It must have been the unspeakable position of humiliation he found himself in as a consequence of being ignored, flouted, and even openly insulted by the men he had once treated as no more worthy of consideration than the deck beneath his feet that was responsible for the fact that the German naval officer with whom the members of the staff of the Allied Naval Armistice Commission were thrown in contact almost invariably assumed an air of injured martyrdom, missing no opportunity to draw attention to, and endeavour to awaken sympathy in, his sad plight. He took advantage of any kind of a pretext to "tell his troubles," and when nothing occurred in the natural course of events to provide an excuse, he invented one. Thus, a Korvettenkapitän in one of the ships searched at Wilhelmshaven took advantage of the fact that a man to whom he gave an order about opening a water-tight door in a bulkhead slouched over and started discussing with the white-banded representative of the Workmen's and Soldiers' Council, to speak at some length of the "terrible situation" with which he had been faced at the time when the High Sea Fleet had been ordered out last November for a decisive naval battle. The filthy condition his ship was in furnished the inspiration for another officer to tell at some length of how he had hung his head with shame since the day he had been baulked of "The Day." An ex-submarine officer--acting as pilot in one of the British destroyers in the Baltic--did not feel that he could leave the ship without setting right some comments on German naval gunnery, which he had found in a London paper left in his cabin.