The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hašek

he'd smash my jaw from ear to ear and keep me in clink till all was blue. Then the M.O. comes up and he shakes his fist right under my nose and shouts: 'You misbegotten whelp ; you scabby ape ; you wretched blob of scum ; you skunk of a Socialist, you !' Well, I looks 'em straight in the face, without moving an eyelid, and there I stood keeping my mouth shut and with one hand at the salute and the other along the seam of my trousers. There they was, running round and yelping at me like a couple of puppies, and I just kept standing there and saying nothing. I keeps my mouth shut, salutes and holds my left hand along the seam of my trousers. When they'd been carrying on like that for about half an hour, the Colonel dashes up to me and yells : 'Are you an idiot or ain't you?' 'Beg to report, sir,' I says, 'that I'm an idiot.' Well, after a lot of rushing about the Colonel decides to give me twenty-one days' solitary confinement
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    for being an idiot, two days per week without any grub, a month's C.B., forty-eight hours in irons. 'Lock him up on the spot,' he says. 'Don't give him anything to eat; tie him hand and foot; show him the army doesn't need any idiots. We'll knock the newspaper nonsense out of your head, you ruffian,' he says. Well, while I was serving my time, there was some rum goings-on in the barracks. Our colonel stopped the troops from reading at all, and in the canteen they wasn't allowed even to wrap up sausages or cheese in newspapers. That made the soldiers start reading and our regiment had all the rest beat when it came to showing how much they'd learned. We used to read all the papers and in every company there were chaps who made up verses and songs guying the Colonel. And whenever anything happened in the regiment there was always some smart chap among the rank and file who wrote a bit about it to the papers and called it 'Soldiers Tortured.' And that wasn't enough for them, mind you. Why, they used to write to our M. P.'s at Vienna asking them to take their part, and so they began to ask questions in Parliament, one after another, all about our colonel being a brute and that sort of stuff. Some minister or other sent a commission to look into it, and in the end a chap named Franta Henclu got two years, because he was the one who had complained to the M. P.'s in Vienna about a smack in the eye that he got from the Colonel on the parade-ground. Afterward, when the commission had cleared off, the Colonel had us all drawn up, the whole blessed regiment, and he says, a soldier's a soldier and he's got to hold his tongue and do his duty, and if there's anything he doesn't like, then it's infringement of subordination. 'You gang of ruffians,' he says, 'you thought the commission was going to help you. Well, it helped you damn well,' he says. And now you'll march past me company by company and repeat aloud what I've just said.' So away we went, one company after another, eyes right, with our hands on our rifle-straps and yelled at the Colonel : 'You gang of ruffians ; you thought the commission was going to help you. Well, it helped you damn well.' The Colonel was laughing fit to bust, till the eleventh company marches past. Up they came, stamping their feet, but when they got alongside the Colonel they never said a word. The Colonel turns as red as a beetroot and sends the elev-
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    enth company back to do it all over again. They march past and keep their mouths shut, but each file as it came up just stares at the Colonel as bold as brass. 'Ruht !' 1 says the Colonel and walks across the barrack square, cracking his whip across his top-boots. Then he spits and suddenly comes to a standstill and yells 'Abtreten!' 2 mounts his old nag and was outside the gate like a shot. We was waiting for the eleventh company to cop out, but nothing happened. We waited one day, two days, a whole week, and still nothing happened. There was no sign of the Colonel in the barracks, and everybody—men, N. C. O.'s and officers