Please, God, Thomas prayed. Let them point right.

As the line moved forward, his stomach complained with a deep growl. He reached into his coat pocket and grabbed the small potato his mother had given him before his eight-mile walk to the coal mine that morning. Despite its dusty, puckered skin and knotty bumps, Thomas hungered for it. His stomach grumbled again. If the men pointed left, the potato would be all that stood between him and starvation.

Timothy Bennett, March 1, 1899.

The month and day didn’t matter. Only the year. That was the cutoff. No exceptions—except for the exceptions. Tens of thousands of them, all over Britain. Boys who looked the part and memorized the correct year: 1899. Thomas repeated it again, not out of concern he’d forget, but out of determination that this time the lie would work. This time the recruiting officer would point right.

Thomas had already been rejected twice before reaching London. Once in Canterbury, when a miner from Dover recognized him entering a factory being used as a temporary recruitment office, and once in Rochester, when an officer told him the army didn’t have time for children wishing to play soldier. Each failure forced him to spend more of his shillings on another train ride, taking Thomas farther from home. If he was rejected again, he would never get back to Dover before his parents noticed he and the food money he’d borrowed for his train tickets were missing.

Guilt tightened around Thomas’s chest. He didn’t like disobeying his parents or taking what little money they’d saved, but after his brother had left to join the army and their father’s hours in the mine had been reduced due to his failing health, the pittance Thomas made as a pony driver at the mine didn’t put enough food on the table. His parents would be better off without another mouth to feed. Besides, he had to find James. The first and only letter they’d received from his brother stated he’d finished training and his unit was headed to the Western Front and a battlefield near the town of Ypres in western Belgium. He’d promised to send word again soon, but word never came.

When news of the Germans using poisonous gas on the Allied troops reached Dover, followed a month later by a B 104-83 form letter from the army stating that James was missing, Dad refused to discuss the matter, and Mum feared the worst and fell into deep despair. But Thomas knew there had to be another reason for his brother’s silence.

Perhaps he’d been captured by the enemy and was being held prisoner. Perhaps he was injured and lying unconscious in an Allied hospital. Or perhaps James was working as a spy and had been chosen for a secret mission, so all information regarding his whereabouts was classified.

There were many perhapses to consider, and Thomas was determined to rule out every single one before he’d consider the one he couldn’t bear to think of …