Alone at Naumburg, Nietzsche took up work of various kinds and read widely. He studied the works of the young German philosophers, Hartmann, Dühring, Lange, Bahnsen; he admired them all, with the indulgence of a brother-in-arms, and dreamt of making their acquaintance and collaborating with them in a review which they should found together. He projected an essay, perhaps a sort of manifesto upon the man whom he wished to give to his contemporaries as a master, Schopenhauer. "Of all the philosophers," he writes, "he is the truest." No false sensibility shackles his mind. He is brave, it is the first quality of a chief. Friedrich Nietzsche notes rapidly: "Ours is the age of Schopenhauer: a sane pessimism founded upon the ideal; the seriousness of manly strength, the taste for what is simple and sane. Schopenhauer is the philosopher of a revived classicism, of a Germanic Hellenism...." He was working ardently, and then, suddenly, his life was turned upside down. He had been exempted from military service on account of his very short sight. But the Prussian army in 1867 had great need of men; and he was enrolled in a regiment of artillery, in barracks at Naumburg. Nietzsche made the best of this vexation. It was always a maxim of his that a man should know how to utilise the chances of his life, extracting from them, as an artist does, the elements of a richer destiny. Therefore, since he had to be a soldier, he resolved that he would learn his new trade. The military obligation had, in this time of war, a solemnity which it lacks to-day. Nietzsche thought it a good and healthy thing that he should shut his dictionaries and get on horseback; that he should become an artilleryman and a good artilleryman, a sort of ascetic in the service of his fatherland, _etwas_ ασκησις _zu treiben,_ he wrote in his German, mottled with Greek. "This life is full of inconvenience," he wrote again, "but, tasted as one would an _entremets,_ it impresses me as altogether profitable. It is a constant appeal to the energy of man which has a value above all as an antidote against that paralysing scepticism the effects of which we have observed together. In the barracks one learns to know one's nature, to know what it has to give among strange men, the greater part of whom are very rough.... Hitherto it has appeared to me that all have felt kindly towards me, captain and privates alike; moreover, everything that I must do, I do it with zeal and interest. Has one not reason to be proud, if one be noted, among thirty recruits, as the best rider? In truth, that is worth more than a philological diploma."