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 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.

That night I went to the Jägerstrasse, to Maxim's. The place is everything the name suggests; one of those Berlin cafés that open when the theaters are coming out and close when the last girl has smiled and gone off with the last man. I sat in a white and gold room with a cynical German surgeon, listening to his comments.

"It is the best in town now," he explained. "All the Palais de Danse girls come here. Don't be in a hurry. I know what you want for your articles. You'll see it soon."

Maxim's, like most places of the sort, was methodically banal. But one by one officers strolled in and soon a piano struck up the notes of a patriotic song. When the music began the girls left the little tables where they had been waiting for some man to smile, and swarmed around the piano, singing one martial song upon another, while officers applauded, drank their healths, and asked them to sing again.

Time passed and the girls sang on, flushed and savage as the music crashed to the cadenzas of war. What were the real emotions of these subjects of Germany; had the war genuine thrills for them? I had talked with decent women of all classes about the war; what of the women whose hectic lives had destroyed real values?

"Get one of those girls over here," I told the surgeon, "and ask her what she thinks of the war."

"Do you really mean it?" he said with a cynical smile.

"Surely. This singing interests me. I wonder what's back of it?"

He called one of them. "Why not sing?" Hilda said with a shrug. "What else? There are few men here now and there are fewer every night. What do I think of this war? My officer's gone to the front without leaving me enough to keep up the apartment. Krieg? Krieg ist schrecklich! War is terrible!"

My German friend was laughing.

"War?" he smiled. "And you thought it was going to change that kind."

But I was thinking of the woman with the veil whom I had seen in the Hall of Awful Doubt; and outside the night air felt cool and clean....

But my symbol of Berlin is not these things—not bustling streets filled with motors, swarming with able-bodied men whom apparently the army did not yet need. Its summation is best expressed by the varied sights and emotions of an afternoon in mid-December.

Lódz has fallen; again Hindenburg has swept back the Russian hordes. Black-shawled women call the extras. Berlin rises out of its calmness and goes mad. Magically the cafés fill.... I am walking down a side street. I see people swarming toward a faded yellow brick church. They seem fired with a zealot's praise. I go in after them and see them fall on their knees.... They are thanking Him for the Russian rout.... Wondering I go out. I come to another church. Its aisles are black with bowed backs; the murmur of prayer drones like bees; a robed minister is intoning:

"Oh, Almighty Father, we thank Thee that Thou art with us in our fight for the right; we thank Thee that—"

It is very quiet in there. War seems a thing incredibly far away. The sincerity of these people grips your heart. I feel as I never felt in church before. Something mysteriously big and reverent stirs all around.... Then outside in the street drums rattle, feet thump. A regiment is going to the front! I hurry to see it go by, but back in the church the bowed forms pray on.

II

"THE BELOVED KING"