'And what else is wrong with you?' asked Bautze.
'Humbly report, sir, I'm a rheumatic, but I will serve His Imperial Majesty to my last drop of blood,' said Svejk modestly.
'I have swollen knees.'
Bautze gave the good soldier Svejk a blood-curdling look and roared out in German:
'You're a malingerer!'
Turning to the sergeant-major he said with icy calm: 'Clap the bastard into gaol at once!'
Two soldiers with bayonets took Svejk off to the garrison gaol.
Svejk walked on his crutches and observed with horror that his rheumatism was beginning to disappear.
Mrs Miiller was still waiting for Svejk with the bath chair above on the bridge but when she saw him under bayoneted escort she burst into tears and ran away from the bathchair, never to return to it again.
And the good soldier Svejk walked along unassumingly under the escort of the armed protectors of the state.
Their bayonets shone in the light of the sun and at Mala Strana before the monument of Radetzky Svejk turned to the crowd which had followed them and called out:
'To Belgrade! To Belgrade!'
And Marshal Radetzky looked dreamily down from his monument at the good soldier Svejk, as, limping on his old crutches, he slowly disappeared into the distance with his recruit's flowers in his buttonhole.
Meanwhile a solemn-looking gentleman informed the crowd around that it was a 'dissenter' they were leading off.
8
Svejk the Malingerer
In these great times the army doctors took unusual pains to drive the devil of sabotage out of the malingerers and restore them to the bosom of the army.
Various degrees of torture had been introduced for malingerers and suspected malingerers, such as consumptives, rheumatics, people with hernia, kidney disease, typhus, diabetes, pneumonia and other illnesses.
The tortures to which the malingerers were subjected were systematized and the grades were as follows: I.
Strict diet, a cup of tea each morning and evening for three days, during which, irrespective, of course, of their complaints, aspirin to be given to induce sweating.
2.
To ensure they did not think that war was all beer and skittles, quinine in powder to be served in generous portions, or so-called 'quinine licking'.
3· The stomach to be pumped out twice a day with a litre of warm water.
4· Enemas with soapy water and glycerine to be applied.
5· Wrapping up in a sheet soaked in cold water.
There were stalwart men who endured all five degrees of torture and let themselves be carried off to the military cemetery in a simple coffin.
But there were also pusillanimous souls who, when they reached the stage of the enema, declared that they were now well and desired nothing better than to march off to the trenches with the next march battalion.
In the garrison prison Svejk was put into the sanatorium hut among pusillanimous malingerers of this very type.
'I can't stand it any longer,' said his neighbour in the next bed, who was brought in from the consulting room after having had his stomach pumped for the second time.
This man was shamming short-sightedness.
'Tomorrow I'll join the regiment,' decided his other neighbour on the left, who had just had an enema and who had been shamming deafness.
In the bed by the door a consumptive who was wrapped up in a cold wet sheet was slowly dying.
'That's the third this week,' observed his neighbour on the right.
'And what's your trouble?'
'I've got rheumatism,' answered Svejk, upon which there was a hearty guffaw all round.
Even the dying consumptive, who was shamming tuberculosis, joined in the laughter.
'Don't try and climb in here with rheumatism,' a fat man warned Svejk solemnly.
'Rheumatism here doesn't mean more than a chilblain.
I'm anaemic, I've lost half my stomach and five of my ribs, but no one believes me.
We even had a fellow here who was deaf and dumb.
For a fortnight they wrapped him up every half-hour in a cold wet sheet and every day they gave him an enema and pumped his stomach.
All the nurses thought he'd won through and would go home, when the doctor prescribed him an emetic.
It could have torn him in half and so he lost courage."
I can't go on being deaf and dumb," he said."
My speech and hearing have returned."
All the patients urged him not to ruin himself but he insisted that he could hear and speak just like other people.
And he reported to this effect at the doctor's visit next morning.'
'He kept it up for quite a long time,' remarked a man, who was pretending to have one leg four inches shorter than the other.
'Not like that chap who shammed a stroke.
All they had to do was to give him three doses of quinine, one enema and a day's fasting.