THOMAS WOKE TO silence. He tried to open his eyes, but they rolled back in his head again and his eyelids drooped closed. He took a deep breath. The air was hot and stale. He drew in a second breath and forced his eyes open. His vision was cloudy and dim. The memory of the cave-in came flooding back in a rush of terror. He scrambled back, but a sharp pain radiated through his leg at the sudden movement. Thomas cried out, but his voice sounded muffled. He lifted his hands to his face and felt the rough fabric, cold metal, and round glass eyepieces of a gas mask.
“George!” Through the fogged-up lenses, he scanned the tunnel for his friend. He spotted him seated on the floor, leaning against the collapsed wall, mere feet away, wearing Thomas’s cracked mask.
Thomas grabbed hold of the lantern and crawled over to him. “George.” He nudged his shoulder, but George didn’t respond. “George!” He shook him harder, and George slumped forward.
“No, no, no, no.” Thomas pulled his broken mask from his friend’s head. The shadows of the tunnel leached the color from George’s freckled face.
“What did you do?” Thomas screamed. He yanked George’s mask from his own head and pressed it to George’s face. Ignoring the heavy dizziness swirling through his head, Thomas held the mask firmly over George’s nose and mouth and pounded on his chest. He leaned his forehead against George’s. “Please! Don’t do this to me!”
Pain, grief, anger, and fear clawed up his throat in ragged cries.
His screams filled the small cavern, echoing off the clay walls and trembling through the beams. He no longer cared who heard. Pain erupted from him with the fury of grief. He raged against God and fate and unanswered prayers. He raged until his voice broke and his vision blurred. He collapsed next to George. And then, taking his friend’s cold hand in his, he waited to die.
“You won’t go alone,” he whispered. “I’m here. You’re not forgotten.” His breathing shallowed, and his vision dimmed as the carbon monoxide seeped into his blood. Numbness crept from his fingers and toes through his hands and feet, up his arms and legs. After years of tormenting him, death was finally showing mercy.
No fear. No pain. A peaceful numbness.
“We’ll face it together,” he whispered to George. “As soldiers. As brothers.” Then he rested his head against George’s shoulder, closed his eyes, and waited for death to claim him. He didn’t know if it would ride in on a thunderous explosion or slip in on the whisper of a final sigh.
But death did neither. It scraped and groaned, creaked and clanged, mumbled and barked.
Barked? Thomas shook his head to free himself of the hallucinations gripping his mind, but the noises grew louder. Someone called his name. Large hands grabbed him. Pain seared through his leg as his body was jerked up, but he’d screamed his throat raw and could only release a weak whimper. Strong arms held him tight against a barrel chest. A voice screamed.
“Go! Go! Go!”
His limp body was jostled with every pounding step.
“What about Shillings?” another voice asked.
“He’s there, but I’m not sure he’s alive.”
Thomas tried to tell them they couldn’t leave George behind, but his head spun with dizziness, and the words he needed swirled past too fast for him to grasp. The only word he could find was “No.”
They couldn’t leave George to face death alone. He’d promised.
His rescuers ignored his plea. At the base of the shaft, he was passed up the ladder from one set of hands to another.
“Get to the support trenches! Now!” a gruff voice ordered.
And then they were running again. Timber beams and clay walls blurred past. Night air chilled Thomas’s damp hair and clammy skin as they broke free from the tunnels and pressed through the trenches. Thomas’s head fell back. His unfocused eyes trailed the full moon glowing against the darkness of the early morning sky.
The arms eased him gently onto a bench. “Take deep breaths, Thomas.” Frederick’s face came into focus. He held a canteen up to Thomas’s lips. “Drink.”
Thomas took one small sip and then another. His throat burned with each swallow.
“As soon as we can get a medic, we will,” Charlie said. “Stay awake until then.”
Max jumped into Thomas’s lap. Thomas winced at the pain in his leg but wrapped the dog up in a tight embrace while Max licked his face. Frederick and Charlie sat on either side of him.
“Are you all right?” Charlie asked.
Thomas didn’t answer.
“We didn’t think we’d get you out of there in time,” Frederick said.
“George.” Thomas forced the name through his aching throat.
Charlie’s head dipped forward.
“Mole said they were able to break through faster because George had dug out a lot of clay on your side,” Frederick said. “We would never have gotten you out in time if he hadn’t.”
“Did Mole go back for him?” Thomas asked.
“He wanted to,” Frederick said, “but Boomer stopped him. He said they couldn’t risk more men getting caught in a collapse this close to zero hour.”
“They were still arguing when Mole ordered that we carry you to the support trenches,” Charlie said.
Fresh tears welled in Thomas’s eyes. “It’s all my fault.”
Frederick placed a hand on Thomas’s shoulder. “You couldn’t have known the gallery would collapse.”
Shifting his leg to try to find a less painful position, Thomas heard something crinkle. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a thick envelope.
“What’s that?” Charlie asked.
Thomas opened the envelope and pulled out a stack of British pounds and a small brown ledger. “George’s winnings and pay book.” His fingers went numb holding the money his friend had worked so hard to win and earn.
“There’s more,” Frederick said, pointing to a folded piece of paper that had fallen into Thomas’s lap.
Thomas opened it.
“That’s the letter I wrote for you,” Frederick said. “The one you asked me to write to your family in case—” He didn’t finish his thought.
The letter shook in Thomas’s trembling hands. “I gave this to George to deliver to my parents. He must have put it and the money in my pocket when he realized—” Unbearable grief bowed Thomas’s head and strangled his words. “He shouldn’t have been down there. None of you should have. This is all my fault.” Sobs shook his shoulders. “George gave me his mask. Why did he do that?”
“You tried to do the same for him,” Frederick said.
“But I was too late.”
“We all were,” Charlie said.
Frederick reached into his coat. “George made me promise to give you this if anything happened.” He took out a folded sheet of paper, wrinkled from the days in his pocket.
“What is it?” Thomas asked.
Frederick unfolded the paper. “After I wrote letters for our families, George asked me to write one for him.”
Thomas’s throat ached, and his bottom lip quivered with barely contained sobs. “Will you read it for me?”
Choking back tears of his own, Frederick nodded and cleared his throat.
Thomas,
I’m not one for words, and I’m really hoping you never see this letter because if you do that means I’m dead. You’re the closest thing to family I’ve got out here, or anywhere, and if I’m to die in this war, there are a few things I need to say.
First, I owe you an apology. I shouldn’t have conned you into coming to the Western Front. I’ve never met your brother, but I know James would agree that you don’t belong here. You should be home with your family.
Second, I want to thank you for asking me to come to Dover with you after the war. I don’t know if you meant it or if your family would really ever have taken me in, but thank you for asking.
And lastly, I hope you find your brother. You’ve refused to give up or forget him. If only all of us were so lucky to have a brother like you.
So, Tommy, I guess this is goodbye. May you have a long, good life, sailing the Channel with your brother. If you can, every once in a while, spare a thought for a lying thief from London. You’ll be the only one who does.
George
Charlie bowed his head to hide his tears, and Frederick folded the letter and handed it to Thomas, who tucked it in his pocket.
The boys sat in silence as artillery fire continued to rain down across no-man’s-land. On the other side of the battlefield, tens of thousands of German soldiers slept, unaware of the nineteen mines, packed with nearly one million pounds of ammonal and gun cotton, beneath their feet. Nineteen charge chambers, at the ends of tunnels carved from the earth by thousands of tunnelers, who’d worked tirelessly, day and night, beneath no-man’s-land. Secret soldiers, who’d labored and fought on a battlefield most didn’t know existed. For months and years, they’d lived, worked, eaten, and slept in those tunnels. And some, like George, had died in them.
Thomas took the necklace from his pocket and clutched his medals in prayer that George and all the tunnelers who’d sacrificed their lives under the Western Front would someday rest in peace. Suddenly, the Allied guns fell silent, and an eerie quiet settled over the battlefield. The absence of noise seized Thomas’s breath. If they’d succeeded in their mission, he knew what would follow. Holding Max, Thomas struggled to his feet. “I have to see.”
Frederick and Charlie helped him across the duckboards and onto a fire step, where they peered through holes in the parapet. The silence stretched on, taut and tenuous until it snapped with mute explosions that rumbled, deep and low, beneath Messines Ridge. The ground bucked and tremored, knocking soldiers on both sides of no-man’s-land off their feet, but the battlefield held firm against nearly one million pounds of explosives.
Thomas closed his eyes. They’d failed in their mission. Fresh tears ran down his cheeks at the realization that Bagger, Bats, and George had died for nothing. Scrubbing away his tears, he was starting down the fire step when no-man’s-land erupted.
The boys watched in horror as towers of fire punched from the bowels of the battlefield, tearing through the German trenches. The force of the blasts lifted concrete bunkers from the ground and tossed clods of earth the size of houses into the air. A wall of flame, blazing a blinding ember red, ignited the sky along Messines. The boys ducked below the parapet, shielding their faces from the intense light and blistering heat. Charlie wrapped his arms around Poppy’s cage, and Thomas huddled over Max, who whimpered in his arms.
The explosions signaled the Allied troops waiting in the front-line trenches. Their rifles and artillery aimed across the battlefield, they unleashed the full fury of over two thousand guns on what remained of the German line in a creeping barrage so loud it was heard as far as London. The boys covered their ears against the gunfire, but their hands did little to lessen the deafening noise. Below the noise, a command shot through the trenches.
“Attack!”
Thomas, Frederick, and Charlie peered back through the holes in the parapet and watched in awe as eighty thousand soldiers climbed over the top of the trenches. Guns raised and firing, they rushed across the battlefield, stepping over fallen comrades and dodging falling debris, burning trees, and tangled lines of “devil’s rope.” Thick smoke and anguished screams rose from giant craters pocking the ridge.
Voices, wailing in pain and fear, crowded the tight spaces between artillery blasts and gunfire. Their pleas, spoken in different languages and varying accents, collided and combined into a universal cry for help.
Thomas could no longer bear to watch or listen. He turned to ask Frederick and Charlie to help him to the Regimental Aid Post when he heard another voice cry out, but this one sounded familiar. Thomas closed his eyes and strained to hear it over the battle raging in front of him. After several seconds, the voice cried out again.
“Help! I need a stretcher bearer! Hurry!”
Thomas turned to see a man rushing through the support trench toward them. Thick layers of dirt and clay encrusted the man’s face and uniform, but Thomas knew him immediately by his stout build and lumbering gait.
“Eton!” Boomer yelled. “Get over here!”
“What’s wrong?” Frederick asked as he ran to meet the miner. “Is Mole hurt?”
“I’m fine,” a gravelly voice behind Boomer answered. “But he won’t be if we don’t get him to a medic now!”
The world tipped, and Charlie grabbed hold of Thomas as Thomas’s uninjured leg gave way at the sight of the crew’s kicker rounding a corner of the trench with George cradled in his arms.