The Good Soldier Svejk Read Online Free PDF Page B

enough," said the chairman of the commission. "You can take this prisoner back to where he came from."
    "Thank you, gentlemen," said Schweik respectfully, "it's quite enough for me, too."
    After his departure the three experts agreed that Schweik was an obvious imbecile in accordance with all the natural laws discovered by mental specialists.
    The report submitted to the examining judge contained, among other remarks, the following passage :
    The undersigned medical authorities base themselves upon the complete mental deficiency and congenital cretinism of Josef Schweik who was brought before the above-mentioned commission and who expressed himself in terms such as "Long Live our Emperor Franz Josef the First," a remark which completely suffices to demonstrate Josef Schweik's state of mind as an obvious imbecile. The undersigned commission therefore makes the following recom-
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    mendations: I. The proceedings against Josef Schweik should be suspended. 2. Josef Schweik should be removed to a mental clinic for observation purposes and to ascertain how far his mental state is dangerous to his surroundings.
    While this report was being drawn up, Schweik was explaining to his fellow-prisoners: "They didn't worry about Ferdinand. All they did was to crack some jokes with me about radium and the Pacific Ocean. In the end we decided that what we'd talked to each other about was quite enough, and then we said good-bye."
    "I trust nobody," remarked the little misshapen man on whose field they had dug up a skeleton. "They're all a pack of shysters."
    "If you ask me, it's just as well they are," said Schweik, lying down on the straw mattress. "If all people wanted to do all the others a good turn, they'd be walloping each other in a brace of shakes."
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    4.
    Schweik Is Ejected from the Lunatic Asylum.
    When Schweik later on described life in the lunatic asylum, he did so in terms of exceptional eulogy : "I'm blowed if I can make out why lunatics kick up such a fuss about being kept there. They can crawl about stark naked on the floor, or caterwaul like jackals, or rave and bite. If you was to do anything like that in the open street, it'd make people stare, but in the asylum it's just taken as a matter of course. Why, the amount of liberty there is something that even the socialists have never dreamed of. The inmates can pass themselves off as God Almighty or the Virgin Mary or the Pope or the King of England or our Em-
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    peror or St. Vaclav, although the one who did him was properly stripped and tied up in solitary confinement. There was a chap there who kept thinking that he was an archbishop, but he did nothing but guzzle. And then there was another who said he was St. Cyril and St. Methodus, just so that he could get double helpings of grub. One fellow was in the family way and invited everyone to the christening. There were lots of chess players, politicians, fishermen and scouts, stamp collectors and photographers and painters there. They used to keep one man always in a strait-waistcoat, to stop him from calculating when the end of the world was coming. Everybody can say what he likes there, the first thing that comes into his head, just like in parliament. The noisiest of the lot was a chap who said he was the sixteenth volume of the encyclopaedia and asked everybody to open him and find an article on sewing machines or else he'd be done for. He wouldn't shut up until they shoved him into a strait-waistcoat. I tell you, the life there was a fair treat. You can bawl, or yelp, or sing, or blub, or moo, or boo, or jump, say your prayers or turn somersaults, or walk on all fours, or hop about on one foot, or run round in a circle, or dance, or skip, or squat on your haunches all day long, and climb up the walls. Nobody comes up to you and says : 'You mustn't do this, you mustn't do that, you ought to be ashamed of yourself, call yourself civilized?' I liked being in the asylum, I can tell you, and while I was there I had the