Meet The Good Soldier Svejk, Patron Saint Of Malingerers And Saboteurs

A 1920s-era Novel Sheds Light on Eastern European Anti-authoritarianism.

- Will Collins

DURING THE FIRST World War, unenthusiastic enlistees would fake disability to avoid dying in a muddy trench. That’s how the “war hero” of Jaroslav Hašek’s classic novel The Good Soldier Švejk winds up in an army hospital a couple of chapters in. There,

Švejk (pronounced Sh-vake) is joined by other Czech conscripts shamming illness or injury. The men are subjected to a sadistic regime of medicalized torture aimed at forcing them to admit their fakery and declare themselves fit for military service.

While recovering between “treatments,” the malingerers, malcontents, and jailbirds of the Austro-Hungarian Empire (“the K & K,” to borrow the era’s German shorthand) compare notes on faking disability. One insists that insanity is the way to go, referring to his own phony religious mania. Another mentions a midwife who dislocates legs for the modest price of 20 crowns. A third says that he had his leg dislocated for a mere 10 crowns and three glasses of beer.

The bravest endure all five steps of the hospital’s brutal treatment program, dying in a sick bed rather than admitting defeat and rejoining the regular army. Less stout-hearted soldiers, the narrator laments, give up after being threatened by the prospect of an enema with soapy water and glycerine.