Dr Gri.instein looked at the new acquisition.
'What's the matter with you?'
'Humbly report, I've got rheumatism!'
In the course of his practice Dr Gri.instein had grown accustomed to be gently ironical, which was much more effective than shouting.
'Aha, rheumatism,' he said to Svejk.
'Then you've got a jolly serious illness.
It's really a coincidence getting rheumatism just at a time when there is a world war on and you've got to go to the front.
I think you must be awfully sorry.'
'Humbly report, sir, I am awfully sorry.'
'Well, there you are, you see, he's awfully sorry.
It's really awfully nice of you that with your rheumatism you've not forgotten us just at this particular moment.
In peacetime a poor chap like him runs about like a young goat, but as soon as war breaks out he immediately gets rheumatism and suddenly his knees don't work.
Your knees hurt, I suppose?'
'Humbly report, they do, sir.'
'And you can't sleep a wink the whole night, can you?
Rheumatism's a very dangerous, painful and grave illness.
We've already had good experience with rheumatics here. Strict diet and other treatment of ours have proved very effective.
Here you'll be fit quicker than in Piest'any1 and you'll march to the front like greased lightning.'
Turning to the hospital orderly he said: 'Write this down: Svejk, strict diet, stomach pump twice a day, enema once a day, and we'll see how it goes after that.
For the time being take him to the consulting room, pump his stomach and when he comes to, give him an enema, but a real good one, until he screams blue murder and his rheumatism gets frightened and runs away.'
Then turning to all the beds the doctor made a speech full of noble and rational moral maxims:
'Don't imagine that I'm just a bloody halfwit who swallows all your bull.
Your tricks don't rattle me in the least.
I know you're all malingerers and you want to desert from the war. And I'll treat you as such.
I've survived hundreds and hundreds of soldiers like you.
Masses of people have lain on these beds here who had nothing wrong with them at all except that they hadn't got a soldier's guts.
While their comrades were fighting on the battlefield they thought they'd lounge about in bed, get hospital rations and wait until the war flew by.
But they all found they'd made a bloody mistake, and all of you'll find you've made a bloody mistake too.
In twenty years time you'll be still screaming in your sleep, when you dream of how you tried it on with me.'
'Humbly report, sir,' came a gentle voice from the bed at the window, 'I'm well again.
I noticed in the night that my asthma's gone.'
'Your name?'
'Kovarik.
Humbly report, I have to have an enema.'
'Good, you'll still get an enema for the road,' Dr Griinstein decided, 'so that you don't complain that we didn't give you treatment here.
Now, all the patients whose names I've read out, fall in and follow the orderly, so that each can get what's due to him.'
And each one got a handsome dose of what had been prescribed.
And if any of them tried to work on those who were executing the orders by means of prayers or threats that they might too once join the medical corps and the executioners might fall into their hands, Svejk at least bore himself with steadfastness.
'Don't spare me,' he invited the myrmidon who was giving him the enema. 'Remember your oath.
Even if it was your father or your own brother who was lying here, give him an enema without batting an eyelid.
Try hard to think that Austria rests on these enemas and victory is ours.' · The next day on his round Dr Gri.instein asked Svejk how he was enjoying being in the military hospital.
Svejk answered that it was a fair and high-minded institution.
In reward he received the same as the day before plus aspirin and three quinine powders which they dissolved into water so that he should drink them at once.
And not even Socrates drank his hemlock bowl with such composure as did Svejk his quinine, when Dr Griinstein was trying out on him all his various degrees of torture.
When they wrapped Svejk up in a wet sheet in the presence of the doctor his answer to the question how he liked it now was:
'Humbly report, sir, it's like being in a swimming pool or at the seaside.'
'Have you still got rheumatism?'
'Humbly report, sir, it doesn't seem to want to get better.'
Svejk was subjected to new tortures.
At that time the widow of the infantry general, Baroness von Botzenheim, took great pains to find that soldier about whom Bohemie had recently published a report that, cripple as he was, he had had himself pushed in a bathchair shouting: