Read Chapter 3: Orders

The morning came wet and grey, the kind of Flanders light that never quite decided if it was day. Émile was still pulling on his boots when Corporal Bryce appeared in the doorway of the billet, blotting the sky, his silhouette filling the frame like a door left ajar. The British tunneler had a way of standing that made rooms smaller.

“Marchand,” Bryce said. “You’re wanted.”

Félix stirred on the cot beside Émile, his bandaged leg propped on a sack of dried peas. He opened one eye, looked from Bryce to Émile, and said nothing. That silence had grown between them since the tunnel—not anger, exactly, but something watchful. Félix had seen the chalk mark. He hadn’t called for Roussel. That made Émile owe him a debt he couldn’t name yet.

Émile laced his boots and followed Bryce out into the drizzle.

The command dugout sat at the end of a communication trench that smelled of rotting sandbags and latrine lime. Inside, Lieutenant Moreau was bent over a map table, his fingers stained with ink and tobacco. The map was spread wide, weighed down at the corners by a tin mug, a boot heel, and a compass that had seen better days.

“Marchand,” Moreau said without looking up. “You know Hill 60?”

Émile stepped forward. He’d grown up hearing about Hill 60—not as a tactical feature, but as a local landmark. The French had a name for it long before the Germans came. So did the Flemish. He didn't volunteer that.

“Redoubt on the eastern rise. Germans hold it,” Émile said.

“They hold it,” Moreau repeated. “And they’ve been holding it for eleven months. We’ve blown six charges under it. The last one, we’re fairly sure, killed our own men because the damn chalk swallowed the blast.” He looked up now, and his eyes were tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep. “You’re from mining country. You know how to make a charge do what you want it to do.”

Émile said nothing.

Moreau tapped the map. “Six hundred kilos of ammonal, placed here, here, and here.” His finger struck three points arranged in a triangle under the redoubt’s eastern shoulder. “You’ll tunnel from the third gallery, branch left, and pack the chambers over three nights. We go up on the fourth.”

Émile lowered his gaze to the map. The redoubt sat on a spur of high ground, the kind of terrain that had made his grandfather curse when the plough dragged stones up from the soil. His eyes moved over Moreau’s pencil marks, then stopped.

There was a faint grey line on the map. A dashed foundation, half-erased, like someone had tried to scrub it out before the printers ran the plates. Émile knew that shape. He’d seen it in a schoolbook once, in a chapter about old abbeys and the saints who’d built them.

“Sir,” Émile said. “The eastern shoulder. That’s where the abbey stood.”

Moreau frowned. “What abbey?”

“Saint-Éloi. The old one.” Émile traced the dashed line with his finger. “The locals say it was built on salt mines. There are tunnels under it—older than the abbey, some of them. If we break into one of those, the blast won’t go where you want it. It’ll go down.”

Moreau’s jaw tightened. He looked at the map, then at Émile, and the calculation in his eyes was quick and unloving.

“Local legend,” Moreau said.

“With respect, sir—legends sometimes have foundations.”

“The ground’s chalk. I’ve seen the cores.” Moreau’s voice hardened. “The engineering officer signed off on this placement. He didn’t see any mines.”

“He wouldn’t,” Émile said. “Not on the map. But the map’s wrong. There’s a hand-drawn copy in the mayor’s house in Poperinghe that shows the old salt works. I saw it when I was a boy. Before the war. My father took me to the market.”

Moreau stared at him for a long moment. The tin mug of coffee sat untouched between them. Rain dripped through a crack in the timber roof and made a small, steady percussion on the map’s edge.

“You want me to delay a full-scale operation because of something you saw in a market stall as a child?” Moreau said.

“I want you to move the charge twenty yards south,” Émile said. “There’s solid ground there. I walked it last spring, before the front moved. It’s all clay.”

“Clay’s too wet. Ammonal needs dry.”

“It’s dry clay. Drier than chalk at this depth.”

Moreau shook his head. He didn't look angry. That was worse. He looked certain, the way men were certain when they’d already decided and were only waiting for you to finish wasting their time.

“The placement stands. You’ll dig where I told you, plant six hundred kilos, and you’ll do it by Sunday.” He picked up the coffee and drank. “That’s an order.”

Émile opened his mouth to argue, then caught Bryce’s eye. The Englishman gave a small, almost imperceptible shake of his head. Don’t push.

Émile closed his mouth.

“Yes, sir,” he said.

Moreau nodded and returned to the map. Émile and Bryce stepped back out into the rain. The trench was ankle-deep in slurry. Boots squelched, and somewhere ahead, men were shifting timber for a revetting job. The day had a grim, wet rhythm to it.

They walked in silence until they were out of earshot of the command dugout.

“Salt mines,” Bryce said.

Émile stopped. He looked at the other man for a long moment. Bryce was a tunneler, third generation, from a mining town in County Durham. He knew ground the way Émile knew ground. They came from different countries, different armies, different languages of dirt. But the dirt didn’t care about any of that.

“You think I’m lying,” Émile said.

“I think you’re not telling the whole truth.” Bryce’s voice was even. “And I think you know the difference.”

Émile looked down at his hands. The chalk dust had worn off his fingers days ago, but he still felt it there, a thread of white under his nails. He thought of the tunnel he’d found under the German lines. The carved walls. The word “LUXE” in letters that weren’t Latin. The tapping that came at night, slower than a pulse, deliberate.

“There are tunnels under this ground that are not on any map,” Émile said quietly. “The old ones. The ones that were here before the abbeys, before the salt works, before the records. Moreau’s charge could break into one of those.” He paused. “Or the German tunnels could.”

Bryce was watching him with the stillness of a man who’d learned to wait underground.

“You’ve seen one,” Bryce said. It wasn’t a question.

Émile said nothing.

“The one under the German lines,” Bryce said. “The one you claimed you sealed.”

The wind moved through the trench, carrying a cold spray. Émile looked up at the grey sky, then at the rise of Hill 60 in the distance, a hump of earth that had been turned over so many times it looked like a scab on the land.

“I marked it,” Émile said. “With chalk.”

Bryce let out a long breath. He didn’t appear surprised. He’d been a tunneler long enough to know lies were often just truths wearing a different uniform.

“We dig at night,” Émile said. “Quiet. I need to see the galleries under the redoubt before Moreau commits us. I need to know what we’re digging into.”

“You want to survey the ground under the German position,” Bryce said slowly, “while the Germans are on the other side of it, and the whole French army is watching.”

“Yes.”

“That’s not a survey. That’s a patrol.”

“It’s a look.”

Bryce stared at him for a long moment. Then he laughed—a short, dry sound, like a pick hitting stone.

“You’re a strange one, Marchand,” he said.

“I’m from mining country,” Émile said. “The ground tells us what it wants us to know. The rest, we have to go and see for ourselves.”

Bryce looked at the rain, at the ration party slogging up the trench with steaming tins, at the shape of Hill 60 rising out of the smoke and drizzle. He seemed to be weighing something, a decision he’d half made the day he’d walked into Émile’s billet.

“Midnight,” Bryce said. “I’ll bring the lamp and a compass. You bring whatever you’re so afraid of that you can’t say its name.”

Émile nodded. Bryce turned and walked off toward the British lines. Émile watched him go, then turned his face toward Hill 60.

Somewhere beneath that lump of earth, in the chalk and clay that stretched back to a time before soldiers and kings and maps, the ancient tunnels lay waiting. He could feel them in his bones, a deep pressure like static on the edge of hearing. The tapping had come again last night, just before dawn—three taps, a pause, three taps. He hadn’t told Félix. He hadn’t told anyone.

It was a pattern. A language. Somebody was down there.

He pressed a hand to the chalk dust he still imagined under his nails and made his way back to the billet to tell Félix what he had to do.