Her eyes watered. She wiped her cheeks and picked up her spoon, then ate every bit of her porridge, bland from the lack of milk, spice, or sugar. Dropping her spoon into the bowl, she believed that Source Columba would need a miracle, the revelation of a weakness in the Nazi armor, if Britain were to survive.

The morning was spent caring for the pigeons. While she cleaned the lofts, Susan looked to the sky, hoping to see Duchess circle the birches. But the trees were empty, except for cheeky squirrels scrambling to collect nuts for winter. As she was disposing of droppings into the rubbish bin, she heard a military truck rumble up the lane. The soldiers, alerted by the sound of the engine, came out of their tent. Bertie stepped from the cottage and zipped up his coat.

Susan quickly learned that the military was dropping off parachute cages for the next wave of pigeons. But this time, the cages were nothing like the ones used for the previous mission. These weren’t cages, nor were they baskets. They were tubes. Nothing more than cardboard, reminiscent of mailing tubes for posters, with small attached parachutes. No screen. Only holes poked in the endcaps for air. A pigeon would be sealed inside what appeared to be a tubular sarcophagus.

“It’s inhumane!” Bertie said, inspecting a tube.

The delivery soldier, a man with a square jaw, freckled skin, and hair the color of a phone box, stepped to Bertie and said, “It’s a new design.”

“New design, my arse,” Bertie said. “It’s a mail tube.”

“They won’t be able to move,” Susan added. “Or see.”

“The cages took up too much room in a Blenheim.” The soldier blew on his fingers to warm them, then stuffed his hands into his jacket. “With these, it’ll take fewer planes, risking fewer pilots.”

Susan couldn’t imagine her pigeons being stuffed like blueprints into tubes. They weren’t pieces of paper to protect from being wrinkled. They were pigeons. Her beautiful, intelligent, loyal pigeons. These devoted animals could possibly be Britain’s only insight into what the enemy was doing across the Channel, and they were being treated like second-class mail. She wanted to stomp on the tubes, rip them apart, and burn them in her grandfather’s fireplace.

As she stared at a stack of tubes, her mind raced. Had the soldier been told everything? Did the cages work? Had some of the parachutes failed to open? Susan shuddered. She wished Ollie were here, recalling how he had reassured her that the parachutes would safely float the pigeons to the ground.

She watched the soldiers unload the last of the tubes and drive away, their tires digging deep grooves into the mud. She turned to Bertie and noticed that his face was red, his hands clenched.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“The military is turning the mission all to pot,” he said, hobbling from the yard.