He confessed and by the time they started pumping out his stomach there wasn't a trace left of his stroke.
The chap who held out longest of all was the one who had been bitten by a mad dog.
He bit, he howled it's true he could do it splendidly - but he just couldn't manage to foam at the mouth.
We did our best to help him. Several times we tickled him for a whole hour before the doctor's visit until he had convulsions and got blue all over, but the foam wouldn't come and didn't in fact come at all.
It was really terrifying.
When he gave in one morning at the doctor's visit we were quite sorry for him.
He stood by his bed erect as a candle, saluted and said:
"Humbly report, sir, the dog I was bitten by may not have been mad after all."
The doctor gave him such a queer look that he began to tremble all over and went on:
"Humbly report, sir, I wasn't bitten by a dog at all.
It was I who bit myself in the arm."
After that confession they put him under investigation for self-mutilation on the charge that he had tried to bite off his arm to get out of going to the front.'
'All those kinds of illnesses where you have to foam at the mouth are difficult to sham,' said the fat malingerer.
'Take for instance epilepsy.
We had an epileptic here who always used to tell us that one fit wasn't enough and so he put on some ten a day. He writhed in convulsions, clenched his fists, rolled his eyes wildly, flung himself about on the floor, stuck out his tongue, in short, I can tell you, it was a magnificent first-class epilepsy, the genuine thing.
But suddenly he got boils, two on the neck and two on the back, and it was all over with his writhing and flinging himself about on the floor, when he couldn't move his head and wasn't able either to sit or lie down.
He got fever and in delirium he let out everything at the doctor's visit.
He gave us a lot of trouble over his boils, because he had to lie here with them another three days and got another diet - coffee and rolls in the morning, soup, dumplings and gravy for lunch, and porridge or soup in the evening. And with our hungry, pumped-out stomachs and strict diet we had to watch this fellow bolting the food, smacking his lips, panting and belching with repletion.
In this way he broke down another three who confessed as well.
They had been suffering from heart disease.'
'The best thing to sham,' said one of the malingerers, 'is insanity.
There are two of our teachers lying in the ward next door and one of them shrieks out incessantly day and night:
"Giordano Bruno's stake is still smouldering.
Reopen the trial of Galileo."
And the other one barks, first three times slowly: bow-wow-wow, then five times quickly in succession: bowwowwowwowwow, and then once more slowly, and so it goes on without a break.
They've managed to keep it up for over three "l"eeks now. Originally I wanted to be insane too, have religious mania and preach about papal infallibility, but in the end I fixed myself up with cancer of the stomach from a barber in Mala Strana for fifteen crowns.'
'I know a chimney-sweep in Brevnov,' remarked another patient. 'For ten crowns he'll give you such a fever that you'll jump out of the window.'
'That's nothing,' said another.
'In Vrsovice there's a midwife who for twenty crowns will dislocate your leg so well that you'll be a cripple until your death.'
'I had my leg dislocated for ten crowns,' came a voice from the row of beds by the window,' for ten crowns and three glasses of beer.'
'My illness has cost me more than two hundred already,' announced his neighbour, a dried-up stick.
'You tell me any poison I haven't taken. You won't find it.
I'm a living repository of poisons of all kinds.
I've taken mercury chloride, I've breathed in mercury fumes, I've chewed arsenic, I've smoked opium, I've drunk tincture of opium, I've sprinkled morphine on bread, I've swallowed strychnine, I've drunk a solution of phosphorus in carbon sulphide as well as picric acid.
I've destroyed my liver, my lungs, my kidneys, my gallbladder, my brain, my heart and my intestines.
No one knows what kind of illness I have.'
'The best thing to do,' explained somebody from the door, 'is to inject paraffin under the skin of your arm.
My cousin was so fortunate as to have his arm cut off under the elbow and today he has no trouble for the rest of the war.'
'So you see,' said Svejk, 'everyone has to go through all that for His Imperial Majesty - even stomach-pumping and enemas.
When I served years ago in my regiment it was even worse.
In those days they used to truss the patient and throw him into a hole to recuperate him.
There weren't any bunks like there are here or spittoons either.
Just a bare plank-bed and the patients lay on it.
Once one had a genuine typhus and the other next to him had smallpox.
Both were trussed, and the regimental doctor kicked them in the belly for being malingerers.
And when both these soldiers died it came up in parliament and was in the newspapers.
They immediately forbade us to read those newspapers and searched our boxes in case we had them.
And as I always have bad luck, I was the only one in the whole regiment they found them on.
So I was taken off on regimental report and our colonel, who was a bloody half-wit, God help him, started to roar at me to stand straight and to tell him who it was who wrote that in the newspapers or he'd break my jaw wide open and have me locked up till I was black in the face.
Then came the regimental doctor, brandishing his fist under my nose and shouting in German: