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 heartrending sacrifice of the women of France, Belgium, Russia, England, Servia, and Austria, who, like these German mothers, wives, and sweethearts, had been stricken down in the moment of hope.