Jaroslav Hašek (1883–1923)

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 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.'

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.'

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.'

One night in May, Hašek came home bone-tired, but he still had enough perseverance and will that he wrote down in a few words a creative idea that later occupied him relentlessly. He had barely opened his eyes in the morning when he began to look for the small sheet of paper on which he had, as he asserted, written his original idea, but which he had forgotten by the morning. In the meantime, I had thrown the paper away into the garbage. Hašek stormed through it, and was blissfully happy when he found the crumpled piece of paper. He carefully pried it open, read through it, scrunched it together again and threw it away. I picked it up again and kept it. The octavo sheet has the clearly legible and underlined title of the story: "The Company Idiot". Below that is a sentence from which one can read "He puts himself to the test to see if he can perform properly as a soldier..." This is followed by several confusing words. - translated from pg. 7 of Geniaalne idioot / Huumori kool