by Keely Hutton
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.
SEVEN
MUFFLED BATTLE CRIES preceded the first wave of soldiers climbing out of the trenches, their rifles and voices raised in a common goal—break the enemy line. The Germans answered with machine-gun fire, mowing down dozens before they reached the top. Some fell back into the trenches. Others collapsed over the edge of the parapet
s. Those who escaped the first barrage climbed over those who didn’t and charged onto no-man’s-land.
They squeezed through holes cut in the barbed wire stretched between spiked posts. The rusty steel barbs tugged at the young soldier’s wool greatcoat as he crawled through an opening. An infantryman, sent out before the assault to clip the wire, lay near the jagged hole, the wire cutters still clutched in his lifeless hand.
The young soldier yanked his coat free, raised his rifle, and rushed across the barren field with his battalion. A line of bullets carved a path within inches of his feet, kicking up mud and rocks. The soldier dove into a large crater gouged into the battlefield by an artillery-shell blast. He landed in a cloud of chlorine gas pooling in the bottom of the crude hole. It scattered before his boots like weak fog as he tripped over large chunks of earth and slipped in patches of mud. Pressing his mask to his face, the soldier hunkered down as the battle raged on around him.
He tried to take in a full breath through his nose, but the mask held his nostrils clamped shut. His breaths came fast and short. What little air he managed to siphon through the mouthpiece was tinged with charcoal from the respirator-box filter. His skin grew slick with a clammy sweat, and his vision began to go black. If he didn’t regain control, he would pass out in the crater. Closing his eyes, he tapped a beat against his rifle and hummed a song from home—one his mother sang to soothe him when he was a child and frightened. By the second verse, his breathing had slowed, and the light-headedness receded.
Above him, masked soldiers rushed past, firing their rifles and waving the troops behind them forward. Smoke thickened the air, cloaking the setting sun in a sooty shroud. The sky howled with cannon fire and artillery blasts. The ground trembled beneath the bombardment. A fellow infantryman spotted the young soldier and jumped down to join him, but a bullet caught the man beneath his left ear before his head cleared the edge. His limp body slid into the large hole, coming to rest in a twisted pile at the soldier’s feet.
Blood seeped beneath the dead man’s masked head, pooling under the haze of gas lingering in the crater. The young soldier choked back vomit rising in his throat. He couldn’t get sick in his mask, but he also couldn’t risk taking it off. He had to move. He glanced back in the direction of the Allied trenches. If he returned, against military orders, he’d be shot at dawn for cowardice. But if he remained, whether it be by bullet, bomb, or gas, death would find him.
He had one chance: cross no-man’s-land and pray what was left of his battalion could break the enemy line. Clutching his rifle, the soldier climbed from his hiding place and rejoined the firefight. Seventy pounds of uniform, equipment, ammunition, and weapons slowed his pace, and the muddy battlefield tripped up his steps, but the soldier pressed forward. He took cover behind sparse trees, stripped of bark and limbs by bullets and blasts. He ducked into craters to shield himself from the shrapnel of mortar- and artillery-shell blasts, but he never stopped. To stop was to die.
The enemy increased their fire as the battalion neared their trenches. The young soldier’s ears rang with the deafening blasts. Through the eyepieces of his mask, he squinted against the blinding flash of artillery shells exploding and spotted the front-line trenches and helmeted heads of the enemy. The soldier aimed his rifle at a machine gunner and pulled the trigger. He didn’t wait for the man to fall before running forward and aiming his rifle at another German soldier.
As he pulled the trigger, an explosion ripped into the ground before him. The blast tore his rifle from his hands and heaved him into the air. He slammed back to the battlefield with teeth-shattering force. His lungs seized, and his vision blurred. The world around him faded. The gunfire and screams evaporated, and the ringing in his ears quieted, until all that remained was the frantic, uneven beat of his own heart.
It was the last sound he heard.
EIGHT
BAGGER LED THE boys back to their dugout, where the three men they’d left sleeping now sat around their makeshift table, drinking tea, smoking, and playing cards.
“’Bout time you got back, Bagger,” said a large man. He had long auburn sideburns, a scattering of teeth, and no neck. His voice grated through his throat like a spade against gravel. “Where’s Max?”
“He’s running messages,” Bagger replied.
“Command better not wear him out. We need him well rested for later.”
“Don’t you worry about Max. He’ll be ready.”
“He better be.” The large man motioned to the empty chair beside him. “We’re getting ready to play pontoon. You in?”
“No chance, Mole. You chaps took all my earnings last time we played. I’ve got nothin’ to wager.”
George stepped forward. “I do.” He reached in his pocket and threw a couple of shillings into the small pile on the table, eager for a bit of card-playing to relax—and to relieve these fellows of their money.
“Who are these lads?” asked a slip of a man with watery eyes magnified by lenses twice the width of George’s thumb.
Bagger motioned to the boys. “Say hello to our new attached infantry, Bats. Hellfire Jack thinks we need a few more beasts of burden.” He glanced back at Frederick. “Though I don’t think Eton here’s seen much burden in his life.”
Frederick’s nostrils flared with indignation, but he kept quiet.
“These boys will be hauling clay and timber and shadowing us while they learn the ropes,” Bagger continued.
Mole pushed back from the table. “Beasts of burden? More like babes of burden.” He circled the boys in slow, disapproving steps before stopping in front of Thomas. “How old are you, lad?”
“Eighteen.”
Mole leaned down so he was eye to eye with Thomas. When Thomas didn’t step back or look away, he smiled with the same crooked grin, sparse teeth, and glint in his eyes as the jack-o’-lanterns Thomas and James used to carve from turnips and potatoes to scare their little sisters. “Eighteen what? Months?”
“Let ’im be, Mole,” Bagger said, waving him back to the table. “If Hellfire Jack’s not questioning his age, neither are we. Besides, we need all the help we can get. I was in a meeting at the command center with Major-General Harington and the other crew leaders before picking up these lads. Jones’s crew is almost finished with the Kruisstraat Four chamber, which leaves only Banning’s crew working on the Ontario Farm gallery and us.”
“If Jones’s crew is almost done, why doesn’t command send us their tunnelers?” Bats asked as he shuffled the cards.
“They’re being sent to Vimy along with most of the hundred and seventy-fifth to help the French with dugouts for the Second Army.”
Bats passed Mole the deck. “So we’re to finish two galleries and chambers while Banning’s crew just has one to dig?”
“Major-General Harington ordered that we abandon the Wytschaete Wood chamber, so we’re down to one.”
Mole slammed a hand on the table, causing Charlie to jump back. “What? Why?”
“There’s not enough time to finish both,” Bagger explained. “He wants us to focus on finishing the gallery and chamber at Maedelstede Farm. It’s a race to the finish line, chaps, and we’re currently losing.”
“Not exactly a fair race when our gallery has to be almost one hundred and ten yards longer than Banning’s,” Mole grumbled, “especially if they’re sending us children to help.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Bagger said. “Harington commanded that all twenty-four chambers be completed and ready by June, so we’re accepting any extra hands he sends our way.” He tossed a fleeting glance at Thomas. “Even if they are small.”
Thomas tucked his hands in his trouser pockets.
“What happens in June?” George asked, retrieving his two shillings and snatching an extra while the men weren’t looking.
“Nothing you need to know about now,” Bagger said. “You just concern yourselves with packing bags with clay, hauling the spoil up top, and keeping your mouths shut.”
“What are w
e digging all these tunnels and chambers for anyway?” Frederick asked. “Coal?”
The men laughed.
“Coal?” Mole said. “Under no-man’s-land? No. We’re the Allies’ first line of defense and offense.”
“It was my understanding the infantry was the army’s first line of defense and offense in the war,” Frederick said.
Bagger shook his head. “Eton, we could fill a million graves with what boarding-school soldiers think they know about this war.”
Mole sat back and smiled.
“But for now,” Bagger added, “all you need to know is that down here, you follow my orders and obey my rules.” He ticked them off on his beefy fingers. “No talking in the lower galleries. Between shifts, sleep is not optional. Tired tunnelers make mistakes, and down here, mistakes cost lives. In the dugout, no cheating at cards or stealing.” He gave George a hard look and held out his hand. A blush tinted George’s freckled cheeks as he fished the extra shilling from his pocket and dropped it into Bagger’s open palm. The crew leader tossed the coin onto the pile on the table. “And lastly, you can go in the reserve and support trenches, but stay away from the front-line trenches. There’s a reason we had spots to fill on our crew, and it’s not because the lads before you were promoted.”
The smirk that had remained on Mole’s face as Bagger lectured the boys disappeared at the mention of their former crew members.
“Follow my rules, and we’ll get along fine,” Bagger said. “Break them, and I’ll have you transferred from my crew and Ypres Salient. You’ll be digging trenches in France before you can utter ‘I’m sorry.’” He leaned forward. “Have I made myself clear?”
The boys nodded.
“Now that that’s settled, what do you lads bring to our merry crew?” asked the fourth clay kicker, a short stump of a man with more hair coating his knuckles and arms and sprouting from under his shirt collar than on his head. He held a pipe firmly between his teeth. Only his lips moved when he spoke. “Any of you have mining experience?”