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At Goettingen, he joined the Hannovera Corps and his record is twenty-eight duels; his face bore many scars, among them a long cut from left jaw to corner of his mouth.
¶ Otto’s mother, who had strong social aspirations and held to the rigid exclusiveness of the upper classes, wished to send her son to an aristocratic university. So she selected Goettingen. Her ideas were to make her son a man of dignity and solid social qualities.
Alas, he became but an indifferent student, excelling principally in dueling, beer-bouts in college taverns, dog-fighting, flirting, and general deviltries unnumbered, for which he spent considerable time in the college dungeon. Listen to this:
¶ Many years ago, in his roaring student days, long before Otto von Bismarck was famous, he received an invitation to a ball, and went to the shoemaker to be measured for high-topped military boots, affected by the beaux of that day. Calling some days later, he was told that it would be impossible to get them finished in time; and he would therefore have to wear his old boots to the ball.
¶ Bismarck scowled and going back to his rooms, whistled for his two ferocious dogs with which he was wont to trail around town; returning to the cobbler’s the daring rascal said in a loud voice: “Mister bootmaker, at a signal from me the dogs will tear you to pieces! I am here to tell you, in the most friendly way in the world, that it is absolutely necessary to have my boots on time.”
¶ Bismarck then went away, but he hired a man to parade up and down in the vicinity of the shop with the two mastiffs; and now and then this man dropped in, and in a voice of sorrow, said to the cobbler: “My master has a terrible temper and I am sorry for you.” At that, the shoemaker told his wife: “Frau, I am going to work all night, to get Herr Bismarck’s boots finished in time for that ball!”
¶ It is needless to add that young Bismarck had his boots on time.
¶ In discussing Bismarck’s life and personality many writers will tell you that the man is inconsistency itself; advocating now what in a year he will recant; that for this and other reasons it is baffling to try to make a picture many-sided enough to portray adequately his complex life.