“You won’t be forgotten,” Thomas said as George stubbed out his cigarette. “I promise.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Tommy. Even in our crew, I wouldn’t be missed. Blimey, Eton would probably do a jig on my grave.”

“Frederick doesn’t hate you as much as you think,” Thomas said. “If he did, he wouldn’t have helped save you today.”

George chuckled, but there was no hint of humor in the sound. “Save me? How? By abandoning me in a flooded chamber and telling you I was trapped as he scurried up the ladder like the rat he is?”

“Frederick didn’t abandon you. He was the one who helped me free your leg and swim you to the ladder.”

George stared at Thomas as though he were waiting for the punch line. “Wait. You’re serious? Eton came back for me?”

Thomas nodded. “I told you, if you’d died, you’d have been missed, even by Frederick.”

George shook his head in disbelief. “Tommy, you and I both know, whether I survive this war or not, when it’s all over, everyone will go back to their lives and families and not spare another thought on me.”

“That’s not true.” Thomas looked George in the eyes. “I promise.”

“Do you promise to have a memorial made for me if I don’t survive this bloody war?”

“You’re not going to die.”

“Answer the question, Tommy.”

“Yes, I promise to make a memorial for you.”

“Really? And what name will you write on it?”

“George.”

“George what?”

Thomas started to answer and then stopped. When George decided to join Norton-Griffith’s recruits, he’d told the man in the bowler hat his name was Georgie Porgie. They’d had a good laugh at the joke at the time, but Thomas no longer found it funny. The truth was, he didn’t know George’s real last name. No one did. Not even George.

TWENTY-SEVEN

“DO YOU KNOW your name?” a voice thick with a German accent asked. Fingers snapped inches from the young soldier’s ear. “Can you hear me?”

The soldier pretended not to hear the sharp sound or the doctor’s questions. The constant ringing in his ears had gradually quieted over his weeks spent in the German field hospital. Its absence had revealed other sounds.

The steady clomp of military boots on the stone floor.

The scrape of medical instruments on metal trays.

The anemic, rattling coughs of gas victims.

The terrified screams of patients in the throes of night terrors.

The soft, soothing hum of his nurse as she changed his bandages.

Voices with different accents—British, French, Canadian, Belgian, Australian—crying out from their beds, begging for help.

The young soldier stared at the hospital bed to his right and the sheet draped over the face of the man lying there. The Australian soldier was the bed’s eighth occupant since the young soldier had realized the hands that were nursing him back to health were not friendly. As the doctor continued to ask him questions and he continued to feign deafness, two medics removed the body, and a nurse changed the sheets in preparation for the bed’s next occupant.