Comforted by this thought, he stopped fighting sleep, but before his eyes fluttered closed, they landed on a medal pinned to the doctor’s uniform. The young soldier’s drugged mind screamed in recognition of its blackened center and silver trim. He had seen it on no-man’s-land—pinned to the uniforms of the enemy. The Iron Cross.

TWENTY-FOUR

FOLLOWING THOMAS’S CLOSE call, Bagger had insisted the crew carry their gas masks in the galleries at all times. Before shifts, he ran drills to test how fast the boys could secure them. The masks were cumbersome. The eyepieces offered limited range of vision, and the heavy material, though effective at keeping out poisonous gas, also trapped the wearer’s breath, turning the air inside the mask hot, humid, and foul. When not wearing the masks, the crew carried them in pouches strapped around their waists. The large pouches impeded their movement in the tight confines of the galleries. After Thomas’s pouch caught on a beam and came unfastened during a shift, he tossed it in the corner, out of the way, but still in reach.

“Dover, where’s your mask?” Bagger hissed in Thomas’s ear.

Thomas pointed to the abandoned pack.

“Get it on, now.”

“It’s too big. It keeps falling off.”

“Now,” Bagger grunted before handing Thomas a full sandbag.

By early May, the Kruisstraat Four chamber was completed and charged, leaving only the Ontario Farm and Maedelstede Farm mines unfinished. After nearly two years of digging, the Allied tunnels spread out like fingers burrowing beneath the battlefield, the hands of the Grim Reaper, reaching for the enemy, waiting to deliver death’s touch. The clock ticked down with every press of the spade. Second by second. Inch by inch. The crew clawed their way toward the enemy line. Always listening.

For the warning scratch of picks and the muffled voices of the enemy whispering orders in foreign tongues and digging toward their position.

For artillery fire that might tear through the fragile ceiling of dirt, sand, water, and clay above their heads.

For the hush of death that would suffocate Poppy’s reassuring chirp and steal into their lungs on every labored breath.

They were grave diggers, but the farther they crept beneath no-man’s-land, the deeper uncertainty crept into Thomas’s weary mind. Were they digging their enemies’ graves or their own? As they inched closer to the German trenches, he worried they were digging both.

The crew made good progress on the new gallery until late one shift when Bats heard the scratch of picks and the scrape of shovels on the other side of the wall where they were working.

“They’re trying to undermine us,” he whispered to Bagger. “If we keep on our projected path, they’ll intercept us by the week’s end.”

“We’ll angle our dig a bit higher,” Bagger said, “but we have to stay in the clay and we have to gain enough distance to avoid a breakthrough, or we’ll be fighting them in these here tunnels, which is a fight I’m not looking to have.”