I stood on the Dorotheenstrasse looking up at the old red brick
building which before the second of August in this year of the world
war was the War Academy. I had heard that when tourists come to Berlin
they like to watch the gay uniformed officers ascending and descending
the long flights of gray steps; for there the cleverest of German
military youths are schooled for the General Staff. Like the tourists,
I stood across the street to-day and watched the old building and the
people ascending or descending the long flights of gray steps. Only
I saw civilians, men alone and in groups, women with shawls wrapped
around their heads, women with yellow topped boots, whose motors
waited beside the curb, and children, clinging to the hands of women,
all entering or leaving by the gray gate; some of the faces were happy
and others were wet with tears, and still others stumbled along with
heavy steps. For this old building on Dorotheenstrasse is no longer the
War Academy; it is a place where day after day hundreds assemble to
learn the fate of husband, kin or lover. For inside the gray gate sits
the Information Bureau of the War Ministry, ready to tell the truth
about every soldier in the German army! I, too, went to learn the truth.
I climbed a creaking staircase and went down a creaking hall. I met
the Count von Schwerin, who is in charge. I found myself in a big,
high-ceilinged room the walls of which were hung with heroic portraits
of military dignitaries. My first impression was of a wide arc of desks
that circling from wall to wall seemed to be a barrier between a number
of gentle-spoken, elderly gentlemen and a vague mass of people that
pressed forward. The anxious faces of all these people reminded me of
another crowd that I had seen--the crowd outside the White Star offices
in New York when the _Titanic_ went down. And I became conscious that
the decorations of this room which, the Count was explaining, was the
Assembly Hall of the War Academy, were singularly appropriate--the
pillars and walls of gray marble, oppressively conveying a sense of
coldness, insistent cold, like a tomb, and all around you the subtle
presence of death, the death of hopes. It was the Hall of Awful Doubt.
And as I walked behind the circle of desks I learned that these men of
tact and sympathy, too old for active service, were doing their part
in the war by helping to soften with kindly offices the blow of fate.
I stood behind them for some few moments and watched, although I felt
like one trespassing upon the privacy of grief. I saw in a segment of
the line a fat, plain-looking woman, with a greasy child clinging to
her dress, a white-haired man with a black muffler wrapped around his
neck, a veiled woman, who from time to time begged one of the elderly
clerks to hurry the news of her husband, and then a wisp of a girl in a
cheap, rose-colored coat, on whose cheeks two dabs of rouge burned like
coals.
Soldiers from the Berlin garrison were used there as runners. At the
bidding of the gentle old men they hastened off with the inquiry to one
of the many filing rooms and returned with the news. This day there was
a new soldier on duty; he was new to the Hall of Awful Doubt.
"I cannot imagine what is keeping him so long," I heard an elderly
clerk tell the woman with the veil. "He'll come any minute.... There he
is now. Excuse me, please."
And the elderly clerk hurried to meet the soldier, wanting to intercept
the news, if it were bad, and break it gently. But as he caught sight
of the clerk I saw the soldier click his heels and, as if he were
delivering a message to an officer, his voice boomed out: "_Tot!_" ...
Dead!
And the woman with the veil gave a little gasp, a long, low moan,
and they carried her to another room; and as I left the gray room,
with the drawn, anxious faces pushing forward for their turns at the
black-covered desks, I realized the heart-rending sacrifice of the
women of France, Belgium, Russia, England, Servia, and Austria, who,
like these German mothers, wives, sweethearts, had been stricken down
in the moment of hope.