“What’d you do before joining up, lad?”

“I was a student. At Eton, sir.”

Bagger shook his head. “Thought so. Well, Eton—”

“It’s Frederick, sir.”

Bagger scratched at the gray stubble peppering his cheeks and chin. “Out here, you’ll answer to whatever I call you.” He looked past Frederick to address all four new recruits. “Understand?”

“Yes, Bagger,” George and Tommy answered. Mouse nodded.

“Understand, Eton?” Bagger stared at Frederick, waiting for his response.

Frederick pursed his lips, fighting the urge to explain the importance of military protocol and decorum to the man standing before him, but decided it wiser to save his breath for a real army leader. “Yes, Bagger.”

“Good.” Bagger waved a beefy hand behind him. “Welcome to your new home, boys.”

Frederick looked around at the narrow trench. Sleeping soldiers already occupied the shallow benches and dugouts.

“Are we to take over the next shift, Bagger, sir? Will we be using their weapons?” He held up his burlap sack. “Is that what these are for? For keeping the rifles dry when we aren’t fighting?”

Bagger laughed. “Didn’t Hellfire Jack’s recruiters tell you? You’re not here to fight on the front line.”

He grabbed Frederick’s shoulder and shoved him toward a narrow entrance in the trench wall.

“You’re here to work under them.”

The boys stopped at a doorway framed with thick lumber beams and peered inside. Wooden planks, wedged into the angled clay floor, led to a dimly lit tunnel carved into the ground separating the support trenches, the second line of Allied trenches, and the front line.

Bagger motioned the four young recruits down the hole. “Welcome to the clay kickers, boys!”

SIX

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.