Shoulder the Sky, by Anne Perry
The Book The Reavley siblings are back and in the thick of World War II. Rev. Joseph Reavley is stationed in Ypres, West Flanders, Belgium. It's spring of 1915, just after the advent of chlorine gas attacks, and well into the trenches. Ypres (Ieper in Dutch), is the front line of the Western Front, where the Germans have been stopped. At stack, the territorial integrity of Belgium and the freedom of the French. Joseph helps evacuate an injured man, a sapper by the name of Corliss. A sapper's job is to dig and mine the tunnels under no man's land, the area between the forward most English trenches and the forward most German trenches. Crossing no man's land is an impossible task under these conditions. The spring is still new, and the nights are still bitterly cold. It rains more than it's sunny, the trenches are loud, crowded, and short on supplies. Rats, lice and ticks crawl over the dirty men. Everyday men are lost to dysentery, frost bite, and diseas...
