MY MEMOIRS

CHAPTER I

IN THE PRUSSIAN NAVY

i. Entering the Service. Prussian Navy and Prussian politics, 1866-1870. Warfare then and now.—2. Foreign political currents. Relations with England. More at home in Plymouth than in Kiel. The superiority of the English. "But you are not a sea-going nation."

WHEN I was a boy there was scarcely any trace left of the enthusiasm for the navy which the Revolution of '48 aroused in Germany, although it flickered up once more in the year 1864 after the Battle of Jas-mund. My going into the navy was not the result of a passionate fondness for it, but was the unintentional product of my father's educational ideal, which was ahead of his time. As my father felt in himself the lack of a knowledge of the exact sciences, he sent my brother and me to the Realschule of our native town Frankfort-on-the-Oder, instead of to the Gymnasium, intending to let us change schools when we reached the top form. But in view of the slight undeveloped state of the realschule at that time, this school proved