'And do you know what it's about?'
'No, I'm not interested.'
'But you ought to be interested.'
'I don't know what I ought to be interested in.
I just smoke my cigar, drink my few glasses, have my supper and don't read the newspapers.
The newspapers tell lies.
Why should I get excited?'
'And so you're not even interested in the murder at Sarajevo then?'
'I'm not interested in any murder at all, whether it's at Prague, Vienna, Sarajevo or London.
For that there are authorities, courts and police.
If at any time anywhere they kill anybody it only serves him right.
Why is he such a bloody careless fool to let himself get killed ? ' Those were his last words in this conversation.
From that moment he went on repeating aloud at intervals of five minutes:
'I'm innocent. I'm innocent.'
He screamed out these words at the gate of police headquarters; he is going to repeat them when he is transferred to the criminal court in Prague; and with these words he will enter his prison cell.
When Svejk had heard all these dreadful conspiratorial tales he thought it right to explain to the others the utter hopelessness of their position.
'We're all of us in a nasty jam,' he began his words of comfort.
'You're not right when you say that nothing can happen to you or any of us.
What have we got the police for except to punish us for talking out of turn?
If the times are so dangerous that archdukes get shot, no one should be surprised if he's carried off to police headquarters.
They're doing all this to make a splash, so that Ferdinand can have some publicity before his funeral.
The more of us there are here, the better it'll be for us, because it'll be all the jollier.
When I was in the army half a company of us were sometimes locked up together.
And how many innocent people used to be condemned! And not only in the army but in the civil courts too.
I remember once a woman was sentenced for strangling her newly-born twins.
Although she swore on oath that she couldn't have strangled twins, when she'd given birth to only one little girl, which she had succeeded in strangling quite painlessly, she was sentenced for double murder all the same.
Or that innocent gipsy in Zabehlice, who broke into a greengrocer's shop on Christmas Day in the night. He swore that he'd gone there to get warm, but it didn't help.
Once it gets into the hands of the courts it's bad.
But that bad has to be.
Perhaps all people aren't such scoundrels as you'd think them to be.
But how can you tell the good chap from the ratter, especially nowadays at such a serious time as this when they've bumped off Ferdinand?
When I served in the army in Budejovice the captain's dog got shot in a forest behind the parade ground.
When he learnt about it he summoned us all, made us fall in and ordered every tenth man to step forward.
Of course it goes without saying that I was one of the tenth men.
And so we stood at attention without batting an eyelid.
The captain went along our ranks and said:
"You bastards, you, you swine, you, you brutes, you spotted hyenas, you, because of that dog I'd like to send every bloody one of you into solitary confinement, make macaroni out of you, shoot you up and make kedgeree out of you.
And to show you I'm not going to be soft with you I'm giving all of you fourteen days c.b."
And so there you see. Then it was all because of a mangy cur and now it's all because of no less a person than His Imperial Highness.
You have to have some horror, to make the mourning worth while.'
'I'm innocent, I'm innocent,' repeated the man with his hair on end.
'Jesus Christ was innocent too,' said .Svejk, 'and all the same they crucified him.
No one anywhere has ever worried about a man being innocent.
Maul halten tmd weiter dienen!1-as they used to tell us in the army.
That's the best and finest thing of all.'
Svejk lay down on the bunk and fell asleep contentedly.
Meanwhile they brought in two new detainees.
One of them was a Bosnian.
He walked up and down the cell grinding his teeth and every time he opened his mouth said: 'Jebe ti dusu.'
He was tortured by the thought that his pedlar's basket would get lost at police headquarters.