Bretschneider lapsed into silence and looked disappointedly round the empty pub.
'Hallo, there used to be a picture of His Imperial Majesty hanging here once,' he started up again after a while.
'Just where the mirror hangs now.'
'Yes, you're right,' Palivec replied. 'It did hang there, but the flies used to shit on it, so I put it away in the attic.
You know, somebody might be so free as to pass a remark about it and then there could be unpleasantness.
I don't want that, do I?'
'In Sarajevo it must have been a pretty ugly business, Mr Palivec.' This crafty direct question evoked an extremely cautious answer from Palivec:
'At this time of the year it's scorching hot in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
When I served there, they had to put ice on our lieutenant's head.'
'Which regiment did you serve in, Mr Palivec?'
'I can't possibly remember anything so unimportant. Bloody nonsense of that sort never interested me and I've never bothered my head about it,' answered Palivec.
'Curiosity killed a cat.'
Bretschneider finally relapsed into silence. His gloomy face only lit up on the arrival of Svejk who came into the pub, ordered a dark black beer and remarked:
'Today they'll be in mourning in Vienna too.'
Bretschneider's eyes gleamed with hope, and he said laconically:
'On Konopiste there are ten black flags.'
'There should be twelve,' said Svejk, after he had taken a swig.
'What makes you think twelve?' asked Bretschneider.
'To make it a round number.
A dozen adds up better, and dozens always come cheaper,' answered Svejk.
There was a silence, which Svejk himself broke with a sigh:
'And so he's already lying with God and the angels. Glory be!
He didn't even live to be Emperor.
When I was serving in the army a general once fell off his horse and killed himself without any fuss.
They wanted to help him back onto his horse, to lift him up, but to their surprise he was completely dead.
And he was going to be promoted Field Marshal.
It happened at a review.
These reviews never come to any good.
In Sarajevo there was a review too.
I remember once at a parade like that I had twenty buttons missing from my uniform and they sent me into solitary confinement for a fortnight, where I lay for two days trussed up like Lazarus.
But in the army you must have discipline, otherwise why would anyone bother at all?
Our Lieutenant Makovec always used to say:
"There's got to be discipline, you bloody fools, otherwise you'd be climbing about on the trees like monkeys, but the army's going to make human beings of you, you god-forsaken idiots."
And isn't that true?
Just imagine a park, let's say at Charles Square, and on every tree an undisciplined soldier!
It's enough to give you a nightmare!'
'At Sarajevo,' Bretschneider resumed, 'it was the Serbs who did it.'
'You're wrong there,' replied Svejk.
'It was the Turks, because of Bosnia and Herzegovina.'
And Svejk expounded his views on Austrian foreign policy in the Balkans. In 1912 the Turks lost the war with Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece. They had wanted Austria to help them, and when this didn't happen, they shot Ferdinand.
'Do you like the Turks?' said Svejk, turning to Palivec.
'Do you like those heathen dogs?
You don't, do you?'
'One customer is as good as another,' said Palivec, 'never mind a Turk.
For tradesmen like us politics doesn't enter into it.
Pay for your beer, sit down in my pub and jabber what you like. That's my principle.
It's all the same to me whether our Ferdinand was done in by a Serb or Turk, Catholic or Moslem, anarchist or Young Czech.'
'All right now, Mr Palivec,' resumed Bretschneider, who was again beginning to despair of catching either of them out, 'but all the same you'll admit that it's a great loss for Austria.'
Svejk replied for the landlord:
'Yes, it's a loss indeed, there's no denying it.