Free The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hašek Page B

and clench his fists, make his eyes start out of his head till they looked as if they was on the ends of wires, and he could kick and put out his tongue—well, I tell you, it was a first-rate epileptic fit, the real thing. Suddenly he got boils, two on his neck and two on his back, and he had to stop twisting himself and knocking his head on the floor, because he couldn't move his head
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    or sit down or even lie down. Then he got fever and that made him light-headed, and he gave the game away while the doctor was there. And he gave us a dickens of a time with his boils, because he had to stop among us with them for another three days on diet number 2 : coffee and roll in the morning, gruel or soup in the evening. And we with our stomachs pumped out and starving on diet number nought had to look on while this chap gobbled up his grub, smacked his lips, fairly puffing and belching through being so chockful of food. He dished three others through that, and they owned up too. They was trying their luck with a weak heart."
    "The best thing to do," said one of the malingerers, "is to sham madness. In the next room there are two other men from the school where I teach and one of them keeps shouting day and night : 'Giordano Bruno's stake is still smouldering ; renew Galileo's trial !' and the other one yelps, first three times, slowly : 'Bow, wow, wow,' and then five times in quick succession : 'Bowwow-wowwowow,' and then slowly again and so on without stopping. They've kept it up for more than three weeks. I meant at first to act the fool too and be a religious maniac and preach about the infallibility of the Pope, but finally I managed to get some cancer of the stomach for fifteen crowns from a barber down the road."
    "I know a chimney sweep," remarked another patient, "who'll get you such a fever for twenty crowns that you'll jump out of the window."
    "That's nothing," said another man. "Down our way there's a midwife who for twenty crowns can dislocate your foot so nicely that you're crippled for the rest of your life."
    "I got my foot dislocated for five crowns," announced a voice from the row of beds by the window, "for five crowns and three drinks."
    "My illness has run me into more than two hundred crowns already," announced his neighbour, a man as thin as a rake. "I bet there's no poison you can mention that I haven't taken. I'm simply bung full of poisons. I've chewed arsenic, I've smoked opium, I've swallowed strychnine, I've drunk vitriol mixed with phosphorus. I've ruined my liver, my lungs, my kidneys, my heart
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    —in fact, all my inside outfit. Nobody knows what disease it is I've got."
    "The best thing to do," explained someone near the door, "is to squirt paraffin oil under the skin on your arms. My cousin had a slice of good luck that way. They cut off his arm below the elbow and now the army'll never worry him any more."
    "Well," said Schweik, "you see what you've all got to go through for the Emperor. Even having your stomachs pumped out. When I was in the army years ago, it used to be much worse. If a man went sick, they just trussed him up, shoved him into a cell to make him get fitter. There wasn't any beds and mattresses and spittoons like what there is here. Just a bare bench for them to lie on. Once there was a chap who had typhus, fair and square, and the one next to him had smallpox. Well, they trussed them both up and the M. O. kicked them in the ribs and said they were shamming. When the pair of them kicked the bucket, there was a dust-up in Parliament and it got into the papers. Like a shot they stopped us from reading the papers and all our boxes was inspected to see if we'd got any hidden there. And it was just my luck that in the whole blessed regiment there was nobody but me whose newspaper was spotted. So I was had up in the orderly room and our colonel, silly old buffer, God rest his soul, starts yelling at me to stand to attention and tell him who'd written that stuff to the paper or