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“Listen, Švejk, are you really God’s prize oaf?��
“Humbly report, sir,�� Švejk answered solemnly. “I am!��

The good soldier Švejk repeats this answer, in one form or another, quite a lot over the course of 892 pages of being frequently grilled by various authorities under the Austro-Hungarian Empire in World War One. You, the reader, will be entirely at liberty to ascertain the truth of the matter!

This was a re-read for me after many years. I remember as a young person being utterly amazed at it, as I’d never come across war satire of this kind before. I found the book less comic this time, and also a touch tedious as it went on, as Švejk (of whom the author admits he is very fond) relates innumerable, ever more far-fetched, stories, to illustrate a particular aspect of human behaviour, while generally sitting in one of a long succession of prisons, military transports, or mental asylums. I am still amazed, though, that Hašek could, seemingly effortlessly, come out with tale upon entertaining tale of unfortunate innocents at the mercy of the civil or military administration, or cunning malefactors who come justly to a sticky end, or unhinged military officials sabotaging their own war . . . having said all that, I attribute any intermittent tediousness I found in the narration to the novel being already almost a hundred years old. At the time of writing, Hašek’s work would have been innovatory, revolutionary, shocking beyond anything we might experience from it today, in our age of enlightened cynicism about “war and war’s alarms�� (WB Yeats), where we are accustomed to more sophisticated satire. I found myself thinking that it was just as well the book was published posthumously or Hašek might have found himself treated just as his hero was.

This book contains no grandiose criticism but relies on incontestable and concrete detail. Of necessity, it’s earthy stuff. As the author points out in the epilogue to Part 1,”Behind the Lines��,
“Life is no finishing school for young ladies.��
Part Two is entitled, “At the Front��, and the language and the incidents are scatological and often bawdy. Hašek defends himself thus:
“It was once said, and very rightly, that a man who is well brought-up may read anything. The only people who boggle at what is perfectly natural are those who are the worst swine and the finest experts in filth. In their utterly contemptible pseudo-morality they ignore the contents and madly attack individual words . . . beneath this camouflage these drawing-room lions indulge in the worst vices and excesses.��
Hašek described conditions for the soldiers and the inefficiency of the army command from personal experience serving on the Eastern Front, although he died without writing his intended third volume, “in Captivity�� which would also have reflected his actual experience (of being a prisoner of war of the Russians). Thanks to Ian’s review of “The Snows of Yesteryear�� and Beata’s of “Wołyń zdradzony�� (“Volhynia betrayed�� according to Google Translate), I have more of an idea of the region of Galicia through which Švejk passes as Part Two ends.
I woke one morning from a Švejk-related dream (no, really!) wondering how I could sum up this novel in the style of Hašek. Just how easy was it to make up tales where Švejk’s point is couched in a ton or so of irrelevant anecdotal detail? I found that in a few minutes I wrote about 500 words of my own Švejk tale (don’t worry, I won’t include it all here!) but the image I had was of a man who, wandering through the halls of the city treasury, came upon ancient, dusty chests, which no one had ever opened or been remotely interested in. This man opened them, and found that they were full of human truths, accumulated over centuries. Perhaps the events they described had not actually taken place but their import was true. The man read them and realised their value to humanity. The man heaped these truths upon himself as if they were coats of ermine, and went out into the street, accosting all whom he met with wise words from the papers in the chests. Eventually he was brought before the city authorities. They listened carefully to his tales of truth hidden away in the cellars of the Treasury. Then they conferred briefly with each other, nodding their sage heads, and had the man thrown into the river as a danger to society.

Just be grateful you were spared the full version!