"You dirty hound, you lousy scab, you miserable turd, you Socialist sod!"
I looked them all squarely in the eyes without blinking and kept quiet, my right hand at the peak of my cap and my left on the seam of my trousers.
They ran around me like dogs and yapped at me, but I did nothing. I kept mum, saluted, left hand on the seam of my trousers.
When they had been raging like this for about half an hour, the colonel rushed at me and roared:
"Are you a half-wit or aren't you?" -
"Humbly report, sir, I'm a half-wit." -"Very well then.
Twenty-one days strict confinement for imbecility, two days a week fasting, a month confined to barracks, forty-eight hours in handcuffs, immediate arrest, don't let him eat, truss him, show him that the monarchy doesn't need half-wits.
We'll flog those newspapers out of your head, you bastard," the colonel decided after flying around for a long time.
But while I was sitting in jug miracles were happening in the barracks.
Our colonel forbade our soldiers to read anything at all, even the Prague Official News.
In the canteen they weren't even allowed to use the newspapers for wrapping up frankfurters or bits of cheese.
From that time all the soldiers started to read, and our regiment became the best educated.
We read all the newspapers and in every company they made up rhymes and songs against the colonel.
And when anything happened in the regiment you'd always find some public benefactor who sent it to the newspapers under the title:
"Maltreatment of the troops".
And they didn't stop at that. They wrote to the parliamentary deputies in Vienna, asking them to take up their case, and the deputies began to make interpellations one after the other, saying that our colonel was a monster and suchlike.
A minister sent a commission to us to investigate the case and a Franta Hencl from Hluboki got two years for being the chap who got on to the deputies in Vienna, because of the knock across the jaw he got from the colonel on the drill-ground.
Later when the commission went away our colonel made us all fall in, the whole regiment, and told us that a soldier is a soldier, that he must shut his mug and do his job, and if he doesn't like anything then it's a breach of discipline.
"So you, you bloody bastards, thought that that commission would help you?" said the colonel.
"A shit they helped you!
And now every company will march past me and repeat aloud what I've said."
And so we marched to where the colonel stood, one company after the other, eyes right, and our hands on our rifle slings and shouted at him:
"And so we, we bloody bastards, thought that that commission would help us.
A shit they helped us!"
The colonel doubled up with laughter until the eleventh company marched up.
They marched, they stamped, but when they reached the colonel -nothing at all, not the faintest sound!
The colonel got red as a turkeycock, marched the eleventh company back and made them repeat the operation once more. They marched past in silence and each rank after the other stared the colonel insolently in the eyes.
"Stand at ease!" said the colonel and paced up and down the yard, lashing his boots with his riding crop and spitting about the place. Then he suddenly stopped and roared out
"Dismiss!", mounted his old crock and away he was out of the gate.
We waited to see what would happen to the eleventh company, but still there was nothing.
We waited one day, then another and then a whole week, but still nothing happened.
The colonel never appeared in the barracks at all, which gave great joy to the men, the N.C.O.s and the officers.
After that we got a new colonel and it was rumoured that the old one was in a sanatorium because he had written a letter in his own hand to His Imperial Majesty telling him that the eleventh company had mutinied.'
The time for the doctor's afternoon round approached.
Dr Gri.instein went from bed to bed, followed by the medical orderly officer with his notebook.
'Macuna?'
'Present!'
'Enema and aspirin!
Pokorny?'
'Present!'
'Stomach pump and quinine!
Kovarik?'
'Present!'
'Enema and aspirin!
Kot'atko?'
'Present!'
'Stomach pump and quinine!'
And so it went on, one after the other, mercilessly, mechanically, briskly.
'Svejk ?'
'Present!'