Page:The Jail, Experiences in 1916.pdf/218

 We sat and smoked. It had been sad when I went, but soon afterwards Dušek had returned to the room. They had brought him back from the Rossau barracks, and were getting ready for his trial.

"And the rest?"

"The censorists have been placed on trial."

"I read about it. Mr. Fels declared during the proceedings, when it was objected that such a sum as 5.000 crowns was not given bona fide to a sergeant-major 'for a benevolent purpose', that today, when millions and milliards are being squandered, 5.000 crowns are a ridiculous trifle."

"And they were condemned to several months which were deducted from the time they had been remanded in custody. Now they are all in military uniforms, but it seems that they won't be in them long and have already discovered a method of taking them off."

"And the engineer?"

"Fallot, fallot", and Papa Declich looked at me with a triumphant glance, the glance of clear-sighted common-sense which was now triumphing over a hoodwinked intellectual."

"The engineer,—a fallot?" I asked again inquisitively, as if I only wanted to defend my lost position; there flitted through my mind everything that I had heard from this man and about him,—his sufferings, the injustice that had been done him, the false accusation of espionage, the long imprisonment, the cross-examinations, his wife, his children, the chains on his feet,—the whole unmerited tragedy of his life.

"The engineer,—a fallot?"

"Yes. He is not an engineer, he never was in the flying corps, he has not two orphans at Chocen—"