church re-consecrated."
After that the turner came before the medical experts and they proved to him that he had been completely sensible and sober, because if he had been tight, they said, he wouldn't have been able to fit the key into the lock of the chapel door.
Afterwards that turner died in Pankrac. I can also give you another example of how a police dog at Kladno made a mistake. It was an Alsatian which belonged to the famous cavalry captain, Rotter.
Captain Rotter bred these dogs and experimented with them on tramps, until all the tramps began to avoid the district of Kladno.
And so he gave orders that the gendarmes must bring in some suspicious individual without fail.
Well, once they brought him a quite respectably dressed man, whom they'd found in the Forest of Liny sitting on a tree stump.
The captain at once had a piece of his coat-tails cut off and given to his police dogs to sniff.
And then they took the man away to a brick works behind the town and set their trained dogs on to his tracks. The dogs found him and brought him back again.
Then the man had to climb up a ladder to a loft, leap over a wall and jump into a lake with the dogs after him.
In the end it turned out that he was a deputy of the Czech Radical Party who had gone for an outing in the woods of U.ny after having got bored with parliament.
And that's why I say that people are erring creatures by nature, they make errors, never mind whether they're learned people or stupid uneducated idiots.
Even ministers make mistakes.'
The commission of medical experts, which had to decide whether Svejk's mental horizon did or did not correspond to all the crimes with which he was charged, consisted of three unusually solemn gentlemen whose views were such that the view of each differed gloriously from any of the views of the other two.
Three different scientific schools and psychiatric views were represented there.
If in the case of Svejk complete agreement had been reached between these opposing scientific camps, it can be explained purely and simply by the stunning impression he produced upon them when he entered the room where his mental state was to be examined and, observing a picture of the Austrian monarch hanging on the wall, cried out:
'Long live our Emperor, Franz Joseph I, gentlemen.'
The case was clear as daylight.
Svejk's spontaneous declaration disposed of a whole range of questions, and there only remained a few very important questions which were needed so that from Svejk's answers the initial opinion of him could be confirmed according to the system of the psychiatrist Dr Kallerson, Dr Heveroch and the Englishman, Weiking.
'Is radium heavier than lead ? '
'Please, sir, I haven't weighed it,' answered Svejk with his sweet smile.
'Do you believe in the end of the world?'
'I'd have to see that end first,' Svejk answered nonchalantly. 'But certainly I shan't see it tomorrow.'
'Would you know how to calculate the diameter of the globe?'
'No, I'm afraid I wouldn't,' answered Svejk, 'but I'd like to ask you a riddle myself, gentlemen.
Take a three-storied house, with eight windows on each floor. On the roof there are two dormer windows and two chimneys. On every floor there are two tenants.
And now, tell me, gentlemen, in which year the house-porter's grandmother died?'
The medical experts exchanged knowing looks, but nevertheless one of them asked this further question:
'You don't know the maximum depth of the Pacific Ocean?'
'No, please sir, I don't,' was the answer,' but I think that it must be definitely deeper than the Vltava below the rock of Vysehrad.'
The chairman of the commission asked briefly: 'Is that enough?', but nonetheless another member requested the following question:
'How much is 12,897 times 13,863?'
'729,' answered Svejk, without batting an eyelid.
'I think that that will do,' said the chairman of the commission.
'You can take the accused back where he came from.'
'Thank you, gentlemen,' replied Svejk deferentially. 'For me it will do too.'