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, silent, descending in twos, guarded by a handful of men,--past all the _personnel_ of war, great and small (for there is but one road, one road on which to travel, one road for the enemy to shell),--past _abris_, bomb-proofs, subterranean huts, to arrive at the _postes de secours_, where silent men moved mysteriously in the mist 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 those quiet bundles were carefully and rapidly installed,--right side up, for instance,--for it is dark and the _brancardiers_ are dull folks, deadened by the dead they carry; then rolled down into the valley below, where little towns bear stolidly their daily burden of shells wantonly thrown 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 where and when he could, in his car, at the _poste_, on the floor of our temporary kitchen at Moosch--dry blankets--wet blankets--blankets of mud--blankets of blood; contagion was pedantry--microbes a myth. At midnight Christmas Eve, he left the valley to get his load of wounded for the last time. Alone, ahead of him, two hours of lonely driving up the mountain. Perhaps he was thinking of other Christmas Eves, perhaps of his distant home, and of those who were thinking of him. * * * * * Matter, the next American to pass, found him by the roadside halfway up the mountain. His face was calm and his hands still in position to grasp the wheel. Matter, and Jennings, who came a little later, bore him tenderly back in Matter's car to Moosch, where his brother, Louis Hall, learned what had happened. A shell had struck his car and killed him instantly, painlessly. A chance shell in a thousand had struck him at his post, in the morning of his youth. * * * * *