Contents (45)
- DULCE ET DECORUM EST
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- EPILOGUE
- AUTHOR’S NOTE
- ABOUT THE AUTHOR
- CONTENTS
Boomer rushed over to his apprentice’s side. George, Mole, and Bagger joined him, but Frederick’s attention remained fixed on Charlie, whose trembling finger pointed to the birdcage behind him and the lifeless canary lying on the cage floor.
SEVENTEEN
OUTSIDE THE TUNNEL, Thomas woke to Bagger shaking him so hard his teeth chattered. Pain throbbed through his head with every violent jostle.
“Please stop. I’m all right.” His voice echoed through his skull, sharpening the dull edges of the growing ache.
Despite Thomas’s insistence that he just needed to rest, the old clay kicker carried him to a Regimental Aid Post in a reserve trench dugout to be examined by a medic. The doctor was busy patching up injured soldiers and returning them to the trenches or, for the more serious cases, sending them on to the Advanced Dressing Station for further treatment.
When Bagger explained that Thomas had been exposed to carbon monoxide, the doctor ordered that he be taken to the ADS in an abandoned church in the village of Ypres for examination. Thomas claimed he could make the walk himself, but the doctor ordered two stretcher bearers to carry Thomas. George, Charlie, and Max accompanied their friend to the church, while Bagger returned to the tunnels to help the next crew seal off the leak by filling in the hole Thomas had drilled.
During the two-mile walk to the village, waves of dizziness and the rocking motion of the stretcher tempted Thomas to close his eyes and sleep, but his close call in the tunnel resurrected long-buried nightmares of men dying in the coal mines and sparked renewed fear that Thomas would one day die the same way, without warning, beneath the ground. To stay awake and avoid revisiting those fears, he focused on George’s voice regaling the soldiers carrying Thomas’s stretcher with tall tales Thomas could now recite as he watched the scenery slide by on both sides of the dirt road.
Three weeks earlier, when Thomas and the other boys had arrived at the Poperinge train station and marched the muddy roads to the Allied trenches, darkness had hidden the towns between the train station and the battlefront. Now, as he was carried through Ypres, the early-morning sun exposed the Belgian village caught in the war’s crosshairs.
Ypres lay in ruins. Medieval structures that had stood tall and strong against time and weather for hundreds of years, had bowed down beneath two years of artillery fire. Crumbling walls, mountains of rubble, abandoned homes, and charred building frames were all that remained. As they neared the ruined church, Thomas gripped his medals and said a prayer that the recent zeppelin strikes over Dover had spared his home and family such devastation.
The church buzzed with voices and movement. Where pews once held worshippers, now hundreds of cots held ailing, injured, and dying soldiers. Damaged statues of Jesus, Mary, and several saints kept a silent vigil over the soldiers as field doctors and nurses, with red crosses stitched on the fronts of their white smocks, tended to patients. While Thomas waited to be examined, the morning sun peeked through the large, round stained-glass window behind the altar and above the sacristy. Its rays broke through the glass, scattering colors across the church floor.