Secret Soldiers

by Keely Hutton

  “There’s no time. You are the help.” Water lapped over George’s lips, and he began to choke. “Try again,” he said between coughs.

  “The water’s coming too fast.” Frederick looked back in the direction of the shaft. In school, he’d been taught that junior officers were the first over the top and the last to retreat, but Frederick had no choice: George needed more help than he could offer, and if he stayed, they’d both drown. “Keep trying to work your foot free. I have to get help.”

  “No!” George lunged in the direction of Frederick’s voice. “Please don’t leave me here!” His fingers grasped at Frederick’s shirt, but Frederick splashed out of reach. “Eton!”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t do it by myself. I’ll be back with help. I promise.”

  As Frederick swam back to the shaft, he heard George scream one word.

  “Coward!”

  And then he heard nothing at all.

  * * *

  At the other end of the tunnel, Thomas had freed Poppy from her submerged birdcage and swum for the shaft, where Charlie stood on the third rung of the ladder. “Take her,” Thomas said, handing Charlie the canary.

  Clinging to the ladder with one hand, Charlie stroked Poppy’s wet feathers, and the little bird released a string of loud chirps. As Thomas turned back toward the tunnel face, Frederick lunged from the water with a desperate gasp and grabbed hold of the ladder.

  Hunched over and pulling in fast, greedy breaths, he pointed back down the tunnel. “George’s foot is trapped. Hurry.”

  Before Thomas or Charlie could respond, Frederick dove back under.

  “Go up and get Bagger and the others,” Thomas told Charlie. “Tell them George is in trouble.” Taking a deep breath, he followed Frederick.

  When they found George, he was no longer fighting to get free. The chamber had flooded, and his body floated motionless beneath Thomas’s hands. Thomas feared they were too late. Pushing the thought aside, Thomas dove down and clawed at the clay trapping George’s foot, tearing away chunks and pushing aside heavy slabs while Frederick pulled at George’s leg, moving it back and forth to help dislodge it. Thomas’s chest burned. Frederick and he would need air soon, but to get any, they’d have to swim back to the ladder, and any chance of saving George would be lost.

  Thomas dug faster and harder, ignoring the cramping in his muscles. Though he couldn’t see Frederick, he could feel his frantic tugs on George’s leg. Just as Thomas began to fear all three of them would drown under no-man’s-land, he felt the clay around George’s leg give way. So did Frederick, who yanked the leg free. Wasting no time, the boys grabbed George’s limp arms and kicked with their waning strength for the ladder.

  When the two boys reached the rungs, pulling George along with them, large hands grabbed hold of their arms and hauled all three of them up the ladder. Mole laid George’s unconscious body on the floorboards of the upper gallery. George’s head hit the board with a dull thud. Clutching Poppy, Charlie winced at the sound, but George did not move.

  * * *

  George’s last word echoed in Frederick’s memory. George was right. He was a coward. A real soldier would have fought harder to free George’s foot before the water filled the mine. A real soldier would have stayed with his comrade until help arrived. A real soldier would have stayed even if help had never arrived. But Frederick was no real soldier.

  He backed away from the group while the others huddled around Mole. The clay kicker took George by the shoulders and shook him. “Come on, Shillings! Wake up!”

  George’s head lolled to the side. His eyes remained closed, and his lips fell open.

  “Is he breathing?” Bagger asked.

  Mole placed a large hand on George’s chest and shook his head.

  Holding Poppy, Charlie began to pace while Thomas stood behind Mole, clutching his medals and whispering the Our Father.

  “Come on, George,” Bats whispered. “Breathe.”

  Mole and Bagger each grabbed one of George’s arms and legs. Holding his limp body between them, they lifted his legs toward the ceiling, so his head hung just above the floor. Securing their grip, they shook George up and down three or four times. “You’re a scrapper, Shillings!” Mole said. “You’re not going to let a little water claim you, are you? Bloody breathe!” He pounded a fist on George’s chest.

  The jostling shook water and sand free from George’s mouth and nose. He suddenly sucked in a sharp breath, and his eyes sprang open. He coughed violently, choking on the sand and water swamping his lungs. Mole and Bagger quickly eased him onto the floor, and Thomas sank against the wall.

  “That’s it, Shillings,” Mole said, slapping his back. “You’re all right.”

  George continued to cough, spewing water on the floorboards. “What happened?” he asked, when at last he found his breath.

  “The tunnel face collapsed and trapped your foot,” Thomas said. “We thought you’d drowned.”

  “You did drown,” Bagger said. “When we pulled you from the mine, you were as lifeless as a corpse. But it takes more than a little water to stop us, eh, Shillings?”

  “You’re lucky your mates got you out when they did,” Boomer added, mussing up George’s hair.

  George’s accusing gaze found Frederick standing back against the wall. “Yeah. Lucky.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  BAGGER ORDERED GEORGE to rest in the dugout while he and the others began the difficult task of sealing off the flooded chamber and section of the gallery with sandbags and a dam of steel mesh and concrete. Aside from Mole telling the boys the job would take several shifts and the help of rotating crews to complete, no one spoke as they worked. When the next crew arrived, Bagger and the other men headed into the trenches, while the boys shuffled back to the dugout. George was sleeping quietly when they arrived, so they ate in silence, too exhausted to form thoughts or words, and then they retired to their bunks.

  Thomas woke an hour later to the creak of George lowering himself off his bunk and the padding of his stockinged feet leaving the dugout. When George didn’t return after five minutes—the time it usually took him to smoke a cigarette—Thomas rolled off his bunk and went looking for him. He found George just outside the tunnel entrance, seated on the ground with his bony knees pulled to his chest and his face cradled in his hands.

  Thomas took a tentative step toward him. “George? Everything all right?”

  George lifted his head and looked up at Thomas. The confident smirk that normally curled his freckled lips sagged, and the mischievous glint that always shone from his green eyes had dimmed. “I’m alive, which is as good as it gets out here, eh, Tommy?” He took a cigarette and match from his pocket. Cuts and splinters from clawing at the timbers in his desperate attempt to escape the flooded tunnel covered his hands. On his right hand, the nail of his pointer finger was missing. He tried to strike the match against a floorboard but dropped it when his raw fingers grated against the wood.

  Thomas picked up the match, struck it on a beam, and lit George’s cigarette.

  George took a long drag and let his head fall back against the sandbags. “Thanks.”

  “What are you doing out here?” Thomas asked, sitting down beside him.

  George stared unblinking at the opposite wall. “I couldn’t sleep, and that is crazy because I don’t think I’ve ever been more tired, which if you knew my life, is saying a lot.”

  “It’s not crazy. After my carbon monoxide poisoning, I couldn’t sleep either,” Thomas admitted. “I was afraid if I closed my eyes, I’d never wake up. I guess it’s normal to fear death. Everyone does.”

  “Not me.” No pride or arrogance bolstered George’s claim. He stated the words as calmly as if he’d just told Thomas the sky was blue. “Only people like you, who have something to lose, fear death.”

  Thomas remembered the small potato he’d carried in his pocket from Dover to Trafalgar Square on the day he’d met George. If George hadn’t convinced him to meet Norton-Griffith’s
recruiter, Thomas might have starved on the streets of London. “I’m a coal miner from Dover. I’ve never had much to lose.”

  The tip of George’s cigarette glowed bright red as he pulled another drag deep into his lungs. “You have everything, and you don’t even know it. You should go home to your family while you still can. Leave before this war kills you, Thomas.”

  George’s use of his real name cut through Thomas with a chill, more disturbing than his warning of the possibility that the war would claim his life. He clutched his saints medals. He wanted to believe they would keep him safe and help him find James, but each night in the tunnels and every day in the trenches carved away at the foundation of his faith, inch by inch, until all that remained now was a gutted hole, cold and empty. He traced the raised image of Saint Joseph with his thumb. “I can’t. Not until I’ve found my brother.”

  George turned to Thomas. “You’ve almost died twice already. What if you coming here to find your brother ends with your parents mourning two sons?”

  Thomas shook his head. “It won’t. I will find him. And I won’t die.”

  “And if you don’t find him? And if you do die?”

  The questions had scratched at Thomas’s thoughts night and day since Johnny had shown him the bodies of missing soldiers strewn across no-man’s-land, but hearing them spoken aloud by George gave his own doubts a voice he could no longer dismiss or ignore.

  “You know the chances of your brother having survived this war are about as good as our chances of surviving it,” George said, “which, if you haven’t noticed, are getting slimmer by the minute.”

  Thomas tucked the medals under his shirt. “I have to find him, George.”

  George sighed. “I know, and I hope you do.”

  Silence hung between them like the smoke lingering around George’s head.

  Thomas combed his fingers through his hair. “What about you? Isn’t there anyone in London wondering where you are?”

  “Aside from the men I owe money?” George shook his head. “No. I’m sure no one’s even noticed I’m gone. You could have let me drown in that tunnel today, and no one would have mourned my death.”

  An aftershock of the panic Thomas had felt when Mole had said George wasn’t breathing shuddered through him. He’d come to not only rely on George, but to trust him with his life. “That’s not true.”

  “That’s nice of you to say, but let’s be honest, if I die under this godforsaken battlefield, no brother will come looking for me. No father will bring my body home. No mother will cry over my grave. I will leave this world the same way I came into it, forgotten.” His voice weakened as the truth in his words settled heavy around them. “But in the end, aren’t we all.”

  “You won’t be forgotten,” Thomas said as George stubbed out his cigarette. “I promise.”

  “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Tommy. Even in our crew, I wouldn’t be missed. Blimey, Eton would probably do a jig on my grave.”

  “Frederick doesn’t hate you as much as you think,” Thomas said. “If he did, he wouldn’t have helped save you today.”

  George chuckled, but there was no hint of humor in the sound. “Save me? How? By abandoning me in a flooded chamber and telling you I was trapped as he scurried up the ladder like the rat he is?”

  “Frederick didn’t abandon you. He was the one who helped me free your leg and swim you to the ladder.”

  George stared at Thomas as though he were waiting for the punch line. “Wait. You’re serious? Eton came back for me?”

  Thomas nodded. “I told you, if you’d died, you’d have been missed, even by Frederick.”

  George shook his head in disbelief. “Tommy, you and I both know, whether I survive this war or not, when it’s all over, everyone will go back to their lives and families and not spare another thought on me.”

  “That’s not true.” Thomas looked George in the eyes. “I promise.”

  “Do you promise to have a memorial made for me if I don’t survive this bloody war?”

  “You’re not going to die.”

  “Answer the question, Tommy.”

  “Yes, I promise to make a memorial for you.”

  “Really? And what name will you write on it?”

  “George.”

  “George what?”

  Thomas started to answer and then stopped. When George decided to join Norton-Griffith’s recruits, he’d told the man in the bowler hat his name was Georgie Porgie. They’d had a good laugh at the joke at the time, but Thomas no longer found it funny. The truth was, he didn’t know George’s real last name. No one did. Not even George.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “DO YOU KNOW your name?” a voice thick with a German accent asked. Fingers snapped inches from the young soldier’s ear. “Can you hear me?”

  The soldier pretended not to hear the sharp sound or the doctor’s questions. The constant ringing in his ears had gradually quieted over his weeks spent in the German field hospital. Its absence had revealed other sounds.

  The steady clomp of military boots on the stone floor.

  The scrape of medical instruments on metal trays.

  The anemic, rattling coughs of gas victims.

  The terrified screams of patients in the throes of night terrors.

  The soft, soothing hum of his nurse as she changed his bandages.

  Voices with different accents—British, French, Canadian, Belgian, Australian—crying out from their beds, begging for help.

  The young soldier stared at the hospital bed to his right and the sheet draped over the face of the man lying there. The Australian soldier was the bed’s eighth occupant since the young soldier had realized the hands that were nursing him back to health were not friendly. As the doctor continued to ask him questions and he continued to feign deafness, two medics removed the body, and a nurse changed the sheets in preparation for the bed’s next occupant.

  The German doctor leaned closer and asked his questions again, this time slower and louder, but the young soldier wasn’t listening. His thoughts were with the dead Australian. Would his body be returned to his troops to be transported home for a proper burial? Or would it be hastily dumped in an unmarked grave on foreign soil or discarded like rubbish in a field for wild animals to find?

  These thoughts had become as routine as the nurse checking his vitals and the doctor asking him questions, and just like the seven times before, his wondering about the fate of the former occupant of the bed to his right led him to ponder his own fate should he die as a prisoner of war. He knew he’d taken a risk volunteering to fight in the war, but he’d assumed that should he die in battle, his remains would be recovered by his comrades and returned to his family, who would bury him near the cliffs of Dover, where they could visit his grave. The thought, though frightening, had given him a small sense of peace about his decision. That sense of peace no longer existed.

  A primal scream ricocheted off the stone walls of the church the Germans had converted into a hospital. The young soldier’s head snapped in the direction of the scream.

  Four beds over, a Canadian soldier, the victim of a mustard-gas attack, had bolted upright in bed. His arms swung out wildly, striking a nurse who’d been treating the pus-yellow boils covering his arms and face. The impact of the strike threw her to the ground.

  “Over the top, boys!” the patient screamed, climbing off the bed.

  The young soldier had heard talk of soldiers whose bodies returned from battle, but not their minds. There was little help and even less sympathy for those suffering shell shock. Watching the Canadian belly-crawl between two beds, the young soldier was certain the other man’s wide, unblinking eyes no longer saw a hospital room. He saw no-man’s-land, and he was fighting for his life.

  The doctor rushed forward with a syringe of morphine to sedate the Canadian. The prisoner lunged at him, and chaos erupted as they wrestled for the needle. With another guttural scream, the prisoner threw the doctor to the floor. Medical staff
rushed to help their injured colleagues and calm agitated patients. The prisoner plowed through the main aisle, knocking over everyone and everything in his path. A German officer stood at the church’s one exit, blocking the man’s escape.

  “Halt!” he ordered as the prisoner barreled toward him. He pulled a revolver from the holster hugging his chest and aimed.

  “No!” the young soldier screamed as the shot punctured the bedlam in the hospital.

  The prisoner’s head jerked back, and his body collapsed in a heap on the floor. His boil-covered face came to rest at a crooked angle. Blood pooled around his head, and his lifeless eyes stared at the young soldier, burning in his memory, joining the others.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  FOLLOWING A RESTLESS six hours of sleep, riddled with nightmares of flooded galleries and nameless graves, Thomas pulled on his boots and stood to join Charlie, Max, and George for their daily search of the trenches before their next shift. They were exiting the dugout when George stopped at the doorway. “You coming, Eton?”

  The men looked up from their card game. Their curious gazes traveled from George to Frederick, seated on his bunk. Charlie braced himself for the snide remark Frederick would make before returning to his writing, but Frederick closed his book and silently followed George out of the tunnels.

  No more invitations were extended after the first. None were needed. Charlie drew an extra sketch of James, and Frederick joined the boys every morning on their search of the trenches. After their first outing together, he brought along his notebook and jotted down information he thought might be important.

  When the boys returned to their dugout after their third outing, Frederick reviewed his notes. “From the soldiers we’ve questioned, we can rule out James being along this stretch of the front any time after their arrival in December.”