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 parapets. Those who escaped the first barrage climbed over those who didn’t and charged onto no-man’s-land.