“So we drank, and I think no man there that night, where danger and death were always brooding darkly, failed to feel the dignity and honor of his calling. 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.’