A Mother’s Gift to the Cause
“A long time after, the mother of Richard Hall said to a friend of mine—said with clear, sad, gentle eyes—‘I am glad to give my boy to so great a cause!’ And we on the edge of the sinister Bois le Pretre, when the news of the boy’s death came to us that Christmas day, felt, too, somehow, somewhere within us, that the cause was great, was ours.
“Late that night I stood alone for a time under the starry sky of that strange hell we inhabited. Oddly enough, I felt, so I recall, a calmness and a courage, even a sort of happiness, new and strange. Though its approaches might be loud and frightening, I knew again that ‘the ways of death are silent and serene;’ an honorable death, a death of one’s own choosing for an ideal, for a cause.”
An extract from a letter written to his parents on Decoration Day, 1916, by Louis P. Hall, Jr., next older brother of Richard—he, too, valiant in the Ambulance Service—gives an intimate glimpse of the qualities of heart and mind that endeared Richard Hall to his fellows and to all who knew him:
“To-day at two I attended a beautiful memorial exercise. It was held at the monument to Washington and Lafayette in the Place des États-Unis, here in Paris. And during these exercises I took a little part when my officers and myself placed a great floral tribute at the base of the monument among the many others. On the tri-color ribbons of this tribute from the American Ambulance were these words: ‘To Richard Hall and the other Americans who gave their lives for France.’
“And so it is, as you well know, that I have thought a great deal of Dick to-day. I believe I can recall almost every time I saw him during our last three months together in Alsace with the circumstances of each meeting. I can even remember many of the times and places we passed each other on the road. He invariably smiled as we waved to each other in passing, just as if he were as pleased to see me as I was to see him. And I wonder if that really could be true! How I did admire and love him as I knew him there in a life which brought forth all the best from a boy who had no worst. And coupled with his splendid character, indeed a part of it, was that fine reserve which never courted an open show of devotion from me. But he was my own brother and always must be my brother, what more could I have asked?... Though we were often miles apart for days at a time, each was doing his little share in alleviating that endless physical pain and bitter human suffering which made our own hardships seem as nothing. And there was always our next meeting, sometimes down in the valley, sometimes at a post in the mountains, when we would talk things over; but even then neither told the other all his inmost thoughts, for in such work our very depths were touched and stirred as they never had been touched and stirred before.”