“All this time, as in all the past months, Richard Nelville Hall calmly
drove his car up the winding shell-swept artery of the mountain of
war—past crazed mules, broken-down artillery carts, swearing drivers,
stricken horses, wounded stragglers still able to hobble; past long
convoys of Boche prisoners, silently descending in twos guarded by a
handful of men; past all the personnel of war, great and small (for
there is but one road on which to travel, one road for the enemy’s
shell); past abris, bomb-proof, to arrive at the _Poste de Secours_;
where silent men moved mysteriously under the great trees, where the
cars were loaded with an ever ready supply of still more quiet figures
(though some made sounds), mere bundles in blankets. Hall saw to it
that these quiet bundles were carefully and rapidly installed, then
rolled down into the valley where little towns bear stolidly their
daily burden of shells thrown wantonly from somewhere in Bocheland
over the mountain to somewhere in France—the bleeding bodies in the
car, a mere corpuscle in the full crimson stream, the ever-rolling
tide from the trenches to the hospital, of the blood of life and the
blood of death. Once there, his wounded unloaded, Dick Hall filled his
gasoline tank and calmly rolled again on his way. Two of his comrades
had been wounded the day before, but Dick Hall never faltered. He slept
when and where he could, in his car, at the _poste_, on the floor of
our temporary kitchen at Moosch—dry blankets or wet blankets of mud,
blankets of blood—contagion was pedantry, microbes a myth.”
It was over this shell-swept, torturous road that Dick Hall was driving
his car on its final errand of mercy when, in the first hours of the
Christmas morning, death made friends with him. Some three hours later
he was found by Matter, one of his comrades, the first to pass along
the mountain road. It was between 3 and 4 o’clock of the morning.
Matter and Jennings, who came a little later, bore the body back in
Matter’s car to Moosch, where his brother, Louis Hall, learned what
had happened. Death had been instantaneous. A fragment of shell had
penetrated his brain. Though he had other injuries (the car was utterly
demolished), we have the testimony of Abbé Klein, the chaplain, that
“even in death his face preserved the expression of smiling radiance,
that frank and kindly nature that his comrades had learned to love in
the months he had been with them.”
“There in the small hours of Christmas morning where mountain fought
mountain—on that hard bitter pass under the pines of the Vosgian sweep,
there fell a very modest and valiant gentleman,” says the memorial from
his comrades of Section Three, adding:
“Dick Hall, we knew you, worked with you, played with you, ate with
you, slept with you, we took pleasure in your company, in your modesty,
in your gentle manner, in your devotion and in your youth—we still
pass that spot, and we salute. Our breath comes quicker, and our eyes
grow dimmer, we grip the wheel a little tighter—we pass better and
stronger.”
[Illustration:
_Drawn by Joseph Cummings Chase._