“One million pounds,” Frederick repeated, sitting down next to Charlie.

“Now do you understand why we keep our mouths shut about our mission?” Bagger asked. “If we succeed, we could change the course of the war.”

Boomer laughed. “Who’d have thought the Great War would be in the filthy hands of a bunch of clay kickers and miners?”

“Certainly not any of your school chums, eh, Eton?” Mole tossed a biscuit at Frederick’s chest. It bounced off and landed on the dugout floor. Max scurried off Thomas’s lap and snatched it up before Frederick could retrieve it. “All these weeks you’ve been moping about, wishing you were on the front line, fighting like a real soldier. And all this time, you were a real soldier.”

“I’m not a real soldier,” Frederick said.

“Sure you are,” Mole said. “We all are. We just can’t tell anyone.”

“We’re secret soldiers,” George said with a smile.

“And if we fail?” Charlie asked, speaking for the first time since they’d entered the dugout.

Bagger finished the last of his tea and placed his cup back on the table with a loud thud. “Failure is not our mission.”

TWENTY-THREE

HIS CARETAKER’S hands became the only proof that a world existed beyond the darkness and silence. They soothed the young soldier when he woke in a cold sweat, screaming for help. They stayed to wipe his tears and hold his hand when he couldn’t forget or stop crying.

After one such episode, the hands slowly unwound a strip of cloth encircling the soldier’s head. Dull light filtered through his closed eyelids, and fingers gently pried open one eye and then the other. A blinding light flitted between them. The young soldier yanked his face away, and the bright light disappeared, but it took several minutes and many rapid blinks to clear the tears and spots crowding his vision. He shielded his stinging eyes with an unsteady hand to take in his surroundings for the first time.

Everything appeared unfocused, like the world had been submerged in cloudy water, but the young soldier’s weak eyes could make out shapes and shadows. Dozens of medical beds, identical to the one he lay on, crowded a narrow room with a vaulted ceiling. Patients occupied every bed. He didn’t recognize the field hospital. Its stone walls didn’t match his memory of the medical hospital behind Allied lines, where he’d often visited sick and wounded comrades. His heart raced. Where was he, and who had brought him to this strange place?

He squinted, trying to focus his vision enough to see anything familiar. The frightened eyes of the man in the next bed captured the young soldier’s blurry gaze. Beefy red burns distorted the man’s features, and the young soldier wondered if he’d known the man. Had they charged across no-man’s-land together? Had he been standing near the man when the artillery shell hit?

The man spoke, but the soldier heard only the low buzzing always humming in his ears. He tried to read the man’s charred, swollen lips, but their movement was too fast and frantic to follow.