The Good Soldier Svejk

Written by Jaroslav Hašek

Narrated by David Horovitch

Jaroslav Hašek’s world-famous satirical farce The Good Soldier Švejk has been translated into over sixty languages, and is one of the best-known Czech works ever published. A soldier in the First World War who never actually sees any combat, Josef Švejk is The Good Soldier’s awkward protagonist – and none of the other characters can quite decide whether his bumbling efforts to get to the front are genuine or not. Often portrayed as one of the first anti-war novels, Hašek’s classic satire is a tour-de-force of modernist writing, influencing later writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner, and Joseph Heller.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naxos Audiobooks
• Release date: Jul 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9789629547837

Jaroslav Hašek

Jaroslav Hašek (1883-1923) war ein tschechischer Schriftsteller und Satiriker. Mit seinem Schwejk schuf er einen der bekanntesten Figuren der Literaturgeschichte. Hasek war ein scharfzüngiger Redakteur, Satiriker und Herausgeber. Er arbeitete für verschiedene Prager Zeitungen. Leider verstarb er mit knapp 40 Jahren viel zu früh an den Folgen seines Alkoholkonsums.

Reviews for The Good Soldier Svejk

[Glenn Killey · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I loved this novel. Imagine a funny Kafka. It will have you smiling throughout

[Noel Parker · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A lot of fun is had at the expense of the many absurdities of military life. Resembles Joseph Heller’s Catch 22, even though that’s set 60 years later. Plus ça change...

[Chuck Hoey · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Loved it. Definitely the inspirational collective IQ for Catch 22. Svjek is an ingenious imbecile. A what? An ingenious imbecile. Read the book to see what I mean.
Not everyone will like this dark humor and cast of characters with a collective IQ of zero. The silliness reminds me of a good Montt Python skit. I also wonder if this book inspired Terry Pratchett.
Sadly, at the heart of any satire is some truth. The Czechs and Slovaks were part of Austria Hungary but many were more inclined to fight with Russia against Austria and Hungary to further their campaign for independence. A sizable number of Czechs did desert to fight for Russia. Many other Czechs and Slovaks did not see why this fight should include them.
The mixture of outright rebellion, indifference, cultural and linguistic barriers, along the pervasive incompetence and lack of preparation, made fertile ground for satire. The truth that these problems and incompetence led to millions of deaths made me laugh to keep from crying.
A wonderful book overall which has obviously influenced many other writers.

[danhammang · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I first heard of this book in a lecture series on the history of Eastern Europe. The professor mentioned that it was a source of inspiration for Joseph Heller's Catch 22. From the excerpts of The Good Soldier that I read I would say that the humor is mined from the same vein. The long intro gives quite a bit of detail about Jaroslav Hašek's biography. His anarchism, in full bloom in the novel, also got him into trouble in real life with the authorities. Sad to say, I suspect similar antics would get him into hotter water in today's post 9/11 world. The plot follows Švejk through his wandering path along the Eastern Front of WWI. There were movies made and Švejk seems to live in the heart of Czechoslovakians in a way similar to say, Charlie Chaplin figures in the early days of American filmdom. It is worth reading to get a feel for that time and place. It is a commitment, though, coming in at just under 800 pages.

[ngmcd_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Patience is required for this book. I found myself at times fully enjoying one of Svejk's ramblinf stories, other times I was tempted to skip through them. As the introduction to the book says, hasek's narrative skills leave a lot to be desired but it is still an immensely enjoyable piece of work. Svejk is the man we can all identify with, sympathise with and root for.

[le.vert.galant · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It's long and occasionally tedious, but I was sorry when it abruptly ended.

[yarb_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Not quite as satisfying on a reread, but still one of the great 20th Century picaresques and a seminal war satire, passing the baton directly from Simplicissimus to the likes of Heller and Eastman. The characters are indelible: the terminally uptight Lt Dub, the apelike, arm-swinging glutton Baloun, the long-suffering but essentially noble Lt Lukáš, and of course Švejk himself with his inexhaustible fund of pointless anecdotes and reductio ad absurdums, a kind of super-moronic Sancho Panza (to Lukáš' Quixote?) whose response to the idiocy of endless war is to meet it on its own idiotic, interminable terms.

Hašek's disgust for the role of the Church in war is extremely palpable. Here he is describing some prayer-cards, penned by the Archbishop of Budapest and distributed to the men by a couple of well-meaning old ladies:

According to the venerable archbishop the merciful Lord ought to cut the Russians, British, Serbs, French and Japanese into mincemeat, and make a paprika goulash out of them. The merciful Lord ought to bathe in the blood of the enemies and murder them all, as the ruthless Herod had done with the Innocents.

His Eminence, the Archbishop of Budapest, used in his prayers such beautiful sentences as for instance: 'God bless your bayonets that they may pierce deeply into your enemies' bellies. May the most just Lord direct the artillery fire onto the heads of the enemy staffs. May merciful God grant that all your enemies choke in their own blood from the wounds which you will deal them!'

And although the plot, such as it is, never makes it to any actual combat (I wonder if it would have done had the author lived to complete it?), the horror of the front is never far away. Here's an anonymous character in a discussion on the prevalence of shit on the battlefield:

'And a dead man, who lay on top of the cover with his legs hanging down and half of whose head had been torn off by shrapnel, just as though he'd been cut in half, he too in the last moment shitted so much that it ran from his trousers over his boots into the trenches mixed with blood. And half his skull together with his brains lay right underneath. A chap doesn't even notice how it happens to him.'

Ultimately though, Švejk is a pre-postmodern work, the theatre of war meeting the theatre of the absurd. Exchanges like this, very near the end of the book, capture the spirit of it, I think:

Vaněk asked with interest:

'How long do you think the war will go on, Švejk?'

'Fifteen years,' answered Švejk. 'That's obvious because once there was a thirty years' war and now we're twice as clever as they were before.'

And at its heart, amid all the inanity, the tedium, the degradations, if you squint very hard, there's a kernel of something decent:

Lieutenant Lukáš walked along the track thinking: 'I ought to have given him a few on the jaw, but instead I've been gossiping with him as though he were a friend.'

[vdt_melbourne · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Couldn’t get into this. The side stories are to frequent and drove me crazy. Which may have well been the author’s point. But not for me

[markm2315 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Occasionally laugh out loud funny, but it is a long one gag story.

[ffortsa · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Well, we read this for one of our f2f book groups, and I got about 2/3 of the way through before my eyes glazed over and I found myself falling asleep and dreaming the end of each sentence. Classic though it might be, it wore out its welcome with me. Schwiek is a con-man and otherwise a cypher at the start of WWI in the Czech-speaking part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and the book is a series of escapes from a bureaucratic, idiotic and mismanaged army and surrounding society. No one actually gets into battle by the book's ending, but the cruelty and mismanagement the erstwhile hero keeps subverting is a sarcastic look at a rotting system. Glad I peeked at it, not sorry I didn't finish it.

[dinadansfriend · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Jaroslav Hasek is the Czech equivalent of Joseph Heller and Mark twain among Americans. Perhaps inadvertently he manages to convey the mental atmosphere of a time period through a collection of apparently humorous episodes. but as "If it not true they won't laugh" he also illuminates the world of Central Europe in a timeless fashion. If you want to step out of the English-speaking box, to join hands with another set of survivors who live a good deal closer to the risk of imminent destruction, this is the book. Warning, the book is incomplete, we don't know whether the author planned a happy ending for our hero, but, as it is central Europe i rather doubt it.

[areal · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A flawless satire. Without a doubt, a manifesto against war, against the military, against the laws and norms that put common sense on the firing line. Hasek created a masterpiece with the name of Svejk, and I have ended up in awe of this huge talent. (Translated from Spanish)

[stillatim · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A very amusing book, with rather diminishing rewards; there are only so many times you can make the joke about how the soldier ate the officer's food before it starts to get boring, and I more or less stopped paying attention to those jokes at the end of part two--which meant part three was more tedious than entertaining. Hasek didn't finish it, and that's probably a good thing. I fear the 1000 page monster which is still recycling jokes by page 989. It's also good because the point of the book as it stands seems to be that Svejk avoids ever actually, you know, fighting in the war, and if the book had ended, he would have had to i) fight, which would have ruined the effect, or ii) not fight, which would have led to still more endless jokes.

This review is getting as drawn out as the book, so: read this over a long period, long enough that you can respond to the repeated jokes the way people used to respond to repeated jokes in TV sitcoms. Hasek had an endless supply of stupid stories for Svejk to tell, which is the heart and joy of the book; he did not have an endless supply of stories for Svejk to act act, which means long stretches of this are static and uninteresting. Better, then, for dipping into than for concerted reading (which is, I regret, how I usually read).

And extra star for being the best-illustrated novel I have ever and probably will ever read, graphic novels included.

[delarayromero · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Wonderful book full of humor that highlights the bureaucracy and the senseless warmongering of the World War I era. Humble, helpful, and charmingly stupid, it will leave us with endearing adventures and misadventures infused with the cunning that comes from absolute poverty. (Translated from Spanish)

[Yubiwa70 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If you get past the first few pages, you will regret its premature end; these brilliant adventures should never come to an end, I could spend months reading them without getting tired. At least he left us 4 of the 6 planned parts. (Translated from Spanish)

[ximoalbanchez · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Good book, well written, but it got a bit heavy for me towards the end. However, it is interesting to read. (Translated from Spanish)

[eldang-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book is in 4 volumes, and really my rating is 5 stars for volume 1, 1 star for volume 2, and I didn't even start reading volumes 3 and 4. The first volume would make a lovely (and already fairly long) stand-alone novel, in which Hašek uses Svejk as a sort of universal "wise fool" character to show up the stupidity of everyone else around him, imperialism, reverence for royalty, patriotism and war. It's lightly written, but often quite cutting, and for a few hundred pages it's a delightful read. The trouble is, by the end of volume 1 it's already starting to get repetitive, so volume 2 became a real slog, and ultimately I lost patience with Svejk's monologues and gave up.

[madepercy-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is quite a tome. It is really four books in one or three and a half, as the author expired before the final book was completed. This is my first reading of a Czech author. I understand that the Austro-Hungarian Empire was held back by the Russians and later the Italians, otherwise the Anglo-French and their allies may have been in some mighty trouble during the Great War. Švejk puts an interesting spin on the peoples and cultures of this part of the conflict and, as an ex-soldier, I couldn't help but chuckle at the timeless idiocies of the military life, and Švejk's nonchalant way of handling such banal annoyances as "greatcoats on, greatcoats off", making "lists of lists", and nonsensical statistics about serving soldiers. While the work is part comedy, it is also satirical. In my mind's eye the comical events were reinforced by the cartoon drawings of Švejk and his antics. These cartoon characters tended to dance in front of real war footage, so a Laurel and Hardy figure had me laughing with embarrassment while at the same time I felt like I shouldn't be laughing. The effect is brilliant. There are so many stories within stories, and Švejk reminds me of the many characters I crossed paths with during my time in the army. One constantly came to mind as I read The Good Soldier Švejk: a soldier who could recite word for word any Monty Python movie ever made. At times, you had to tell him to just shut up, but it was hard to dislike him. Švejk is this same person. Tragic comedy is how I would describe this work. Brilliant.

[amerynth · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

It was hard to pick a rating for Jaroslav Hasek's novel "The Good Soldier Svejk." I liked the concept of the book much more than its actual execution -- it quickly got too repetitive and even the amusing bits didn't really sing anymore.

The book follows Svejk, who is either an idiot or very good at playing one -- as he becomes a Czech soldier during World War I. There are about a zillion different Svejk antics in the book, that mostly end up the same way-- he nearly gets, jailed, committed or executed but someone believes he is just too dumb for words and therefore he is saved. Onto the next antic...

Hasek's point about the futility of war is amply illustrated and there is a good bit of humor in the story. Had it been given a good edit for length and content, I probably would have enjoyed it more.

[leslie398 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This WW1 classic Czech novel reminded me of Catch-22 or M.A.S.H. -- black humor about the way armies work. I much prefered this older translation to that of Sadlon's new one I started off with in Book 1 and also enjoyed Lada's illustrations this book had.

[seeword · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The absurdities of the military during wartime. A thoroughly satisfying read. The book that inspired Joseph Heller's Catch-22
Library Book

[kristelh_15 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This is the story of Švejk, a Czeck soldier who tells of the glorious war (WWI). It is a biting satire/anti war book. While it is funny and satirical it also portrays the ugliness of war.

Opinion: While I liked this story, it was too long and I struggled to stay engaged. I wonder if I wouldn’t have enjoyed it more if I had read it on something else than the i pad. I think it would have been a great audio. I think I would have laughed a lot and people would have stared at me. It was just way too long and the author died before he completed it.
Švejk as an anti hero reminded me a little of A Confederacy of Dunces.

[jldobias · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek.

Translated by Cecil Parrott.

This book was recommended by a friend of mine who come from Russia and had previously read a translation in Russian, which I can only guess might be closer to the native language. The recommendation came in part because my family originates from the same country as the author.

The Hard book volume I have contains the full volume in 4 parts and 800 pages that ends incomplete because of the authors death. Even though incomplete the work still stands well as it is and doesn't disappoint. It may well have inspired me to go on and read Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt 1725-1798 which also is incomplete for a number of reasons, although it's much much much longer when you find the entire set.

When I searched it out I found this volume translated by Cecil Parrott it promised to have the entire volume as written by Jaroslav Hasek up to his untimely death. Cecil Parrott's credentials seem quite impressive and I felt that the closest translation I might get, that I could read, might well be this one.

I believe Parrott does well in that the best recollections I can obtain from my friend as I read through seem to be as narrowly close to what he remembers. The reason for the need for a clear translation is that this is a darkly satirical work that pokes fun not so much at the first world war as it does at the political structure that brought it about and then goes on to poke at the intelligence structure of the military that seems at most times to bumble through the entire mess at the expense of the foot soldiers who seem to be considered of less value and worth to them than their counterparts in the enemies advancing columns.

Even so Cecil Parrott himself admits there are some parts that are difficult at best to translate that may often take the bite out of the humor. Much of this seems to be in the translation of many of the couched insults that are passed between the various languages that are showcased from the ethnic backgrounds of the surrounding theater of war. These are things that may not even travel that well between the original and the Russian translation and require extensive discussion to begin to get the feel of them.

What does translate through though is the irreverence for the church and clergy and perhaps this stands well as one of those works that best describes the disparity between piety in like religions on both side of a war. Religions that seem to collude in treating foot-soldiers as though they are the worst of heathens leading to the ridiculousness of trying to reconcile how they can believe they will win the war with gods help while employing heathens. Their reasoning only becomes clear as I understand that it's because the the true heathens are the ones giving the troops gods blessing.

There have been comparisons of this work to Joseph Heller's Catch 22 that I might differ with. I will admit that there seems to be some credibility to the claim that Joseph Heller was inspired by this book. Where The Good Soldier Svejk might be a dark satire of the first world war it does not seem to endeavor to shock as much as Heller's Catch 22. And I did not feel as close a touch with the culture and world of world war 2 in Catch 22 as I felt viewing the landscape of world war 1 in The Good Soldier Svejk.

I felt the satire of Catch 22 was more in line with contemporaries such as the film Dr. Strangelove in its darkness but less absurd than Dr. Strangelove. The satire of The Good Soldier Svejk is a different animal that though dark it seems more lighthearted than Catch 22 and though in many cases it showcases the ridiculous it is not quite as absurd as Dr. Strangelove. I can attribute that in part to the nature of the character Svejk.

Svejk is a simple man who is somehow complex while being considered an imbecile by those around him. What is the most interesting in his character is that as he goes through life he seems to just float around with tides of events that shape his life as though he has few cares in the world. But, it's the stories that he feels so free about telling that make this man understandable to me. He is full of analogues and honestly some of them I didn't quite always catch the point or at least how that point was supposed to be highlighting the subject matter that brought it on. In his forward Cecil Parrott does admit that while translating the book he felt that the authors narrative often digressed and that might be attributed to his heavy drinking while writing. If there is merit to that I would suggest that there might be a number of the analogues that grew out of that as much as they came from necessity of Svejk to make a point.

The one troublesome thing to me was that for some reason I felt the analogues belonged to Svejk and unfortunately there are a few other characters who were allowed to go off on a tangent now and then.

Svejk's story begins when he is in a public establishment expressing his view that the assassination of Ferdinand was going to lead to war- this declaration along with other too free speech leads to his arrest. Along with several others who are similarly awaiting conviction for crimes against the monarchy.

Eventually, and even though he physically is unsound, he's inducted into the army. This takes a circuitous route through the medical community of the times, whose job seems to be to uncover every fraudulent illness in all the shirkers at whatever means possible including various forms of torture.

Svejk doesn't seem at most times to care where he ends up in the system and he seems more interested in consoling himself with his own analogies. For this he is considered an idiot and an imbecile. But, clearly all of the people around him seem to be comedic caricatures that might mirror some of the people that Hasek has run across in his own life. Their absurdness is drawn out to a point of the ridiculous to demonstrate how that contributes to the inefficiency of the command staff in charge of the army.

I found the first part and the last part the most interesting, which in a way contained the disappointment that the last part is incomplete. The middle two parts are mostly the long route taken to get to the front where the battle is. There is a lot of detail about the conditions of the country at that time and the accessibility of provisions for the troops and the problem of morale and morals within the ranks. Svejk a few times uses the phrase six of one half dozen of another, which prompted me to look up the etymology of the phrase and find it's possible it was an exact translation. The reason I mention this is because often in the story the people caught between the troops in the war may have thought of each sides presence in their province in that six of one half a dozen of the other way. Conditions were poor and often it seemed to be in part because of the incompetence of the military and though I only saw the military of one side it might be easy to translate this assessment over to the other side in this tale.

I enjoyed this book and much if not all of the humor made it through; even through my thick self. Anyone who enjoys historical novels and loves satires and can enjoy dark humor which to some may not seem like humor at all then this book will entertain. If the reader is like myself it will take a few days to a week or two to trudge through. There was a possibility that some of the flavor of the humor was seasoned by contact with the British humor of the translator so perhaps someone of that ilk might be able to steer through the murky water a bit more quickly. All in all I'd recommend this translation to all who are forced by necessity and perhaps their own laziness to read it in English. You won't be forced to read it as it does entertain.

J.L. Dobias

[hadriantheblind · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I've been on a roll with my reading recently. Love having time off.

Anyways - it is often said that this novel was an inspiration for Catch-22. Like Catch-22, it is hilarious. Unfortunately, it tends to go on for a little too long, also like Catch-22.

The moralizing in the end does tend to break up the monotony. The book ends abruptly, but this is due to the author's unfortunate death. This also explains some 'unpolished' sections of the book.

Despite these flaws, it is still hilarious and very much worth your time if you want a good rollicking anti-war novel.

[annbury_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

"The Good Soldier Svejk" is a 20th century classic, but that doesn't mean one will necessarily love it, or indeed finish it -- I read the first of the four volumes, and feel that I have done my duty. Moreover, there was a lot I enjoyed in the book, and quitting early may have kept it that way. Three more volumes, I suspect, would pretty much extinguish the enjoyment.

The book begins in 1914, when the Czech Republic was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Svejk (Schweik in German, same guy) is a Czech soldier in the Austrian army, whose attitude of glowing idiocy (assumed, we assume, but --) brings him into constant conflict with the military authorities. This is usually a lot harder on the authorities than on Svejk.

The book is about the futility and stupidity of war, of the military, of the Church -- of all the institutions of the State that screw up the lives of ordinary people. Svejk is the ordinary person who resists not by refusing to go along, but by cooperating so idiotically that he succeeds in avoiding (at least in Book One) actually going to war. He is a terrific character, and has become a key character in Czech self-definition.

So -- why the three and half stars, instead of five? There are three main problems, and they all have more to do with me than with the book.

First, I don't read Czech. The introduction tells us that Hasek used language in a revolutionary way, running up and down the linguistic social scale, switching between German and Czech (as Czechs did in those days) and using much more informal language than was accepted. Most of this does not come through in the translation, which in this case is probably more a problem of translation in general than of this translation. The Austro-Hungarian empire must have created a sort of linguistic goulash for anyone who wasn't down on the farm, and that's not something that can really be reproduced in 21rst century English.

Second, a lot of water has gone under the bridge (or blood under the battlements) since Hasek published this book in 1923. Anti-war sentiments are less shocking that they were, and more recent anti-war novels speak more strongly to at least this reader -- for example, Catch-22.

Finally, I'm female. Usually, this doesn't have much impact on my reaction to books, but in the case of military humor, it does. Like sports talk and trading room banter, this is a genre which is less than dear to my heart.

Anyway, I'm glad I read Volume I, but doubt I will forge on into 2, 3, and 4

[markalanlaidlaw · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Clever satire,worth the effort of reading in the original, Europe's catch 22 40 years earlier than Joseph H's excellent book.

[rsgompertz · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If you like Kurt Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" , Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Joseph Heller's "Catch 22," or John Kennedy O'Toole's "A Confederacy of Dunces," you'll be delighted to discover this obscure saga of "The Good Soldier Svejk."

I'm not sure if any of the above mentioned authors were aware of this interconnected tangle of Central European shaggy dog stories written just after WWI, but it sure feels like the mother lode for modern satire.

The author, born in Bohemia in 1883, was an eccentric writer who took up journalism, drinking, and wandering. Think of him as a Don Quixote lost somewhere in the Austrio-Hungarian empire. During WWI he was captured and spent years in Russian prison camps.

Hasek's piercing sense of the absurd must have helped him survive a mountain of ordeals because he came out on the other side with this picaresque tale of a reluctant soldier who is either the most inept person on earth or the most brilliant we've ever produced. Svejk confounds everyone he encounters. Through wits or lack thereof, he survives the perils of war and wrath of his commanders, floating down a seemingly endless stream of hilarious and insightful parables.

Svejk is the wise fool, the schlemiel, the coyote trickster. He lurches and stumbles from one fiasco to the next vexing his apoplectic superiors, skirting disasters, and always finding something to drink at the end of the day.

The collected edition isn't an easy read in that it's very long and a bit of a ramble. But it's worth it. In many ways, this is a book about everything. You can mine it for meaning and metaphor, or just be entertained. It's old world and worldly--a massive send up of humanity caught at our best and worst with all our fancies and foibles gently laid bare.

[difreda · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After spending more than 3 decades in the service of this Nation. I conclude that all new officers should have this as a well thumbed memento by the time they retire. Even today there is a bit of this nonsense left. Gladly or should I say "Humbly Report!" - the older officers have matured well beyond the Hasek's Generals. A must read for all military personnel - just like war Hasek has a lot of ups and downs - periods of absolute gut- busting humor - interspersed with doldrums - still a great read!

[gbill_7 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Bravo on pointing out the absolute idiocy of war, but not rich enough or structurally strong enough to be good fiction; I could only make it through about 350 of the book's 700+ pages.

Quotes on war:
"An old reservist looked at the raw recruit and said: 'Nice hope that a shrapnel tears off your head! They've pulled the wool over our eyes. Once a deputy from the Clerical Party came to our village and spoke to us about God's peace, which spans the earth, and how the Lord did not want war and wanted us all to live in peace and get on together like brothers. And look at him now, the bloody fool! Now that war has broken out they pray in all the churches for the success of our arms, and they talk about God like a chief of the general staff who guides and directs the war. From this military hospital I've seen many funerals go out and cartfuls of hacked-off arms and legs carried away.'
'And the soldiers are buried naked,' said another soldier, 'and into the uniform they put another live man. And so it goes on for ever and ever.
...
'I think that it's splendid to get oneself run through with a bayonet,' said Svejk, 'and also that it's not bad to get a bullet in the stomach. It's even grander when you're torn to pieces by a shell and you see that your legs and belly are somehow remote from you. It's very funny and you die before anyone can explain it to you.'
The young soldier gave a heartfelt sigh. He was sorry for his young life. Why was he born in such a stupid century to be butchered like an ox in a slaughterhouse? What was all that necessary?"

"But the scoundrel Marek stood by the side of Svejk and looked quite happy. It could not have turned out better for him. It was definitely better to peel potatoes in the kitchen, shape dumplings and take meat off the bone than stand up to the hurricane fire of the enemy and roar out: 'Form two deep! Fix bayonets!' when one's trousers were full."

"Before the arrival of the passenger train the third-class restaurant filled up with soldiers and civilians. They were predominantly soldiers of various regiments and formations and the most diverse nationalities whom the whirlwinds of war had swept into the Tabor hospitals. They were now going back to the front to get new wounds, mutilations and pains and to earn the reward of a simple wooden cross over their graves. Years after on the mournful plains of East Galicia a faded Austrian soldier's cap with a rusty Imperial badge would flutter over it in wind and rain. From time to time a miserable old carrion crow would perch on it, recalling fat feasts of bygone days when there used to be spread for him an unending table of human corpses and horse carcasses, when just under the cap on which he perched there lay the daintiest morsels of all - human eyes."

"'All along the line,' said the volunteer, pulling the blanket over him, 'everything in the army stinks of rottenness. Up till now the wide-eyed masses haven't woken up to it. With goggling eyes they let themselves be made into mincemeat and when they're struck by a bullet they just whisper, 'Mummy!' Heroes don't exist, only cattle for the slaughter and the butchers in the general staffs."

[schmerguls · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This satirical novel is often funny and I laughed a lot. But it is also long and I admit I was glad when I got to the last page. Joseph Svejk is a native of Prague and is in the Austrian Army, and purports to be a most loyal soldier. His responses to officers are often very funny and drive said officers up a wall. The humor is sometimes coarse and overly dependent on excretory functions. References to the Catholic Church are seldom admiratory. If conditions in the Austrian Army are accuately depicted it is easy to see why Austria did poorly in the War.