Secret Soldiers

by Keely Hutton

  Boomer laughed. “Who’d have thought the Great War would be in the filthy hands of a bunch of clay kickers and miners?”

  “Certainly not any of your school chums, eh, Eton?” Mole tossed a biscuit at Frederick’s chest. It bounced off and landed on the dugout floor. Max scurried off Thomas’s lap and snatched it up before Frederick could retrieve it. “All these weeks you’ve been moping about, wishing you were on the front line, fighting like a real soldier. And all this time, you were a real soldier.”

  “I’m not a real soldier,” Frederick said.

  “Sure you are,” Mole said. “We all are. We just can’t tell anyone.”

  “We’re secret soldiers,” George said with a smile.

  “And if we fail?” Charlie asked, speaking for the first time since they’d entered the dugout.

  Bagger finished the last of his tea and placed his cup back on the table with a loud thud. “Failure is not our mission.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  HIS CARETAKER’S hands became the only proof that a world existed beyond the darkness and silence. They soothed the young soldier when he woke in a cold sweat, screaming for help. They stayed to wipe his tears and hold his hand when he couldn’t forget or stop crying.

  After one such episode, the hands slowly unwound a strip of cloth encircling the soldier’s head. Dull light filtered through his closed eyelids, and fingers gently pried open one eye and then the other. A blinding light flitted between them. The young soldier yanked his face away, and the bright light disappeared, but it took several minutes and many rapid blinks to clear the tears and spots crowding his vision. He shielded his stinging eyes with an unsteady hand to take in his surroundings for the first time.

  Everything appeared unfocused, like the world had been submerged in cloudy water, but the young soldier’s weak eyes could make out shapes and shadows. Dozens of medical beds, identical to the one he lay on, crowded a narrow room with a vaulted ceiling. Patients occupied every bed. He didn’t recognize the field hospital. Its stone walls didn’t match his memory of the medical hospital behind Allied lines, where he’d often visited sick and wounded comrades. His heart raced. Where was he, and who had brought him to this strange place?

  He squinted, trying to focus his vision enough to see anything familiar. The frightened eyes of the man in the next bed captured the young soldier’s blurry gaze. Beefy red burns distorted the man’s features, and the young soldier wondered if he’d known the man. Had they charged across no-man’s-land together? Had he been standing near the man when the artillery shell hit?

  The man spoke, but the soldier heard only the low buzzing always humming in his ears. He tried to read the man’s charred, swollen lips, but their movement was too fast and frantic to follow.

  I’m sorry, he mouthed, and then turned away, shaken by the thought that the artillery blast might have left him looking just as monstrous. He reached up and touched his face. His nose felt swollen and tender beneath his fingers, and a sticky trail of small, raised bumps ran across his forehead like tiny, crooked train tracks. He focused on the fuzzy silhouettes of nurses and doctors weaving between hospital beds, checking vitals and administering drugs in the form of pills and through syringes. His anxiety eased with the care with which the medics treated their patients. No matter where he was, he was in kind, capable hands.

  A prism of soft light spilled through a window behind the soldier’s bed. He lifted his arm and watched the rainbow of colors glide across his hand, and a weak smile twitched on his lips. He didn’t know where he was or the extent of his injuries, but he did know one thing. He had crossed the dark abyss. He had survived no-man’s-land, and once he fully regained his sight, hearing, and strength, he would never have to step foot on another battlefield. He would keep his promise and return home to his family.

  No longer able to hold up his arm, he let it fall to his chest. A nurse rushed over, her brow lined with concern. He studied her as she checked his forehead. Dark shadows, hollowed from endless hours of caring for the injured, outlined kind hazel eyes in a soft, pretty face. Long blond hair hid in the coil of a tight bun tucked beneath her white nurse’s cap. A few strands had fallen loose and hung down her slender neck in lazy curls. She smiled when she caught him staring. He knew he should look away. It was not polite to stare, but he couldn’t stop. He was desperate to memorize every line and curve of her face, hoping it would join the others in his sleep. Praying it would bring him comfort in his nightmares.

  Her lips moved. He shook his head and pointed to his ears. Giving him an understanding pat on his shoulder, she took hold of his hand. He smiled, grateful for her kindness, but his smile fell when she reached for a needle. He shook his head.

  “No!” The word clawed through his throat as he pulled his hand away. The nurse turned and called out to someone. Seconds later, a doctor grabbed hold of the soldier’s arm and pinned it down. The soldier struggled to pull free, but the doctor tightened his grip. The young soldier stared up at the nurse, his eyes begging her not to put him back to sleep. With a sympathetic smile, she pressed the needle into a vein in his arm and depressed the plunger.

  One heartbeat. Two heartbeats. Three.

  The morphine loosened fear’s grip on the soldier’s muscles and tugged at his eyelids, dragging him back into the darkness. At least this time, the soldier thought, I know I’m safe. Soon, I’ll be better, and they’ll let me go home to my family.

  Comforted by this thought, he stopped fighting sleep, but before his eyes fluttered closed, they landed on a medal pinned to the doctor’s uniform. The young soldier’s drugged mind screamed in recognition of its blackened center and silver trim. He had seen it on no-man’s-land—pinned to the uniforms of the enemy. The Iron Cross.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  FOLLOWING THOMAS’S CLOSE call, Bagger had insisted the crew carry their gas masks in the galleries at all times. Before shifts, he ran drills to test how fast the boys could secure them. The masks were cumbersome. The eyepieces offered limited range of vision, and the heavy material, though effective at keeping out poisonous gas, also trapped the wearer’s breath, turning the air inside the mask hot, humid, and foul. When not wearing the masks, the crew carried them in pouches strapped around their waists. The large pouches impeded their movement in the tight confines of the galleries. After Thomas’s pouch caught on a beam and came unfastened during a shift, he tossed it in the corner, out of the way, but still in reach.

  “Dover, where’s your mask?” Bagger hissed in Thomas’s ear.

  Thomas pointed to the abandoned pack.

  “Get it on, now.”

  “It’s too big. It keeps falling off.”

  “Now,” Bagger grunted before handing Thomas a full sandbag.

  By early May, the Kruisstraat Four chamber was completed and charged, leaving only the Ontario Farm and Maedelstede Farm mines unfinished. After nearly two years of digging, the Allied tunnels spread out like fingers burrowing beneath the battlefield, the hands of the Grim Reaper, reaching for the enemy, waiting to deliver death’s touch. The clock ticked down with every press of the spade. Second by second. Inch by inch. The crew clawed their way toward the enemy line. Always listening.

  For the warning scratch of picks and the muffled voices of the enemy whispering orders in foreign tongues and digging toward their position.

  For artillery fire that might tear through the fragile ceiling of dirt, sand, water, and clay above their heads.

  For the hush of death that would suffocate Poppy’s reassuring chirp and steal into their lungs on every labored breath.

  They were grave diggers, but the farther they crept beneath no-man’s-land, the deeper uncertainty crept into Thomas’s weary mind. Were they digging their enemies’ graves or their own? As they inched closer to the German trenches, he worried they were digging both.

  * * *

  The crew made good progress on the new gallery until late one shift when Bats heard the scratch of picks and the scrape of shovels on the other si
de of the wall where they were working.

  “They’re trying to undermine us,” he whispered to Bagger. “If we keep on our projected path, they’ll intercept us by the week’s end.”

  “We’ll angle our dig a bit higher,” Bagger said, “but we have to stay in the clay and we have to gain enough distance to avoid a breakthrough, or we’ll be fighting them in these here tunnels, which is a fight I’m not looking to have.”

  The rest agreed. Guns were not an option underground, where the firing of one bullet in such an enclosed space would put the whole crew in danger of carbon monoxide poisoning. Not even Mole, with all his big talk about what he’d do to the enemy should they ever come face-to-face, liked the idea of hand-to-hand combat in a dark space with barely enough room to swing a pick, much less a punch. They worked in tense silence, widening the distance between them and the sound of the Germans closing in on their position. After a couple of days, the scratch of enemy picks and the scrape of enemy shovels grew fainter. When Bats felt they’d evaded danger, they turned their tunnel forward again toward the enemy trenches.

  After a week of digging, Bagger signaled them to stop. They were below enemy lines. He motioned for Mole to start widening the end of the gallery to carve out a chamber that, when finished, would be packed with explosives, creating a time bomb buried deep beneath the feet of the unsuspecting German soldiers huddled in their trenches.

  While Bats listened for the enemy, Mole and Bagger worked the tunnel face, and Boomer and the boys removed bags of spoil and placed timber beams. Focusing on the top corners of the face, Mole kicked the spade into the clay and pressed down with his feet to work the clay free. As he pulled back, sand and water gushed from the narrow cut.

  He scrambled up from his board. Everyone stopped their work and watched as Mole and Bagger rushed to plug the hole with the slab of clay they’d just removed, but wet sand continued to seep in around the edges of the cut.

  Frederick dropped the beam he and George were carrying and stepped back as a growing puddle of water crept toward his stockinged feet.

  In sharp, urgent hand gestures, Bagger signaled for Thomas and Charlie to bring him the full sandbag they’d been carrying to the shaft ladder.

  Thomas and Charlie rushed forward with the bag, which Mole tore open. The kicker shoved two slabs of spoil into the boys’ hands. “Plug the holes,” he whispered.

  The boys obeyed without question, frantically pressing chunks of clay into the widening cracks outlining the cut, but water and sand continued to leak from the tunnel face.

  George and Frederick sprinted to the shaft to retrieve more bags to help. Hoisting two full bags of spoil they’d left by the ladder onto their shoulders, they hurried back, splashing through the rising water that was cresting above their ankles. They squeezed in beside Charlie and Thomas, dropped the bags at the tunnel face, and started packing the hole. Poppy chirped and flapped in her cage on the floor. Gently stroking the agitated canary’s head, Charlie lifted her cage from the water and hung it from an exposed nail on the shaft’s entrance before returning to help the other boys.

  “It’s not working,” George whispered, as a jet of water sprayed out from the hole.

  Max barked and bit at the stream.

  Bagger scooped up Max and clamped a hand over the dog’s muzzle. With Max silenced, Bagger removed his hand and motioned for the men in his crew to join him at the base of the shaft.

  Thomas inched closer to overhear their urgent whispers.

  “There’s too much pressure behind those leaks,” Mole said. “Packing them with clay is a temporary fix at best.”

  “The section’s a loss,” Boomer added. “Even if we stop the flow, we can’t dig any farther. We angled too high and broke back through the water table.”

  Bagger kicked at the water creeping up the cuffs of his trousers. “So we abandon the chamber?”

  “Not until we stop the water,” Boomer said. “If we don’t, this whole gallery will flood.”

  “We’ve got to dam it,” Bats said. “We’ll need enough bags to wall off the face.”

  Scratching his mustache, Bagger glanced back to where the other boys stood at the tunnel face as he considered the men’s assessment of the situation. Inhaling deeply, he nodded and then signaled to the men to climb the shaft to the upper gallery to fetch more filled sandbags. Once Mole, Bats, and Boomer had started their ascent, Bagger grabbed hold of the ladder to heft himself onto the bottom rung. Thomas moved to follow, but the crew leader held up a hand to stop him. With Max tucked under one arm, Bagger shook his head, jabbed a finger at Thomas and then pointed toward the other boys waiting at the tunnel face before pressing the finger to his lips. Though he didn’t speak a word, his orders were clear. Thomas and the boys were to stay in the chamber and keep the leaks as contained as possible, and they were to do so quietly.

  Max whimpered as Bagger hauled the dog up the shaft and into the upper gallery. Thomas watched with envy. He’d been caught before in a gallery that flooded back in Dover. It was not an experience he wished to repeat. Water was unforgiving in mines.

  When Thomas rejoined the boys at the tunnel face, Frederick lifted a soaked foot from the rising water. “So much for keeping our feet dry,” he whispered to Thomas.

  Thomas didn’t answer. Wet feet were the least of their worries. With the chamber flooded, they’d wasted days, if not weeks, of digging, but if they lost the gallery too, they’d be pushed further behind a deadline they were already struggling to meet. He passed Frederick another slab of clay, which Frederick pressed into a new crack. The plug held, and Frederick stepped back to scan the wall for any other leaks. Only the hole George struggled to plug remained.

  Charlie handed George the last slab in his sandbag. George pressed it into the growing cracks, but the water pressure eroded the edges. Chunks of clay broke free, and water gushed from a gaping hole, soaking his shirt and trousers. “Mouse!” he whispered through clenched teeth. “Tell Bagger we need those bags now!”

  Charlie hurried over to the shaft, but hesitated at the bottom of the ladder.

  Thomas grabbed George’s arm. He knew if the wall broke, the chamber and gallery would flood in seconds. They needed to escape before it was too late. He pulled on George’s arm and pointed to the shaft ladder, but George yanked his arm free and covered as much of the hole as he could with his hands. “Go,” he mouthed to Thomas. “Help Mouse.” He looked to Frederick. “You too.”

  Frederick squeezed in beside him and covered the rest of the hole with his hands. “This is no time to play the hero, George,” he whispered. “You need our help, or this wall will fall.”

  “I don’t need help,” George said, his whispers growing in volume and annoyance. “What I need is you to get those bloody bags down—”

  Before he could finish, the crumbling tunnel face collapsed. Water and sand surged through the opening, knocking the boys off their feet. Thomas tumbled end over end and slammed into one of the beams lining the tunnel wall. The force knocked the air from his lungs. He opened his eyes and tried to get his bearings, but the water had doused all light and sound in the tunnel. Finding his footing, he pushed off the floor, praying to find an air pocket near the ceiling.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  BARELY SIX INCHES remained between the tunnel ceiling and rising water. Thomas lifted his chin as high as he could and took a deep breath before his heavy clothes dragged him under again. He kicked harder, propelling himself upward to keep his face above the water. Unable to see in the darkness, he screamed for the others. “Charlie! Frederick!”

  “I’m here,” Frederick whispered, his voice so close Thomas flinched. “You shouldn’t scream. The Germans could hear you.”

  “Who cares? If they blast their way into this tunnel, they’ll drown with us,” Thomas said.

  “Fair point. Can you swim?”

  “Yes,” Thomas answered, thankful for the summer days James and he had snuck into St. Margaret’s Bay, where James taught Thomas how to sw
im. He kicked to keep his face in the shrinking pocket of air, and his nose scraped against a beam in the ceiling. He knew he should swim for the ladder, but he couldn’t leave the others behind. “Can you?”

  “Yes, and I can still stand.” Frederick pushed up on the tips of his toes to keep his face in the pocket. “But we’ve got to get out of this chamber before it fills.”

  “Where are George and Charlie?” Thomas asked, angling his head to lift an ear from the water to hear Frederick’s response.

  “Charlie!” Frederick yelled, no longer worried about the enemy hearing. “George!”

  The sound of loud, panicked splashing drew the boys’ heads in the direction of what had been the tunnel face.

  “Over here!” George yelled.

  His reply was echoed in the opposite direction, by the shaft. “Help!” Charlie called out with a gurgled plea. “Help!”

  “Get George,” Thomas ordered Frederick, realizing the Eton student’s size would help in rescuing George. “I’ll help Charlie.”

  With no time and little air left to argue, Frederick swam in the direction of George’s voice, careful to keep his arms stretched out in front of him, so he wouldn’t run face-first into George or a fallen beam. When his hands found George, Frederick lifted his face to the ceiling for air. “This way. Follow my voice.” He started back in the direction of the shaft, but George didn’t move.

  “Come on!” Frederick yelled.

  George answered from the darkness. “I can’t swim, and even if I could, half the tunnel face is on my right foot.”

  “You’re stuck?”

  The frustrated sigh that followed felt heavier in the darkness.

  “Right,” Frederick said. “I’ll swim down and see if I can free it.”

  George struggled to keep his face in the shrinking pocket of air. “Hurry. I can’t stretch any higher, and this water is rising fast.”

  Frederick ducked beneath the water. His hands followed the line of George’s leg until they reached the mound of clay and sand pinning George’s foot to the floor. He dug around his leg but couldn’t remove enough to free George. Unable to hold his breath any longer, he resurfaced. “I need to get help.”