BAGGER ORDERED GEORGE to rest in the dugout while he and the others began the difficult task of sealing off the flooded chamber and section of the gallery with sandbags and a dam of steel mesh and concrete. Aside from Mole telling the boys the job would take several shifts and the help of rotating crews to complete, no one spoke as they worked. When the next crew arrived, Bagger and the other men headed into the trenches, while the boys shuffled back to the dugout. George was sleeping quietly when they arrived, so they ate in silence, too exhausted to form thoughts or words, and then they retired to their bunks.
Thomas woke an hour later to the creak of George lowering himself off his bunk and the padding of his stockinged feet leaving the dugout. When George didn’t return after five minutes—the time it usually took him to smoke a cigarette—Thomas rolled off his bunk and went looking for him. He found George just outside the tunnel entrance, seated on the ground with his bony knees pulled to his chest and his face cradled in his hands.
Thomas took a tentative step toward him. “George? Everything all right?”
George lifted his head and looked up at Thomas. The confident smirk that normally curled his freckled lips sagged, and the mischievous glint that always shone from his green eyes had dimmed. “I’m alive, which is as good as it gets out here, eh, Tommy?” He took a cigarette and match from his pocket. Cuts and splinters from clawing at the timbers in his desperate attempt to escape the flooded tunnel covered his hands. On his right hand, the nail of his pointer finger was missing. He tried to strike the match against a floorboard but dropped it when his raw fingers grated against the wood.
Thomas picked up the match, struck it on a beam, and lit George’s cigarette.
George took a long drag and let his head fall back against the sandbags. “Thanks.”
“What are you doing out here?” Thomas asked, sitting down beside him.
George stared unblinking at the opposite wall. “I couldn’t sleep, and that is crazy because I don’t think I’ve ever been more tired, which if you knew my life, is saying a lot.”
“It’s not crazy. After my carbon monoxide poisoning, I couldn’t sleep either,” Thomas admitted. “I was afraid if I closed my eyes, I’d never wake up. I guess it’s normal to fear death. Everyone does.”
“Not me.” No pride or arrogance bolstered George’s claim. He stated the words as calmly as if he’d just told Thomas the sky was blue. “Only people like you, who have something to lose, fear death.”
Thomas remembered the small potato he’d carried in his pocket from Dover to Trafalgar Square on the day he’d met George. If George hadn’t convinced him to meet Norton-Griffith’s recruiter, Thomas might have starved on the streets of London. “I’m a coal miner from Dover. I’ve never had much to lose.”
The tip of George’s cigarette glowed bright red as he pulled another drag deep into his lungs. “You have everything, and you don’t even know it. You should go home to your family while you still can. Leave before this war kills you, Thomas.”
George’s use of his real name cut through Thomas with a chill, more disturbing than his warning of the possibility that the war would claim his life. He clutched his saints medals. He wanted to believe they would keep him safe and help him find James, but each night in the tunnels and every day in the trenches carved away at the foundation of his faith, inch by inch, until all that remained now was a gutted hole, cold and empty. He traced the raised image of Saint Joseph with his thumb. “I can’t. Not until I’ve found my brother.”
George turned to Thomas. “You’ve almost died twice already. What if you coming here to find your brother ends with your parents mourning two sons?”
Thomas shook his head. “It won’t. I will find him. And I won’t die.”
“And if you don’t find him? And if you do die?”
The questions had scratched at Thomas’s thoughts night and day since Johnny had shown him the bodies of missing soldiers strewn across no-man’s-land, but hearing them spoken aloud by George gave his own doubts a voice he could no longer dismiss or ignore.
“You know the chances of your brother having survived this war are about as good as our chances of surviving it,” George said, “which, if you haven’t noticed, are getting slimmer by the minute.”
Thomas tucked the medals under his shirt. “I have to find him, George.”
George sighed. “I know, and I hope you do.”
Silence hung between them like the smoke lingering around George’s head.
Thomas combed his fingers through his hair. “What about you? Isn’t there anyone in London wondering where you are?”
“Aside from the men I owe money?” George shook his head. “No. I’m sure no one’s even noticed I’m gone. You could have let me drown in that tunnel today, and no one would have mourned my death.”
An aftershock of the panic Thomas had felt when Mole had said George wasn’t breathing shuddered through him. He’d come to not only rely on George, but to trust him with his life. “That’s not true.”
“That’s nice of you to say, but let’s be honest, if I die under this godforsaken battlefield, no brother will come looking for me. No father will bring my body home. No mother will cry over my grave. I will leave this world the same way I came into it, forgotten.” His voice weakened as the truth in his words settled heavy around them. “But in the end, aren’t we all.”
“You won’t be forgotten,” Thomas said as George stubbed out his cigarette. “I promise.”
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Tommy. Even in our crew, I wouldn’t be missed. Blimey, Eton would probably do a jig on my grave.”
“Frederick doesn’t hate you as much as you think,” Thomas said. “If he did, he wouldn’t have helped save you today.”
George chuckled, but there was no hint of humor in the sound. “Save me? How? By abandoning me in a flooded chamber and telling you I was trapped as he scurried up the ladder like the rat he is?”
“Frederick didn’t abandon you. He was the one who helped me free your leg and swim you to the ladder.”
George stared at Thomas as though he were waiting for the punch line. “Wait. You’re serious? Eton came back for me?”
Thomas nodded. “I told you, if you’d died, you’d have been missed, even by Frederick.”
George shook his head in disbelief. “Tommy, you and I both know, whether I survive this war or not, when it’s all over, everyone will go back to their lives and families and not spare another thought on me.”
“That’s not true.” Thomas looked George in the eyes. “I promise.”
“Do you promise to have a memorial made for me if I don’t survive this bloody war?”
“You’re not going to die.”
“Answer the question, Tommy.”
“Yes, I promise to make a memorial for you.”
“Really? And what name will you write on it?”
“George.”
“George what?”
Thomas started to answer and then stopped. When George decided to join Norton-Griffith’s recruits, he’d told the man in the bowler hat his name was Georgie Porgie. They’d had a good laugh at the joke at the time, but Thomas no longer found it funny. The truth was, he didn’t know George’s real last name. No one did. Not even George.