I am ashamed to say it again, but this event made no impression upon me—none at all. I took knowledge of it just as one learns by hearsay that somewhere in the distance floods have set in, or fires broken out,—elemental events, of a very lamentable nature, but they will pass by. And at bottom the thing is not uninteresting—it is something historical. The Prussians will of course get a thrashing; and if we should lose the game, there would be peace again after it anyhow. We had no one dear to us in the army, so we were not anxious. I read no newspaper; and the stories that they told,—victories of the Prussians in Hannover, at Frankfurt, later also in Bohemia (but not much of it came to our ears, and if anything did I have forgotten it),—nothing of all that has remained imprinted on my memory: a proof that it was heartily indifferent to me. To-day I cannot understand how I could be so stupid. Even apart from my future ardent sentiments in behalf of peace, which ought at that time to have been already dormant in the young woman of twenty-three and to have been awakened on this occasion, such a tremendous event should at any rate, even from the ordinary point of view, have stirred me, should have filled me with some kind of emotion, either patriotic enthusiasm or tingling human sympathy or, if nothing more, anxiety and terror; but there was nothing, nothing. It would not be necessary to set down in these reminiscences the confession of such a fact, doubly humiliating for a future opponent of war, but the incongruity that is here apparent is a thing that distinctly deserves scrutiny. The most interesting thing for the reader of memoirs, I think, is always the opportunity to observe how and whereby certain destinies, talents, or deeds, which are known to pertain to the writer of the memoir, have been prepared for and developed; one wishes to trace out what inner aptitudes, and what outer influences, have contributed to the formation of the total product. From this there always result useful lessons and bits of knowledge. Provided, of course, that the autobiographer is entirely sincere: useful lessons are to be drawn only from unfalsified facts.