DARKNESS SWALLOWED THE labyrinth that stretched beneath the Allied trenches and burrowed deep under no-man’s-land toward Messines Ridge, the higher ground occupied by thousands of enemy troops.
With uncertain steps, the boys followed Bagger into the tunnel. They passed a dugout packed with filled sandbags stacked to the ceiling.
“What are all the bags for?” George asked, breaking the uncomfortable silence closing in on them.
“They’re for camouflage. If we get word that the Germans have breached our lines, we use them to seal off the entrance. We don’t want the enemy discovering our tunnels.”
“Now, when you say ‘seal off the entrance,’ you don’t mean with us in the tunnels, do you?” George pressed.
“That’s exactly what I mean. We stay down here and wait quietly until the threat has passed. When it has, our infantrymen will remove the bags.”
“And if the threat doesn’t pass?” George asked.
Ignoring the question, Bagger ushered the boys inside a second, larger dugout carved as an offshoot of the main tunnel. Wooden posts and slabs, with wire netting stretched between them, jutted from the walls on either side of the cave-like room, creating eight narrow bunks. Men slept curled up on three of the bunks. Not one woke or even budged when Bagger and the boys entered. In the middle of the dugout, four wooden chairs surrounded an overturned crate, cluttered with flickering candles, dirty tin cups and plates, and a worn deck of cards. A birdcage rested on a square wooden board wedged into a corner near the “ceiling” at the rear of the dugout. Inside the cage, a small yellow canary, a speck of sunshine in the darkness, hopped from its perch to the side of the cage and back, its crisp tweet piercing the silence of the underground barracks.
Thomas knew the flap and scratch of the bird’s movement, the clip of its chirp, and the trill of its song meant life to miners. When a canary stopped singing and dropped from its perch, miners knew their deadliest enemy, carbon monoxide, was present and they had minutes, maybe only seconds, to escape.
Without odor or sound, the lethal gas crept upon unsuspecting miners as they worked deep beneath the earth, leaching away their oxygen and suffocating them into wakeless sleep. During his three years in the coal mine, Thomas had learned that explosions, even ones as small as a bullet firing, in confined, unventilated areas, could unleash the miners’ deadly foe. If you weren’t paying attention, if you forgot to regularly listen for the canary’s song, or if you neglected to check whether the bird remained on its perch, you were as good as dead.
As Thomas watched the canary hop around its cage, calling out to them with a rapid, high-pitched greeting, he pulled a long breath deep into his lungs.
“This is our dugout,” Bagger said. “We work in eight-hour shifts. One on. Two off. Our crew covers the nine P.M. to five A.M. shift. When you’re not working, you can go up top, behind the trenches, for some fresh air and to get some food, but we sleep, eat, and relax in here.”
Dread, cold and heavy, pooled in Thomas’s stomach. He’d left the coal mines of Dover and traveled to the Western Front only to end up underground again. Reminding himself of his reason for coming to Ypres, he pushed away thoughts of working and, worse yet, sleeping beneath the earth and started calculating how many hours of sleep he could survive on and how much time that would leave him when he was off-shift to search the trenches for his brother.
Now that he’d made it to the Western Front, Thomas couldn’t afford to waste any time. He knew finding his brother wouldn’t be easy, but he had to try. James would look for him if their roles were reversed. And when Thomas found his brother, they’d make their way home to their family, where they belonged.
While Bagger lectured the boys about storing food to keep rats from infesting the tunnels and explained where in the trenches they’d find the holes they were to use as their latrine, Thomas considered the fact that if he could convince one of the other boys to help him look for James, he would double his chances of finding him. But who could he trust?
His only interaction with Frederick Chamberlain was being on the receiving end of the Eton student’s disgusted glares. He’d be no help. Charlie seemed nice enough, but walking through the trenches, the boy had looked like he was about to jump out of his skin. Thomas doubted he could convince him to return to the trenches again on a regular basis. That left George.
Thomas knew him the best, but that wasn’t saying much. Despite the fact that he talked constantly, George never spoke about his family or home, and even though he’d been true to his word about getting Thomas to the Western Front, he’d only kept his promise because doing so benefitted George. Even his decision to enlist had nothing to do with Thomas or with helping anyone but himself. The lanky street urchin had only decided to enlist after he saw the contents of Thomas’s kit bag and overheard the recruiter say they’d be provided with two meals a day, a place to sleep, cigarettes, and five more shillings a day than the infantrymen.
Despite George’s reasons for joining, Thomas was glad he had. He’d distracted Thomas with funny stories on the long train and ferry rides and during their march to Ypres when images of James lying dead on some foreign battlefield crept into Thomas’s thoughts. But he didn’t trust George. If there was a chance that sharing Thomas’s secret would earn George favor with Bagger or the rest of the crew, Thomas had no doubt the London con would betray him.
No. He couldn’t risk telling anyone. He would have to find James on his own.
Bagger nudged Thomas’s shoulder with a sausage-link finger. “Take off your boots. All of you. You can leave them in here.”
Thomas, George, and Charlie immediately started unlacing their boots.
Frederick, however, did not. “You just warned us in the trenches not to let our feet get wet.”
“Boots make noise, Eton. Socks don’t. Everyone except our kicker works in socks.” He nodded to the largest man snoring away on a low bunk and then turned to walk onward.
“But won’t our feet get wet?” Frederick pressed, still refusing to remove his boots.
Bagger stopped in the entranceway. His meaty hands balled into fists the size of sledgehammers.
Thomas stepped away from Frederick, distancing himself as far as he could in the confined space in case Bagger decided to knock some respect into the quarrelsome boy.
Charlie slid behind George, who shook his head and rolled his eyes at Frederick’s continued need to question everything and everyone.
But Bagger didn’t hit Frederick. He didn’t even turn around. His broad shoulders rose and fell as he took a long, irritated breath. “I’ve been digging tunnels since before you were born, Eton. Mole and I were some of the first tunnelers Hellfire Jack recruited for this war. What we lack in experience on the battlefield, we more than make up for in the tunnels beneath it, so when I tell you to take off your boots, you take off your boots. There are far worse things to worry about than trench foot in these tunnels.” Relaxing his fists, he motioned for the boys to follow. “Come on. Time to show you what you’ll be doing down here. There’s no talking in the lower galleries. Not a sound. The tunnels have ears, and they’re always listening. One sound. One word. One small cough can signal your death and the death of everyone in your crew, so I don’t even want to hear you breathing, understand?”
Thomas didn’t dare nod in case his neck, stiff from the train ride, creaked.
“Got that, Eton?”
“Yes, Bagger, sir,” Frederick mumbled as he unlaced his boots.
Thomas, George, and Charlie followed the crew leader down the tunnel to the top of a watertight steel shaft that cut straight down through layers of soil, water, and wet sand to a layer of clay. A minute later, Frederick joined them and, one by one, they descended the shaft ladder to a lower gallery. Thomas was used to working beneath the earth. He’d spent the last three years in a coal mine in Dover, but he’d never feared silence until he descended the tunnels beneath no-man’s-land.
The coal mines under the hills of Dover were dark and confined, but they were alive. They hummed with the vibration of pickaxes striking stone, rumbled with carts full of coal pulled by ponies over metal rails, and echoed with men’s voices, as deep and gravelly as the earth they dug, shouting out orders, singing Irish tunes off-key, and laughing over jokes Thomas would never dare repeat at home.
The tunnels beneath the Western Front lay deadly quiet. Their silence crept across Thomas’s skin in gooseflesh he feared no amount of heat could drive away, and for the first time in two weeks, he wished George would start talking again.
But no one spoke. Not after Bagger’s warning.
As they followed the man farther beneath the battlefield separating the Allied trenches from the Germans’, approximately a city block away, shadows, cast by candles and electric lanterns burrowed into the narrow clay walls, twitched and scattered down the tunnel like angry apparitions. Timber beams, set three hand widths apart and etched with pencil markings, braced the tunnel walls. Thomas recognized some letters, but he couldn’t decipher what they were or what they meant. He had always struggled with reading and writing, and his inability to decipher letters as easily as his classmates had resulted in daily punishments from his teacher. Miss Barry wore a metal thimble on her right pointer finger, which she tapped against Thomas’s head every time he mispronounced a word. Thomas went home every day humiliated and with a terrible headache. After five years of such cruel punishment, Miss Barry deemed Thomas unteachable, and Mr. Sullivan pulled his youngest son from school to work with him and James in the coal mine.
Twice, Bagger led them down ladders inside large metal tubes, past pulley systems, deeper into the earth, until they reached the lowest gallery, set one hundred feet below the battlefield. They then began the long walk up a gentle incline in the direction of Messines Ridge. Along the way, they occasionally passed men hauling full sandbags on small rubber-tired trams to the shafts to be transported to the upper galleries. Thomas assumed the bags’ final destination was the side room just inside the tunnel entrance. Remembering the sandbags’ purpose, his steps faltered at the thought of an enemy breach of the trenches and being walled inside the tunnels with no escape. With a shudder, he pushed the horrific thought from his mind and hurried to catch up with the others.
As they made their way farther beneath no-man’s-land, Thomas found himself grateful for his lack of height, for the first time in his life. He didn’t have to bow his head or hunch his back like Bagger or the other boys. George hit his head more than once on the timber beams but didn’t complain. They all followed Bagger in silence, even Frederick.
Thomas lost count of the side tunnels that sprouted out from the main gallery. He wasn’t sure where they led or what the clay kickers were digging for, but it was obvious that like ants, they were creating a maze of tunnels beneath no-man’s-land.
After several more minutes of walking, Thomas noticed that the timber beams bracing the tunnel walls, ceiling, and floor ended. Bagger stopped. Four men worked so quietly at the end wall of the tunnel that Thomas saw them before he heard them. The men gave Bagger a subtle nod and then returned to their work.
The largest man, with legs as wide as tree trunks, lay on his back on a wooden board that rested on a wooden block at a forty-five-degree angle. He wore a pair of boots wrapped in empty sandbags. The other men worked in thick socks so caked with clay their original color could not be guessed. Knees pulled to his chest, the reclining man wedged his feet against the footrests positioned above a finely sharpened spade, then slowly pressed the flat blade into the clay face of the tunnel. Once the blade was deep in the clay, the man pushed up and pulled down on the handle to loosen the cut before slowly withdrawing the spade and the spit of clay.
A second crew member, crouched beside the man cutting clay from the tunnel face, helped ease the slab from the wall and placed it in an empty burlap sandbag. They continued their work without a word. When the bag was full, the second man handed it to the third crew member, who loaded the bag onto a tram, which he pulled to the first metal shaft. There, he transferred the bags of clay from the handcart into a bucket at the end of a pulley system. The bags were then hauled up the shaft by the fourth crew member. Several minutes later, the cart returned below with a pile of timber beams, which the two trammers braced along the newly exposed clay wall. They didn’t use hammers or nails to secure the beams, instead carving notches into the clay to wedge the lumber into place before repeating the whole process again.
Push, pull, bag, drag, raise.
Nine inches at a time.
Thomas followed their movements, in awe of the precision and silence with which they worked, operating more like machines than men. He thought about how before the war his brother and he would pass the long hours digging for coal by listening to the old miners’ stories of their youth. Even after James left to join the army, Thomas had relied on the miners’ voices and tales to keep loneliness and boredom from pressing in on him from all sides. When he led Morty, one of the company ponies, from the mine with a cart full of coal or rock, Thomas would regale the pony with the miners’ tales, often changing the names to include his own and those of his family. Morty listened, occasionally tossing his head or whinnying. The hours underground passed faster with the distractions. Here, in the tunnels, Thomas would feel every second of silence-imposed solitude.