9
Svejk in the Garrison Gaol
For people who did not want to go to the front the last refuge was the garrison gaol.
I once knew a probationary teacher who was a mathematician and did not want to serve in the artillery and shoot people. So he stole a lieutenant's watch to get himselfi nto the garrison gaol.
He did this deliberately.
War neither impressed nor enchanted him.
Shooting at the enemy and killing with shrapnel and shells equally unhappy probationary teachers of mathematics serving on the other side seemed to him sheer idiocy.
'I don't want to be hated for my brutality,' he said to himself, and calmly stole the watch.
First they examined his mental condition but, when he said he wanted to get rich quick, they sent him off to the garrison gaol.
There were a lot more people like that sitting there for theft or fraud-idealists and non-idealists.
There were people who saw the war as a way of increasing their income, those various quartermaster sergeants at the base or at the front who were up to all possible kinds of fiddles with messing and pay, and also petty thieves who were a thousand times more honest than the blackguards who sent them there.
And soldiers sat there who had committed various other offences of a purely military kind such as insubordination, attempted mutiny or desertion.
Then came the political prisoners who were in a special class; eighty per cent of them were utterly innocent and of these ninety-nine per cent were sentenced.
The whole establishment of the office of the judge advocate was magnificent.
Every state on the brink of total political, economic and moral collapse has an establishment like this.
The aura of past power and glory clings to its courts, police, gendarmerie and venal pack of informers.
In every military unit Austria had her snoopers who spied on their comrades, sleeping on the same bunks with them and sharing their bread on the march.
In addition the garrison gaol was supplied with material by the State Security, Messrs Klfma, Slavfcek and Co.
The military censorship consigned here the writers of letters exchanged between the men at the front and the despairing ones they had left behind at home. The gendarmes even brought here poor old peasant pensioners who had written letters to the front, and the court-martial jugged them for twelve years as a punishment for their words of consolation and their descriptions of the misery at home.
From the Hradcany garrison the road led through Bi'evnov to the drill-ground at Motol.
Along it a procession would pass, headed by a man under military escort with his hands manacled and followed by a cart with a coffin on it.
On the drill-ground was heard the curt order:
'Fire!'
And then in all the regiments and battalions they read out the regimental order that one more man had been shot for mutiny during call-up, when his wife, not bearing to be parted from him, had been slashed by the captain's sabre.
And in the garrison gaol the triumvirate - Staff Warder Slavik, Captain Linhart and Sergeant-Major Repa, alias 'the hangman', were getting on with the job!
How many did they flog in solitary confinement?
Perhaps in the Republic today Captain Linhart is still a captain.
I hope for his sake his years of service in the garrison gaol will count towards his pension.
They do in the case of Slavfcek and Klima from the State Security.
Repa has returned to civilian life and carries on his profession as a master builder.
Perhaps he is a member of one of the patriotic societies in the Republic.
Under the Republic Staff Warder Slavik became a thief and is today in gaol.
The poor man could not set himself up so comfortably in the Republic as the other military gentlemen did.
It was quite natural that when he took charge of Svejk Staff Warder Slavik gave him a look of mute reproach, as much as to say:
'So you've got a tarnished reputation too, if you've got yourself here?
Well, love, we'll sweeten your stay here, as we do for anyone who's fallen into our hands, and you know that our hands aren't exactly the ladies' kind.'
And to add weight to his look he thrust his muscular fat fist under Svejk's nose and said:
'Sniff that, you bastard!'
Svejk sniffed it and observed: 'I wouldn't like to get that in the nose. It smells of the graveyard.'
This calm, considered remark appealed to the staff warder.
'Hey,' he said, prodding Svejk in the stomach with his fist, 'stand straight!
What's that you've got in your pockets?
If it's cigarettes, you can leave them here. And hand over your money too so that they don't steal it off you.
Haven't you got anything else?
Honest to God?
Don't tell lies, now.
You'll be punished for lying.'
'Where shall we put him?' asked Sergeant-Major Repa.
'In no. r6,' the staff warder decided, 'among the pants.
Don't you see that Captain Linhart has marked his papers: