AFTER THE CAPTURED German miner was treated and taken into custody and Charlie’s cuts were bandaged, Boomer detonated a second explosion to seal off the opening, and the surviving clay kickers buried the dead a mile behind the Allied reserve trenches, in a field crowded with row upon row of fresh graves.
Bats.
Bagger.
Even the German boy.
Mole, Boomer, and the boys were joined by several infantrymen, including Johnny and Dan, who shared memories, recited prayers, and sang Bagger’s favorite song, “Danny Boy.” Standing before the graves, Thomas remembered his brother singing the song while their dad played the tin whistle and his mum, sisters, and he sat around the fireplace after Sunday dinner. His mum used to say James had vocal cords plucked straight from an angel’s heavenly harp. What Thomas wouldn’t give to hear his brother’s voice lifted in song again. Grief, hard and unmoving, ached in his throat, choking off the lyrics. George reached over and put a hand on his shoulder. He gave Thomas an understanding nod and then raised his voice louder for both of them.
When the boys and men finished the song and had said all they could manage to say, Thomas picked up Max, who lay whimpering on Bagger’s grave, and carried the small dog back to the dugout.
Boomer accompanied Mole to the Regimental Aid Post to have his ears examined for hearing damage from being so close to the blast. Though the boys were alone, they did not venture into the trenches that day. They stayed in the dugout, where Charlie drew sketches of Bagger and Bats while George constructed wooden frames for the pictures from scrap wood he’d scrounged up in the trenches. Thomas consoled Max, who paced the dugout and jumped onto Bagger’s bunk, searching for his master, and Frederick spent hours writing and rewriting condolence letters to the men’s families, telling their wives and children how nobly both men had served their country.
Thomas’s chest ached with renewed grief when Frederick asked Mole the men’s real names to use in the letters. Their nicknames had confined Bagger and Bats to the tunnels and the war, in Thomas’s mind. Before their deaths, he’d given little thought to the lives they’d lived prior to the war or hoped to reclaim after. Now suddenly they weren’t just tunnelers. They were husbands and fathers with families praying for their safe return. Was Bagger’s wife saying the rosary beside a photo of her husband before bed? Were Bats’s children struggling to get by in their father’s absence?
While the others slept that night, Thomas lay awake in his bunk with Max curled up next to him on one of Bagger’s shirts. Thinking of all Bagger and Bats had sacrificed for their crew and all their families had lost, Thomas couldn’t help but wonder if his decision to follow James into the war would cost him and his family more.
A somberness filled the tunnels and dugout in the week following their crew members’ deaths. The medics assured Mole that his hearing loss was most likely temporary, but his annoyance over the constant ringing in his ears and having to ask everyone to repeat themselves, coupled with his grief over the loss of his closest friend on the Western Front, soured the kicker’s normally cheerful disposition. Listeners and baggers from other crews that had completed their mines helped Mole, Boomer, and the boys with their gallery. Each shift brought two new temporary members to their crew. Recalling Mole’s advice to Charlie after Feathers died, Thomas didn’t bother to learn their names.
In the dugout, Bagger’s and Bats’s empty bunks served as constant reminders that death had found their crew under no-man’s-land, and the boys feared, as they continued to dig beneath the battlefield, that it would hunt them down again. Even George, who’d faced death all his life and laughed at its attempts to claim him in London, counted down the minutes to the end of each shift in the tunnels. He hadn’t lied to Thomas when he claimed he’d never feared death because he had nothing to lose, but that was before.
The moment Thomas had invited George to come home with him after the war, he’d given George hope for a future George had never dared imagine before, and with that gift of hope came the burden of fear. Fear that death would steal it all away.
Early one morning, a week after the breach in the tunnel, George went looking for Thomas to tell him he’d decided to accept his invitation to join him and his family in Dover after the war. He checked Bagger’s and Bats’s graves first, as Thomas often visited there after their shifts to say a prayer and tell them about the progress the crew had made, but he didn’t find Thomas there that morning. George had turned back to look for him in the trenches when he spotted Thomas sitting in the poppy field under Feathers’s elm tree.
His head bowed and his back to the battlefield, Thomas did not see George approaching. Max slept curled up on his lap, and as George got closer, he overheard Thomas talking.
“We finished the Maedelstede Farm mine today. Other crews sent men to help, so we’d finish on time.”
Not wanting to intrude on a private moment, George stopped and waited as Thomas continued the one-sided conversation.
“All that’s left is to charge the chamber. Boomer said they’ll blow twenty-three mines on the seventh.” His voice trailed off. “Only three more days.”
Three more days, George thought, and our mission will be over. But what would that mean? Would the remnants of their crew be sent home? Not likely. George knew how to play the odds, and the odds were that if the mission succeeded, they’d be sent to another stretch of the Western Front, where they’d be ordered to again burrow beneath a battlefield and undermine the enemy’s position. If the mission failed, they’d be handed a weapon and put in the front-line trenches. Either way, the odds of the rest of the crew surviving the war were dwindling with every day they remained on or under its battlefields.
Thomas reached up and gripped the medals hanging from his neck and said something George didn’t expect.
“I’m sorry, Grandad. I’ve tried to find James, but I’ve failed. If I don’t make it home, my friend George has promised to give Mum and Dad a letter from me, so they’ll know what happened and hopefully someday find some peace.” His voice cracked. “But they’ll never be at peace if we don’t find James, so please, if James is with you”—Thomas sniffled back tears—“send me a sign. Please, Grandad. I can’t do this alone.” Max stirred from his slumber and licked the tears sliding down Thomas’s face.
George left before Thomas spotted him. He walked to the dugout, where he found Charlie asleep on his bunk and Frederick writing in his notebook.
“Where are Mole and Boomer?” he asked.
Frederick did not look up from his writing. “In the trenches, scrounging up some food.”
George checked Charlie’s bunk to make sure he was really sleeping, then he pulled a chair close to Frederick and straddled it backward. “We need to talk,” he whispered.
Frederick closed his notebook. “Is something wrong?”
“Yes … No … I don’t know. I just need you to do me a favor.”
“What kind of favor?”
“I need you to write me two letters.”
His curiosity piqued, Frederick opened his notebook to a clean page. “To whom?”
“You’re not going to like the first.”
“Why not?”
“Because I need you to write to your father.”
Frederick snapped the notebook closed again. “You’re right. I don’t like it.”
“But he’s the only one who can help.”
“Help what? Send me home?”
“No. Find James.” George ran a hand through his hair. “We’ll never find out what happened to him searching the trenches, and with the end of the mission less than three days away, we’re running out of time. Your dad is our best hope. He could ask around. Someone higher up has to know what happened to Thomas’s brother.”
“He’ll send for me the minute he gets the letter,” Frederick said.
“Who cares if he drags you home? Get out of these tunnels before you end up under the poppy field with Bagger and Bats.”
“I can’t go home.” Frederick grabbed his notebook and pen and stood. “Not yet.” Then he left the dugout.
George followed him into the tunnels. “Why not?”
“I don’t want to talk about it, George.”
“Because of your father?”
“No.” Frederick kept walking, determined to get out of the tunnels and away from George, but George ran ahead of him and blocked the exit.
“Let me pass,” Frederick said.
“Not until you tell me why you can’t go home.”
“Why do you care?” Frederick asked.
“Because whatever the reason, it’s stopping you from helping Thomas find his brother.”
Frederick’s shoulders slumped.
“Why can’t you go home, Eton?” George repeated.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
“Because I haven’t done what I came here to do.”
“And what’s that?”
Frederick’s head dipped. He exited the tunnel and sat down in a small dugout in the support trench wall. “Prove I’m not a coward.”
George followed him outside. “To who?” he asked, his voice rising with frustration. “Your father?”
“No.” Frederick pulled the broken white feather from his pocket. “To myself.”
George stared at the feather. He’d seen men on the streets of London receive white feathers for not joining the army. He didn’t know who had given Frederick the feather, but he knew what it meant. “Eton, you’re not a coward. Look at all you’ve done. Charlie and I would be buried beside Bagger and Bats if it weren’t for you. You’re as real a soldier as any man on the front line, and I’ll fight anyone who dares say otherwise.”
Machine-gun fire ripped across no-man’s-land, shattering the silent stalemate between the trenches. Frederick crouched down behind the sandbags. When he realized he wasn’t in danger, he looked up at George. “Real soldiers don’t run away from a fight or hesitate in the heat of battle. They don’t tremble in fear in their bunks or cry over the enemies they’ve killed.”
Pressure built in Frederick’s throat and behind his eyes, but he would not cry. Chamberlains did not cry. “I came here a coward, George. I can’t leave here as one.”
George took the feather from Frederick and ran it between his fingers, straightening out the bent spine. “You think being scared makes you a coward? What kind of rubbish do they teach you at Eton? That soldiers aren’t scared? We’re living beneath the front line of a war. Only a fool wouldn’t be scared. What matters is you came here anyway, and when your crew needed you, you were there for them, despite being scared. That’s real courage, Eton. And if that doesn’t make your father proud or get your name engraved on the wall of that fancy school of yours, you let me know.” He lifted the feather. “I’ll carve your name on the bloody wall myself.”
Sniffing back unshed tears, Frederick smiled. “You don’t know how to write.”
“I have no doubt you’ll make sure I spell your name correctly.”
Frederick laughed. “You’re probably right.”
“Of course I am.” George tucked the feather in his unruly hair, so it stuck up like the plume of a hat. “You should wear this with pride.”
“You’re crazy.”
“Probably, but that doesn’t mean I’m not right.” He handed the feather back to Frederick. “That feather may have brought you to the front, Eton, but your courage has kept you here.”
Frederick tucked the feather behind his ear. “Who knows? Maybe it’s a new style that will catch on here in the trenches.”
“Absolutely. Especially after we blow the ridge and become war heroes. Everyone will want a white feather just like yours.” George lit a cigarette and sat beside Frederick.
“Do you really think the army will reveal what we’re doing?” Frederick asked. “If we fail, they’ll cover up the work we did. If we succeed, they’ll want to keep our work secret to maintain the element of surprise over our enemies, so they can reuse the method under other battlefields. No one will know what we’ve sacrificed for crown and country.” He stared off in the direction of Bats’s and Bagger’s graves. “Or what we’ve lost.”
“We’ll know,” George said.
Frederick nodded.
“So,” George asked, “will you write to your dad about James?”
Frederick nodded again and then opened his notebook and wrote a brief letter to his dad explaining where he was and the situation with Thomas’s brother. When he finished, he pushed up his glasses to rub his eyes and turned to a fresh page. “What about the second letter?”
“I need you to write me one, like you did for Tommy and Mouse, and if things go wrong, I need you to deliver it to someone for me. And you have to promise not to tell anyone about this.” He held out his hand. “Do I have your word, Eton, as a real soldier?”
Frederick took hold of George’s hand and gave it a firm shake. “No, you have my word as a secret soldier.”