"Guard and watch closely!"
'Oh, yes, indeed,' he declared solemnly to Svcjk, 'vermin arc treated like vermin.
If anyone gets awkward we drag him off to the solitary. There we break all his ribs and leave him until he's a goner.
That's our right.
Like we did with that butcher, eh, Repa?'
'Yes, he gave us a lot of trouble, sir,' replied Sergeant-Major Repa dreamily.
'What a body!
I stamped on him for more than five minutes, until his ribs began to crack and blood poured out of his mouth.
And he lived for another ten days.
A really tough customer.'
'So you see, you bastard, what happens here when anyone starts getting awkward or trying to escape,' said Staff Warder Slavik, concluding his pedagogical discourse.
'It's sheer suicide, and by the way suicide's punished too.
And God help you, you miserable shit, if when there's an inspection you take it into your head to complain about anything.
When there's an inspection and you're asked:
"Have you any complaints?" you have to stand at attention, you stinking vermin, salute and answer:
"Humbly report, none. I'm completely satisfied.'' Now what are you going to say, you lousy oaf?
Repeat what I said!'
'Humbly report, none. I'm completely satisfied,' Svejk repeated with such a sweet expression on his face that the staff warder was misled and took it for honest zeal and decency.
'Now strip down to your pants and go to no. 16,' he said affably, without adding either 'shit', 'stinking vermin' or 'lousy oaf' as he usually did.
In no. 16 Svejk encountered twenty men in their pants.
They were all men whose papers had been marked
'Guard and watch closely!' and who were now being watched very carefully so that they should not escape.
If those pants had been clean and there had been no bars on the windows, you might at first glance have supposed that you were in the dressing-room of some bathing establishment.
Sergeant-Major Repa handed Svejk over to the 'cell commander', a hairy fellow in an unbuttoned shirt.
He wrote Svejk's name down on a piece of paper which was hanging on the wall and said to him:
'Tomorrow we're going to have a show.
They'll take us to the chapel to hear a sermon.
We shall all of us be standing in our pants right under the pulpit.
There'll be some fun.'
As in all prisons and penitentiaries the local chapel was very popular in the garrison gaol too.
Not that enforced attendance at it brought the congregation nearer to God or that the prisoners learned more about morality.
There could be no question of any nonsense of that kind.
The service and sermons were a marvellous thrill in the boredom of the garrison gaol.
It was not a question of getting nearer to God, but of the hope of finding on the way in the corridor or in the courtyard a fag-end or a cigar-end.
A little fag-end, lying about hopelessly in a spittoon or somewhere in the dust on the floor, stole the show and God was nowhere.
That little stinking object triumphed over God and the salvation of the soul.
Then on top of that came the sermon, which was a rare picnic, for the chaplain, Otto Katz, was really a lovely man.
His sermons were unusually exciting and amusing and they refreshed the boredom of the garrison gaol.
He could drivel so beautifully about the infinite grace of God, and give uplift to the abandoned prisoners and disgraced men. He could let off such resounding oaths from the pulpit and the altar. He could roar out his 'lte, nzissa est' so gorgeously at the altar, conduct the whole service in such an original way and turn the whole order of the Holy Mass upside down. When he was thoroughly drunk he could invent entirely new prayers and a new Holy Mass, even a liturgy of his own, something which was quite unheard of here.
And then, what a scream when he sometimes slipped and fell over with the chalice, the holy sacrament or the missal, loudly accusing the server from the prison unit of having purposely tripped him up and dealing him out solitary confinement or irons before the Holy Communion itself.
And the recipient was happy because it was an inseparable part of the whole pantomime in the prison chapel.
He played a leading part in the piece and acquitted himself honourably in it.
The chaplain, Otto Katz, the most perfect of army chaplains, was a Jew.
By the way, there's nothing odd about that. Archbishop Kohn was a Jew too and a friend of Machar1 into the bargain.
Chaplain Otto Katz had an even more colourful past than the famous Archbishop Kohn.
He studied at the Commercial Academy and served in the forces as a one-year volunteer.
He mastered so thoroughly bills of exchange and the laws about them that within a year he brought the firm of Katz and Co. Ltd to such a glorious and successful bankruptcy that old Mr Katz went off to North America, pulling off a kind of settlement unbeknown to his creditors or his partner, who went off to the Argentine.
And so after having disinterestedly bestowed the firm of Katz and Co. upon North and South America, young Otto Katz found himself in the position of a man who had no hopes of inheriting anything, had nowhere to lay his head and must therefore join the army.
Before this, however, Otto Katz had hit upon an awfully fine idea.
He had himself baptized.