The Good Soldier Svejk (53 page)

The first telegram had to be delivered, in spite of the surprising message it contained. It was addressed
au clair
to the draft of the 91st regiment, with a copy for the draft of the 75th regiment, which was still further behind them. The signature was in order : Ritter von Herbert.

"This is a very confidential matter, sir," said the transport officer mysteriously. "A secret telegram from your division. Your brigade commander's gone mad. They took him off to Vienna after he'd been sending out dozens of telegrams like that from the brigade all over the place. You're pretty certain to find another telegram when you get to Budapest. Of course, all his telegrams'll have to be cancelled, although we haven't received any instructions on that point yet."

Captain Sagner began to feel very uncomfortable.

"When does the train leave?" he asked.

The railway transport officer looked at his watch.

"In six minutes," he replied.

"Very well, then. I must be off," said Captain Sagner.

He returned to the staff carriage, where all the officers, except Cadet Biegler, were playing cards. Cadet Biegler was rummaging among a pile of manuscripts which he had started, all dealing with various aspects of the war. For he had ambitions to distinguish himself, not only on the battle field, but also as a literary wizard. His literary efforts had promising titles, but he had got no further with them. They included the following :

Character of the Troops in the Great War; Who Began the War?; The Policy of Austria-Hungary and the Birth of the Great War; Observations on War; Popular Lecture on the Outbreak of the Great War; Reflections on Politics and War; Austria-Hungary's Day of Glory; Slavonic Imperialism and the Great War; War Documents; Documents Bearing on the History of the Great War; Diary of the Great War; Daily Survey of the Great War; Our Dynasty in the Great War; The Nations of the Austro- Hungarian Monarchy in Arms; My Experiences in the Great War; Chronicle of My War Campaign; How Austria-Hungary's Enemies Wage War; Whose Is the Victory?; Our Officers and Our Men; Noteworthy Deeds of My Soldiers; Prom the Epoch of the Great War; On the Battle Tumult; Book of Austro-Hungarian Heroes; The Iron Brigade; Collection of My Letters from the Front; Handbook for Troops in the Field; Days of Struggle and Days of Victory; What I Saw and Experienced in the Field; In the Trenches; The Officer Tells His Story; Enemy Aeroplanes and Our Infantry; After the Battle; Our Artillery, Faithful Sons of Our Country; And Even Though All Demons Ranged Themselves Against Us; War, Defensive and Offensive; Blood and Iron; Victory or Death; Our Heroes in Captivity.

Captain Sagner inspected all these things, and asked Cadet Biegler what he thought he was up to. Cadet Biegler replied with genuine gusto that each of these titles denoted a book which he was going to write. So many titles, so many books.

"If I should get killed at the front, sir," he said, "I should like to leave some sort of memorial behind me. In this I am inspired by the example of the German professor, Udo Kraft. He was born in 1870, but volunteered for the army and was killed on August 22, 1914, at Anley. Before his death he published a book called
How to Die for the Kaiser! A Course of Self-training."

Captain Sagner led Cadet Biegler to the window.

"Let's see what else you've got. Your doings interest me enormously," he said with a touch of irony. "What's that notebook you're hiding under your tunic?"

"That's nothing," replied Cadet Biegler, blushing like a girl. "You can see for yourself, sir."

The notebook bore the following label :

CONSPECTUS OF GREAT AND FAMOUS BATTLES

Fought by the Austro-Hungarian Army.

Compiled from Historical Records by Adolf Biegler,

Officer in the Imperial Royal Army. With Notes and Comments.

By adolph biegler, Officer in the Imperial Royal Army.

The conspectus was extremely simple.

From the Battle of Nôrdlingen on September 6, 1634, by way of the Battles of Zenta on September 11, 1697, Caldiera on October 31, 1805, Aspern on May 22, 1809, Leipzig in 1813, Santa Lucia in May, 1848, Trantenau on June 27, 1866, to the capture of Sarajevo on August 19, 1878. The diagrams of these battles were all alike. In each case Cadet Biegler had drawn plain rectangles on one side to represent Austro-Hungarian troops and dotted rectangles to represent the enemy. Both sides had a left wing, a centre and a right wing. Then at the back there were reserves, while arrows darted to and fro. The Battle of Nôrdlingen, just like the capture of Sarajevo, looked like the arrangement of the players at the start of a football match and the arrows showed which way each side was to kick the ball. This idea immediately occurred to Captain Sagner, and he asked :

"Do you play football?"

Cadet Biegler blushed still more and blinked nervously, so that it looked as if he were trying to keep back his tears.

Captain Sagner, with a smile, continued to peruse the notebook and paused at the comment on the diagram representing the Battle of Trantenau during the war between Prussia and Austria. Cadet Biegler had written:

The battle of Trantenau ought not to have been fought, because the mountainous character of the terrain made it impossible for General Mazzucheli to extend the division menaced by the strong Prussian columns on the elevated areas surrounding the left wing of our division.

"According to you," said Captain Sagner, with a smile, returning the notebook to Cadet Biegler, "the battle of Trantenau could only have been fought if Trantenau were in a plain. It's very nice of you, Cadet Biegler, to try and get a grip of military strategy when you've been so short a time in the army. You remind me of a lot of kids playing at soldiers and calling each other General. Really, it's a real treat to see the way you've given yourself such rapid promotion. 'Adolf Biegler, Officer in the Imperial Royal Army' ! Why, at that rate, you'll be a field-marshal by the time we get to Budapest. The day before yesterday you were at home weighing cow hides in your father's shop. And now you're Adolf Biegler, Lieutenant in the Imperial Royal Army. Why, man alive, you're not an officer yet. You're a cadet. You're just floating in the air between the ranks of ensign and the N. C. O.'s. You're about as much entitled to call yourself an officer as a lance-corporal sitting in a pub would be to let people call him a staff sergeant-major."

Cadet Biegler, seeing that the conversation was at an end, saluted and, very red in the face, passed through the carriage to the corridor at the very end. He entered the lavatory, where he began to sob quietly. Later, he wiped his eyes and stalked out into the corridor, telling himself that he must be strong, damned stroną. But he had a headache and he felt altogether out of sorts.

He passed through the last compartment when Matushitch, battalion orderly, was playing "sixty-six" with Batzer, orderly of the battalion commander.

He coughed as he went by. They turned round and went on playing.

"Don't you know what you ought to do?" asked Cadet Biegler sternly.

"Couldn't manage it," replied Batzer in the terrible dialect of German, as spoken on the frontiers of Bavaria and Bohemia. "Hadn't got any trumps left.

"I ought to have played clubs," he continued, "high clubs, and then come out with the king of diamonds. That's what I ought to have done."

Cadet Biegler said no more, but lay down in his corner. When,

later on, Ensign Pleschner came to give him a drink from a bottle of brandy, he was surprised to find Cadet Biegler engrossed in Professor Urdo Kraft's volume,
How to Die for the Kaiser! A Course of Self-training.

Before they reached Budapest, Cadet Biegler was so tipsy that he leaned out of the carriage window and kept shouting to the deserted landscape :

"Get a move on! For God's sake, get a move!"

Later, at Captain Sagner's orders, Matushitch and Batzer laid Cadet Biegler to rest on a seat, where he dreamed that he had the iron cross with bars, that he'd been mentioned in dispatches, and that he was a major who was proceeding to inspect a brigade. It puzzled him why it was that though he was in charge of a whole brigade, he was still major. He suspected that he ought to have been appointed major-general, and that the "general" had somehow got lost in the post. Then he was in a motor car which, as the result of an explosion, reached the gates of heaven, for which the password was "God and Kaiser." He was admitted to the presence of God, who turned out to be none other than Captain Sagner who was accusing him of masquerading as a major-general. Then he floundered into a new dream. He was defending Linz during the War of the Austrian Succession. There were redoubts and palisades and Lieutenant Lukash dying at his feet. Lieutenant Lukash was saying something very pathetic and complimentary to him when he felt a bullet strike him so that he could no longer sit on his horse. He fell through space and landed on the floor of the railway carriage.

Batzer and Matushitch lifted him up and put him back on his seat. Then Matushitch went to Captain Sagner and reported that strange things had been happening to Cadet Biegler.

"I don't think it's the brandy that's upset him," he said. "It's more likely to be cholera. He's been drinking water at all the railway stations. I saw him at Mozony -"

"Cholera doesn't come on as quickly as all that. Go and ask the doctor to have a look at him."

The doctor who was attached to the battalion was a "war doctor" named Welfer. He had studied medicine at various universities of Austria-Hungary, and had walked all kinds of hos-

pitals, but he had never taken his degree for the simple reason that there was a clause in his uncle's will by which a fixed annual amount was to be paid by the remaining heirs to Friedrich Welfer, medical student, until the said Friedrich Welfer received his doctor's diploma. As the fixed annual amount was about four times greater than the pay of a house physician, Friedrich Welfer, medical student, exerted himself honestly to stave off, to as remote a period as possible, the award of a medical diploma.

But when the war broke out, it dealt Friedrich Welfer a treacherous blow from behind. He was taken by the scruff of his neck and shoved into the army, whereupon one of the heirs, who was in the War Office, arranged for the worthy Friedrich Welfer to be awarded a war-doctor's degree. This was done in writing. He received a number of questions to answer, and he answered them all with the stereotyped formula "rats." Three days later he was informed that he had been awarded a doctor's diploma. He was detailed to a military hospital, and with a bad grace he went. After a while it was discovered that he treated military patients with extreme indulgence, keeping them in hospital as long as possible. His principle was : "What's it matter if they stay in hospital or get killed in the trenches? May as well let 'em die in hospital as in the fighting line."

It was then that Dr. Welfer was sent off with the nth draft to the front.

Captain Sagner, of course, felt vastly superior to this ex-medical student, and when Dr. Welfer came back from his examination of Cadet Biegler, he did not even condescend to notice him, but continued his conversation with Lieutenant Lukash on the subject of water melons. Dr. Welfer, however, came up and said with a smile :

"There's nothing wrong with him. Young gentlemen who aspire in the course of time to become army officers and who brag of their expert knowledge of strategy really ought to be told that it's dangerous to eat up at a sitting a whole parcel of lollipops which their mama has sent them. Cadet Biegler, so he informed me, has managed to put away thirty cream puffs since we left Bruck. It reminds me of that verse in Schiller:
'Who saith tha -' "

"Look here, Doctor," Captain Sagner interrupted him. "Schiller be blowed. What's up with Cadet Biegler?"

Dr. Welfer again smiled.

"Cadet Biegler, your aspirant for military rank, has had a slight bodily mishap. It isn't cholera and it isn't dysentery. What with his thirty cream puffs and rather more brandy than he's used to—well, as I say, a slight bodily mishap."

"So it's nothing serious, then?" asked Captain Sagner. "All the same. If the news of it were to get about . . ."

Lieutenant Lukash stood up and said to Captain Sagner :

"A damned fine platoon commander for you. I wouldn't take him as a gift."

"I pulled him round a bit," continued Dr. Welfer, with the same irritating smile. "The battalion commander will do the rest. I'm going to have him sent to hospital. I'll issue a certificate that he's got dysentery. A severe case of dysentery. Isolation. Cadet Biegler will be taken to the disinfection hut."

Captain Sagner turned to his friend Lieutenant Lukash and said in a strictly official voice :

"Cadet Biegler of your company has been taken ill with dysentery and will remain at Budapest for treatment."

And thus it came about that the dauntless Cadet Biegler was conveyed to the military isolation hospital at Uj Buda.

His trousers got lost amid the alarums and excursions of the World War.