Rebuild Richard Hall's Memorial Cairn

The Reconstructed Richard Hall Memorial

I am the author of a soon to be published history titled The Harvard Section, The History of American Ambulance Field Service Section Three 1914-1915. It is the first part of a two-volume history of the creation and service of an organization comprised of Ivy-League, young American college men, that volunteered to drive ambulances for the French army in World War One. The story opens on the day after France had declared war with Germany and documents the genesis of an ambulance service by American volunteers whose primary desire was to aid France in her hour of need. From its awkward beginnings, this history follows a group of American ambulance drivers who are sent to the front lines to evacuate wounded in a war that the United States was not yet involved. Drawn from hundreds of previously unpublished letters, diaries, and photographs, The Harvard Section provides a unique perspective of WWI that culminates with the death of a young man named Richard Hall, the first American ambulance driver to give his life for France during the First World War .

When I begin to write this book in earnest, one of the many things I determined to do was to write a definitive account of the death of Richard Hall. His death was not only a pivotal event in the history of Section Three, but in the history of the American Field Service itself. As I dug deeper into the events of his death, I came to realize that there were conflicting accounts and that the sources used in the period literature were written by men who were not there. Case in point, in the book Friends of France, the primary source used was written by volunteer Luke Doyle. Although well written, Doyle was no there when Hall was killed as he had been wounded a few days before and was convalescing at a hospital in town of Bussang, miles away.

After a great deal of persistence and searching I discovered a cache of letters, written by volunteer Robert Matter of Indianapolis. Matter and Allyn Jennings were the two who discovered Hall's body around two or three in morning Christmas Day. Matter's description is the only first hand actual account of what occurred. Consequently, armed with that information and other research I was able to provide the most detailed and accurate account of the events of that day that have ever been recorded.

Hall was buried on December 27, in a little military cemetery in the village of Moosch where he lies to this very day. Soon after the funeral, several of Hall's friends began to construct a memorial of stacked stone alongside the road to commemorate the location where Hall met his end. This "cairn" was photographed, written about in letters and diaries and Waldo Peirce even drew a charcoal sketch of it. (This sketch survives today in the archives of the AFS organization in New York City.).

Within a few weeks of the construction of this cairn, Section Three was transferred out of Alsace, never to return. Over the intervening 110 years, many people have visited Hall's grave in Moosch. His mother visited his grave during the war and later his parents and siblings made a pilgrimage to commemorate his resting place. In the 1920s, the graduating class of his Alma Mater at Dartmouth send a block of New Hampshire granite emblazoned with a bronze plaque which was placed near his grave. In modern times, such as in 2015, students from the AFS and descendants of the Hall family reunited at Richard's grave on the 100th anniversary of his death, but in all of the years and all of the events, the rock cairn was never mentioned again.

As I was writing the chapter on Richard's death, I attempted to work out the exact location of where he may have actually been, and when he was struck down. There were two landmarks that I felt, if discovered would enable me to deduce where he was when he was killed. The first was a watering trough that the ambulance drivers used to refill their steaming radiators. This trough also has enough room to pull their ambulances over, to allow traffic to pass by them. Driver Tracy Putnam recounted how he saw Richard Hall, drive past this watering trough. The second landmark would be the cairn if it still existed. If I could find the locations of either, then it would narrow the possible location of his death down to a better certainty.

The scenario was that on the night of Christmas Eve, the French attack on the German positions on the Hartsmannswillerkopf and the subsequent German counterattacks had been raging for several days. The Americans were evacuating three first aid stations or "postes de secours." The furthest away was called Bains Douches, the second or middle was Herrenflue and the third and largest was an encampment called Thomansplatz. The wounded once gathered from these posts, had to be transported down from the mountainside, along a treacherous road to the nearest field hospital that was located in a village called Moosch. All of this was only accessible via one road. All traffic going up and all traffic going down were forced to use one road. Prior to the attack, French engineers had cut a second road down from the camp at Hartsmannswillerkopf, but due to the weather and traffic, this road was forced to be closed as it had become impassable.

Hall had made several trips, up and down the mountain that day. His destination was the field hospital located in the H. Jungck building in Moosch. The trip down took a few hours and once arriving at the hospital, the backlog of wounded waiting to be seen forced the ambulance drivers to wait until their patients could be unloaded. According to family tradition, Richard and his brother Louis had been boarded with a family in Moosch by the name of Muller. The Muller's owned an inn and had a young daughter named Marie. Legend has it the Marie and Richard had a mutual attraction and on the night of Christmas, Marie had been volunteering at the H. Jungck hospital in Moosch. Encountering Richard while he was waiting for his ambulance to be unloaded, she made for him an omelette confiture which tragically turned out to be his final meal.

According to Waldo Peirce, the trip back up to Thomansplatz took approximately two hours and my best estimate is that Richard left the hospital at Moosch around midnight. Two hours later, after negotiating his way up the slippery, muddy road, dodging mule trains and supply wagons, Richard found himself on an empty patch of road. The Germans were shelling the valley, pretty much continuously and although they could not see the road directly they were able to lob shells over the mountain. As fate would have it, Richard found himself at the wrong place at the right time and a chance German shell struck the rear of his empty ambulance. The impact was terrible, blowing bits of canvas and one of his spare tires up into some nearby tree branches. The momentum and the blast, blew his ambulance off the road, causing it to tumble down a ravine. Hall was most likely killed instantly. He was struck in the right thigh, the small of his back on the right side and just behind his right ear with shrapnel. As the ambulance tumbled, his body was thrown clear.

Robert Matter and Allyn Ryerson Jennings came along about an hour or so later and strictly by chance, Matter happened to glance over his shoulder and down the ravine and saw the wreckage of Hall's ambulance. How many drivers drove past the wreckage before it was discovered is unknown, but I imagine several inadvertently passed him by. Matter and Jennings stopped to investigate, at first thinking that one of their comrades had simply run his car off the road. But as they clambered down the ravine, with lantern in hand, they spied what they thought at first was a pile of blankets. It turned out it was Hall's body. Shocked by their discovery, the boys determined that they must retrieve Hall's body and bring it back down to the hospital below. They returned to their ambulances and were forced to drive a bit further up the road in order to find a place wide enough for them to turn around. As they were in the process of turning their cars about, several other American ambulances arrived, all having driven unaware past the spot where Hall lay. In the dark the newly arrived ambulance men asked what the problem was. To Matter and Jenning's horror, they realized that one of the newly arrived drivers was Richard's brother Louis. Not knowing what to do, they made a story up of having to return to their base below to have their brakes examined and so Louis Hall and the others continued on their way, back up the mountain.

Matter and Jennings then drove back to the spot where they knew Richard's body lay. Parking their ambulances and getting a stretcher from the back, the boys scrambled down the ravine. Jennings lost his nerve and refused to touch the body, so Matter was forced to drag it onto the stretcher. Rigor Mortis had already begun to set in and as they attempted to transport the body back up the hill, it kept slipping off the stretcher. Finally, with no other choice, Matter half carried and half drug Hall's remains back up to his ambulance and got it loaded inside. The two then drove their sorrowful cargo back down to the hospital below where they reported that Hall had been killed.

In my desire to determine if the rock cairn had survived the previous 110 years, I was fortunate to have met via Facebook a French writer, historian and retired military officer named Daniel Bastien. Daniel and I had become friends and collaborators and his assistance with this project has been invaluable. His knowledge of the geography and the history of Alsace as well as a cadre of wonderfully dedicated fellow historians has helped me identify the locations of numerous photos and keep me honest and accurate in my descriptions of the area. (It is not easy sometimes to give accurate descriptions of a location you have never been to before.)

I explained to Daniel my desire to discover if the cairn was still in existence and he enthusiastically assembled a team of local historians who trekked up into the mountains in an attempt to find the long lost cairn. The odds that it had survived were slim, as a lot could have occurred over the past 110 years. The road could have been widened, the cairn bulldozed away. Erosion or even the war itself could have destroyed the stones. After a few false starts, they were excited to announce that they had found the foundation stones of the cairn! The road was still effectively the same. It is an unpaved, mountain road, infrequently used by the forestry service. The road had been expanded, narrowing the hillside between the embankment and the roadbed, causing the loss of a majority of the stones, but the foundation was still there.

Hall's ambulance as previously described had been blown to pieces and scattered as it tumbled down the ravine. I have not been able to ascertain, but at some point the wreckage was recovered. My guess is, during the war and by the French automobile service. There is one photo known to exist that is identified as Hall's ambulance. Where and when it was taken is unknown. What happened to the wreckage is likewise unknown. However, logic would have it that if the car tumbled down the ravine and then was subsequently drug out of there, a fair amount of debris would have been left behind. So after the French team discovered the foundation stones of the cairn, they went across the road and searched for a debris field left by Hall's ambulance. In amongst the odd bits of metal, they successfully located, tell-tale pieces of Hall's ambulance.

Moved by the discovery that they had made, Daniel and his comrades determined that it would be a fitting memorial to this long lost boy, the first American ambulance driver to give his life for France, to rebuild permanently the rock cairn lovingly constructed by his comrades 110 years ago.

I am pleased to announce that this reconstruction is now in the works and the new Richard Hall Memorial Cairn is slated to be dedicated September 13 of this year. Donations to off set the cost of construction can be made to me, which will be forwarded to Daniel and his team in France.