Great War

The Great War marks the Checquy’s discovery that the Grafters had survived—and grown more capable—after their apparent disappearance. A secret project begun among the organization’s darker echelons used battlefield corpses, but its failure was followed by a more consequential finding: the dead bore signs of Grafter work. The episode turns a concealed wartime experiment into the first warning of a threat the Checquy believed could endanger the nation.

The Secret Project and Its Discovery

During the war, Checquy agents routinely collected bodies from the no-man’s-land between the trenches. The project’s leaders needed cadavers and could ask fewer questions when they came from battlefields rather than England. It ended in dismal failure and was ordered forgotten; only diligent later research uncovered its existence.

Working with the corpses, the scientists encountered disquieting anomalies that they attributed to the Grafters. The evidence changed the meaning of the project’s failure: the Grafters were not merely a vanished adversary from the past but an active presence whose abilities had advanced beyond those they possessed when the Belgians were at the height of their power.

Investigation at Ypres

The project leaders concluded that the discovery had to be reported to the Checquy Court, since the Grafters represented a grave threat to the organization and the nation. But the scientists hesitated to bring the Court claims resting only on corpses in advanced decay. Seeking firmer evidence, they quietly sent two Pawns to the front: Thomas Ryan, a proficient soldier who could see at telescopic range and through human skin, and Charlotte Taylor, who could cook a person from the inside. They traveled discreetly to Ypres, where the suspicious bodies had been gathered.

Reports from the Trenches

Ryan sent regular dispatches to keep the project leaders informed. In them, he relayed the soldiers’ accounts of things moving through the wasteland: figures lolloping among the craters and breathing in mud and blood, and unnatural men glimpsed at night, walking silently among the bodies and slipping over barbed wire with inhuman grace. One face was seen laughingly gulping poisonous gas before disappearing into roiling fog; shots were fired, yet no body could be found.

Ryan and Taylor respected the young soldiers around them, many of whom were unlikely to survive the war, and did not want their questions to deepen the fear already present in the trenches. They nevertheless coaxed out as many details as they could. The reports pushed the inquiry beyond collecting testimony: the two Pawns resolved that they would have to go over the top themselves.

Significance of the Wartime Inquiry

The Great War investigation traces how the Checquy’s attempt to use the dead as material for a secret experiment became an encounter with a danger the organization had thought gone. The project’s failure did not erase what its scientists learned from the corpses: the Grafters were still active, and their capabilities had advanced. Yet the threat first emerged through uncertain traces rather than a confirmed confrontation. The leaders’ reluctance to approach the Court with evidence from badly decayed bodies led them to send Ryan and Taylor to Ypres, where accounts from soldiers began to give those traces a shape. Their decision to go over the top marks the inquiry’s shift from collecting reports to seeking direct evidence.