If anyone gets murdered anywhere, serve him right. Why does he want to be such a damn fool as to let himself get murdered?"

Those were his last words at that conversation. Since then he had kept on repeating in a loud voice at intervals of five minutes :

"I'm innocent, I'm innocent."

He had shouted these words in the entrance to the police headquarters, he would repeat them while being conveyed to the Prague sessions, and with these words on his lips he would enter his prison cell.

When Schweik had heard all these dreadful tales of conspiracy he thought fit to make clear to them the complete hopelessness of their situation.

"We're all in the deuce of a mess," he began his words of comfort. "You say that nothing can happen to you, to all of us, but you're wrong. What have we got the police for except to punish us for letting our tongues wag? If the times are so dangerous that archdukes get shot, the likes of us mustn't be surprised if we're taken up before the beak. They're doing all this to make a bit of a splash, so that Ferdinand'U be in the limelight before his funeral. The more of us there are, the better it'll be for us, because we'll feel all the jollier. When I was in the army, sometimes half the company were shoved into clink. And lots of innocent men used to get punished. Not only in the army, in the law courts, too. Once I remember there was a woman who was sentenced for strangling her newborn twins. Although she swore she couldn't have strangled the twins, because she's only had one baby, a female one, that she managed to strangle quite painlessly, she was sentenced for double murder. Once the court takes a thing up, there's trouble. But there's bound to be trouble. It may be that not all people are such crooks as they're taken for. But nowadays how are you going to tell an honest man from a crook, especially now in these grave times when Ferdinand got done in. When I was in the army the captain's pet dog got shot in the wood behind the parade ground. When he heard about it, he called us all out on parade and ordered every tenth man to step one pace forward. Of course, I was a tenth man, and there we

stood at attention without moving an eyelash. The captain walked round us and said : 'You blackguards, you ruffians, you scum, you scabby brutes, I'd like to shove the whole gang of you into solitary confinement over that dog. I'd chop you into mincemeat, I'd shoot you and have you turned into stew. But just to show you that I'm not going to treat you leniently, I'm giving you all fourteen days C. B.' You see, that time the trouble was over a dog, but a fullblown archduke's at the bottom of it all. That's why they've got to put the fear of God into people, so as to make the trouble worth while."

"I'm innocent, I'm innocent," repeated the man with the bristly hair.

"So was Jesus Christ," said Schweik, "but they crucified Him for all that. Nobody anywhere at any time has ever cared a damn whether a man's innocent or not. Maul halten und welter dienen,2 as they used to tell us in the army. That's the best and wisest thing to do."

Whereupon Schweik stretched himself out on the mattress and fell asleep contentedly.

In the meanwhile, two new arrivals were brought in. One of them was a Bosnian. He walked up and down gnashing his teeth. The other new guest was Palivec who, on seeing his acquaintance Schweik, woke him up and exclaimed in a voice full of tragedy :

"Now I'm here, too !"

Schweik shook hands with him cordially and said :

"I'm glad of that, really I am.