When the boys and men finished the song and had said all they could manage to say, Thomas picked up Max, who lay whimpering on Bagger’s grave, and carried the small dog back to the dugout.

Boomer accompanied Mole to the Regimental Aid Post to have his ears examined for hearing damage from being so close to the blast. Though the boys were alone, they did not venture into the trenches that day. They stayed in the dugout, where Charlie drew sketches of Bagger and Bats while George constructed wooden frames for the pictures from scrap wood he’d scrounged up in the trenches. Thomas consoled Max, who paced the dugout and jumped onto Bagger’s bunk, searching for his master, and Frederick spent hours writing and rewriting condolence letters to the men’s families, telling their wives and children how nobly both men had served their country.

Thomas’s chest ached with renewed grief when Frederick asked Mole the men’s real names to use in the letters. Their nicknames had confined Bagger and Bats to the tunnels and the war, in Thomas’s mind. Before their deaths, he’d given little thought to the lives they’d lived prior to the war or hoped to reclaim after. Now suddenly they weren’t just tunnelers. They were husbands and fathers with families praying for their safe return. Was Bagger’s wife saying the rosary beside a photo of her husband before bed? Were Bats’s children struggling to get by in their father’s absence?

While the others slept that night, Thomas lay awake in his bunk with Max curled up next to him on one of Bagger’s shirts. Thinking of all Bagger and Bats had sacrificed for their crew and all their families had lost, Thomas couldn’t help but wonder if his decision to follow James into the war would cost him and his family more.

A somberness filled the tunnels and dugout in the week following their crew members’ deaths. The medics assured Mole that his hearing loss was most likely temporary, but his annoyance over the constant ringing in his ears and having to ask everyone to repeat themselves, coupled with his grief over the loss of his closest friend on the Western Front, soured the kicker’s normally cheerful disposition. Listeners and baggers from other crews that had completed their mines helped Mole, Boomer, and the boys with their gallery. Each shift brought two new temporary members to their crew. Recalling Mole’s advice to Charlie after Feathers died, Thomas didn’t bother to learn their names.

In the dugout, Bagger’s and Bats’s empty bunks served as constant reminders that death had found their crew under no-man’s-land, and the boys feared, as they continued to dig beneath the battlefield, that it would hunt them down again. Even George, who’d faced death all his life and laughed at its attempts to claim him in London, counted down the minutes to the end of each shift in the tunnels. He hadn’t lied to Thomas when he claimed he’d never feared death because he had nothing to lose, but that was before.