'To Belgrade!'; which patriotic pronouncement induced the editorial staff of Boltemie to invite their readers to organize collections in aid of the loyal and heroic cripple.
Finally, after inquiries at police headquarters it was ascertained that the man in question was Svejk and after that it was easy to make a search for him.
Baroness von Botzenheim went to the Hradcany taking with her her lady companion and her footman with a hamper.
The poor baroness had no idea what it meant for someone to be lying in the hospital of the garrison gaol.
Her visiting card opened the prison door for her, in the office they were awfully nice to her, and in five minutes she learnt that' the good soldier Svejk ',whom she was looking for, lay in the third hut, bed number seventeen.
She was accompanied by Dr Griinstein himself, who was quite flabbergasted by it.
Svejk was just sitting up in bed after the usual daily procedure prescribed by Dr Griinstein, surrounded by a group of emaciated and starved malingerers, who had not yet given up and were stubbornly struggling with Dr Griinstein on the battlefield of strict diet.
Anyone who had listened to them would have had the impression that he was in the company of epicures, in a school of cordon bleu cuisine or a course for gourmets.
'You can even eat ordinary suet cracklings if they are warm,' a patient with 'inveterate stomach catarrh' was just telling the others at this moment.
'As the suet boils, you squeeze the cracklings dry, add salt and pepper, and I can tell you that goose cracklings are not in the same class.'
'You leave goose cracklings alone,' said a man with 'cancer of the stomach'. 'There's nothing to touch them.
What are pork cracklings in comparison?
Of course you must fry them until they're golden brown, like the Jews do.
They take a fat goose, draw the fat off with the skin and fry it.'
'You know, you're quite wrong as far as pork cracklings are concerned,' Svejk's neighbour put in.
'Of course I'm talking about cracklings of home-made fat, what they call home-made cracklings.
They're not brown and they're not yellow. They must be something between the two shades.
These kinds of cracklings mustn't be either too soft or too hard.
And they mustn't be crunchy or they're overcooked.
They must melt on the tongue and you mustn't feel the fat dripping on your chin.'
'Which of you have eaten horse cracklings?' chimed in a new voice, but there was no answer because at that moment the medical orderly ran m: 'Everybody in bed!
An archduchess is coming here.
Don't anyone dare show his dirty legs outside the bed.'
And not even an archduchess could have entered the ward with such dignity as did Baroness von Botzenheim.
After her the whole suite poured in, including even the quartermaster sergeant-major of the hospital who saw in all this the mysterious hand of Accounts Control, which was going to tear him away from his fat feeding trough at the base and deliver him to the tender mercies of the shrapnel somewhere under the barbed wire posts.
He was pale, but Dr Griinstein was even paler.
Before his eyes there danced the old baroness's small visiting card with her title, 'Widow of a general', and everything which could be associated with it like connections, protection, complaints, transfer to the front and other frightful things.
'Here you have Svejk,' he said, endeavouring to preserve an artificial composure and leading the Baroness von Botzenheim to Svejk's bed.
'He behaves with great patience.'
Baroness von Botzenheim sat down on the chair prepared for her at Svejk's bed and said:
'Tshech zoldier, goot zoldier, krippl - zoldier iss brafe zoldier.
I !of fery moch Tshech Austrian.'
At that she stroked Svejk on his unshaven cheeks and went on:
'I reat eferyzink in ze newspapers, I brink you yum yum, zomzink to bite, to shmoke, to zuck, Tshech zoldier, goot zoldier.
Johann, come here!'
Her footman, whose bristly side-whiskers recalled the notorious killer Babinsky, dragged a voluminous hamper to the bed, while the old baroness's companion, a tall lady with a tearful face, sat down on Svejk's bed and smoothed out his straw pillow under his back with the fixed idea that this was what ought to be done for sick heroes.
In the meantime the baroness drew presents out of the hamper: a dozen roast chickens wrapped up in pink silk paper and tied with a yellow and black silk ribbon, two bottles of a war liqueur with the label:
'Gott strafe Eng!and.'1 On the back of the label was a picture of Franz Joseph and Wilhelm clasping hands as though they were going to play the nursery game:
'Bunny sat alone in his hole. Poor little bunny, what's wrong with you that you can't hop! '2 Then she took out of the hamper three bottles of wine for the convalescent and two boxes of cigarettes.
She set out everything elegantly on the empty bed next to Svejk's, where she also put a beautifully bound book, Stories from tlze Life of our Monarch, which had been written by the present meritorious chief editor of our official Czechoslovak Republic who doted on old Franz.
Packets of chocolate with the same inscription,
'Gott strafe England', and again with pictures of the Austrian and German emperors, found their way to the bed.
On the chocolate they were no longer clasping hands; each was acting on his own and turning his back to the other.
There was a beautiful toothbrush with two rows of bristles and the inscription
'Viribus unitis', 1 so that anyone who cleaned his teeth should remember Austria.
An elegant and extremely useful little gift for the front and the trenches was a manicure set.
On the case was a picture showing shrapnel bursting and a man in a steel helmet rushing forward with fixed bayonet.
And underneath it was written in German:
'For God, Emperor and Fatherland!'
There was a tin of biscuits without a picture on it but with a verse in German instead, together with a Czech translation on the back: Austria, thou noble house, Thy banners wide unfurl! Thy flags shall flutter proud on high. Austria shall never die!