Josef Svejk, officer's orderly to Lieutenant Luka?. 'Finished ? '
'Humbly report, sir, the date is missing.'
'zoDecember 1914.
Now write the envelope, take these four hundred crowns, carry them to the post office and send them to that address.'
And Lieutenant Lukas began happily to whistle an aria from the operetta The Divorced Lady.
'One thing· more, Svejk,' he called out when Svejk was going to the post office.
'What about that dog which you went to look for?'
'I've got my hands on one, sir, a jolly pretty animal, but it'll be difficult to get it.
Tomorrow I hope that I'll be able to bring it after all.
It bites.' VI
Lieutenant Lukas had not heard the last word, though it was so important.
'The beast bit for all it's worth,' Svejk had wanted to repeat, but in the end he thought: 'What business is it of the lieutenant's?
He wants a dog, and he'll get one!'
It's of course an easy thing to say: ' Get me a dog!'
Dog-owners are very careful about their dogs even if they are not thoroughbreds.
And a mongrel whose only function in life is to warm the feet of an old woman is adored by its owner and no one is allowed to hurt a hair of its head.
But the dog, especially if it is a thoroughbred, must feel instinctively that one fine day it will be purloined from its master.
It lives in continual fear that it will and must be stolen.
For instance, when a dog is out for a walk it goes away from its master for a moment. At first it's happy and skittish. It plays with other dogs and climbs on their backs for immoral purposes and they climb on his. It smells the kerbstones, lifts its leg at every corner and even over the greengrocer woman's basket of potatoes: in short it has suchjoie de vivre and the world seems just as wonderful to it as it does to a young man when he has passed his school-leaving examination.
But suddenly you notice that its gaiety vanishes and it feels that it's got lost.
And now it is assailed for the first time by real despair.
It runs in a panic about the streets, sniffs, whines and drags its tail between its legs in utter hopelessness. It puts its ears back and rushes along in the middle of the street no one knows where.
If it could speak it would cry:
'Jesus Mary, someone's going to steal me!'
Have you ever been in a kennel and seen dogs which are panicky?
They've all been stolen.
The large city has evolved a special class of thief who lives exclusively on the theft of dogs.
There exist tiny breeds of drawing-room dogs, tiny miniature pinschers which fit like a very small glove into the pocket of an overcoat or a lady's muff.
And they even get pulled out from there, poor things.
The savage German spotted mastiff gets kidnapped at night while it is ferociously guarding a villa in the suburbs.
The police dog is whisked off under the detective's nose.
You take a dog out on a lead, someone cuts the lead in two, the dog's gone and you are left looking idiotically at an empty strap.
Fifty per cent of the dogs which you meet in the streets have changed their masters several times, and very often after years you may buy back your own dog which someone had stolen from you as a puppy once when you took it for a walk.
The danger of being stolen is worst when dogs are led out to perform their small and large bodily needs.
It is just when they are engaged in doing the latter that most of them get lost.
That is why every dog, when it is so occupied, looks cautiously around itself.
There are various modes of operation resorted to by dog-thieves.
They steal dogs either directly in pickpocket fashion or by cunningly enticing the unfortunate creature.
It is only in a school reader or natural history primer that a dog is a faithful animal.
Once allow even the most faithful of dogs to smell a fried horsemeat sausage and it's lost.
It forgets its master by whose side it is walking, turns round and follows you with its mouth watering, and in anticipation of the great joy over the sausage it wags its tail in a very friendly way and distends its nostrils like the wildest stallion when it is being led off to the mare.
In Mala Strana near the Castle Steps there is a small pub.
Two men were sitting there one day in the back in the dusk. One was a soldier and the other a civilian.
Leaning forward to each other they whispered mysteriously.
They looked like conspirators from the days of the Venetian Republic.
'Every day at eight o'clock,' the civilian whispered, 'the maid takes it out to the corner ofHavlfcek Square on the way to the park.
But it's a real brute and bites for all it's worth.
You can't stroke it.'
And leaning closer to the soldier he whispered in his ear:
'It doesn't even touch sausage.'