The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, Book Two

Švejk remained alone sitting at the table, and while he was quietly drinking up the fiver from the high-minded benefactor, the people at the platform who weren’t present during Švejk’s conversation with the station master and only saw a crowd of people from a distance were passing along to one another that they caught some spy who was taking pictures of the railway station, which claim was being controverted by one lady insisting that he was no spy, but that she’d heard that one dragoon cut up an officer with a saber by the ladies’ bathroom because the officer was creeping in there after his girl-friend who was seeing off the dragoon.
     These adventurous flights of speculative imagination, which were characteristic of the wartime raw nerves, were brought to an abrupt end by the policemen who were sweeping the platform clear. And Švejk kept on drinking quietly, remembering and thinking tenderly of his Senior Lieutenant. What is it, one wonders, that he is going to do when he arrives at Ceské Budejovice and going through the whole train finds his servant nowhere?
     Before the arrival of the regularly-scheduled train the third-class restaurant filled with both soldiers and civilians. Mostly there were soldiers from various regiments, formations, and of the most varied nationalities whom the windstorm of the war had blown into the field hospitals, and who were now departing again into the field for new injuries, maiming, pain, and who were taking off to earn a simple wooden cross for above their graves on which there would still years later in the sad plains of eastern Galicia in the wind and the rain flail a sun-bleached Austrian military cap with a rusted “Frankie” pin on it, upon which from time to time would perch a sad raven, grown old and tired, remembering the fat-filled feast of years ago when there used to be set for him an endless table of tasty human corpses and horse carcasses, when just under such a cap that he’s sitting on, there would be a bite of the most tasty morsel — human eyes.
     One of those candidates for suffering, who was released from the military hospital after surgery and was dressed in a messy uniform with traces of blood and mud, took a seat next to Švejk. He was sort of stunted, emaciated, sad. He laid a small package on the table, pulled out a broken coin-purse and was recounting his money.
     Then he looked at Švejk and asked: “Magyarul?”
     “Me, pal, I’m a Czech,” answered Švejk, “wanna have a drink?”
     “Nem tudom, barátom.”
     “That doesn’t matter, buddy,” Švejk goaded him putting his full stein in front of the sad soldier, “just take a proper draft.”
     He got the message, had a drink, thanked: “Köszönöm szivesen,” and kept on examining the contents of his coin-purse, and in the end he gave a sigh.
     Švejk realized that the Hungarian would like to have a beer and that he didn’t have enough money, therefore he ordered one beer to be brought for him, after which the Hungarian thanked him again and started telling Švejk something with the help of gestures, showing him his arm with a hole shot through it while he spoke up in the international language: “Pif, paf, poots, bing, bang, boom.”
     Švejk was nodding in sympathy and the stunted convalescent passed additional information onto Švejk by lowering his left arm with the hand a foot or two above the floor and then raising three fingers, signifying that he had three small children.
     “Nincs ham, nincs ham,” he continued, wanting to say that they had nothing to eat at home, and with the dirty sleeve of his military overcoat, in which could be seen the hole made by a bullet that flew into his body for the Hungarian king, he dried his eyes from which had sprung up tears.
     Given such entertainment it was nothing queer then that Švejk had almost nothing left of that fiver and slowly, but surely was cutting himself off from Ceské Budejovice, and with each stein, to which he was treating himself and the Hungarian convalescent, he was losing the ability to purchase a military fare-card.