Mole checked his watch. “I guess we’ll find out one way or another in three hours.”

After the boys had gathered their meager belongings, Boomer left to speak with two of the other crew leaders who, like him, had been tasked with pushing the plungers that would detonate the mines.

“How can he be so calm about all this?” Charlie asked Thomas.

“He knows we’ve done all we can to make sure this mission is successful. All we can do now is wait.”

The dugout trembled beneath another wave of shelling.

“Well, I, for one, am not waiting down here,” George said, slinging his kit bag over his shoulder. “Think I’ll go scrounge up some food in the reserve trenches.”

Max jumped off Thomas’s lap at the word food and followed him to the doorway.

“I’ll join you,” Frederick said, packing up the last of his books. “All this sitting around and waiting is making me nervous.”

“You chaps coming?” George asked Charlie and Thomas.

“I have a few things left to pack,” Thomas said.

“Me too,” Charlie said, taking down the framed sketches of Bagger and Bats and placing them carefully in his bag.

“If we can’t find you in the reserve trenches,” Thomas said, “we’ll meet you at the corner of the support and communication trenches. That should be a safe enough distance from the mine blasts to watch the assault.”

“Sounds like a plan,” George said. “How about you, Mole?”

“What?” Mole said, angling his right ear to better hear.

“Are you coming with us?” George yelled.

Mole shook his head. “I’ll grab some food after the dugout’s cleared and then join Boomer at the top of the shaft to count down until zero hour. We’ll see you boys in the reserve trenches after the show.”

“Good luck, sir,” Frederick said.

Mole smiled. “You too, Eton.”

Thomas watched as Frederick and George exited the dugout with Max trotting along at George’s heels.

Five minutes later, Charlie and Thomas finished packing their belongings and told Mole they’d see him up top after the mines fired.

As they made their way through the gallery to the tunnel entrance, Thomas imagined the thousands of unsuspecting German soldiers across no-man’s-land, sleeping in their dugouts and trenches, yards above one million pounds of explosives. The more he thought about the surprise attack they would soon unleash on the enemy, the more he wondered if the German miners hadn’t executed a similar plan. Staring down at the worn boards lining the gallery floor, Thomas quickened his pace, suddenly worried that at any moment the earth beneath him might explode. Anxious paranoia hummed through his body. He pushed thoughts of the impending explosions and the battle that would follow from his mind and thought about Charlie’s decision to return home after the war to help his brother. He knew James had planned to return home after the war to help Thomas start their shipping business. They’d had so many dreams for their future, but then James went missing, leaving Thomas with only a battered family picture and a Saint Joseph medal to remember him by.