2 MY MEMOIRS

inadequate; I have felt the effects of this all my life. Our teachers were so old-fashioned that they spoke a language which we really did not understand. As a scholar I was very mediocre, and at Christmas, 1864, my certificate was " Moderate." My school friend Maltzahn had expressed his intention of entering the navy, and so it occurred to me that it might mean a certain relief for my parents if I too were to take up the idea. At first my proposal was received in complete silence at home, but after some weeks my father called me to him and told me that my depressed state of mind had been noticed. My mind seemed to be set on the navy, he said, and if I wanted to go, no obstacle would be placed in my way. Nobody could have been more suprised than I; but what was I to do? I kept to my word, and in the spring of 1865 I presented myself at the age of sixteen for the entrance examination at the Naval Cadets' Institute of those days in Berlin, passed, to everybody's surprise, fifth on the list, and became a sailor.

The attractions of the navy were, as I have said, slight at that time. In 1861 the corvette Amasone had gone down with almost all the cadets on board who constituted the supply of officers for many years to come. This event reduced the applications for naval cadetships to three the following year, and compelled the conditional acceptance even in my year of several candidates who had failed, in addition to the ten aspirants who were successful. The grasp of naval affairs possessed by the Prussian intelligentsia of those