THE TUNNELLERS’ MEMORIAL website was an invaluable resource in my research for this book. In July 2017, I emailed military historian Jeremy Banning, who was part of the Tunnellers’ Memorial team, and he was kind enough to put me in contact with his colleague, historian Simon Jones. Jeremy also recommended Simon’s book Underground Warfare 1914–1918, which became a main source of information for my research. I emailed Simon after I finished it, and he generously answered my questions. Simon’s book also led me to two other extraordinary works, Beneath Flanders Field and Pillars of Fire. I spent months poring over their pages. Further research uncovered articles, documentaries, and firsthand accounts, including letters home from soldiers on the front lines, which gave me a better understanding of the trials and tribulations faced by the brave men and boys who served on and under the battlefields of the Western Front.
I was shocked to discover that more than a quarter of a million underage British boys served in the four-year conflict. Unlike the child soldiers of the Ugandan Civil War, whom I wrote about in my first novel, Soldier Boy, the young soldiers of the Great War were not stolen from their families and forced into combat. The boys who served lied about their ages and volunteered to fight. In my research, I learned about the various reasons that drove a literal army of boys, some as young as thirteen, to the recruiter’s table. Some joined out of a sense of duty. Others sought glory. Many joined out of necessity, willing to risk their lives in the trenches for the promise of fare wages and three meals a day. The hundreds of thousands of underage British soldiers with their diverse reasons for joining the war inspired the main characters in Secret Soldiers and provided endless sources of tension and conflict for Thomas and his clay kicking crew, who struggled to work as a team and complete their secret mission beneath no-man’s-land.
While researching, I discovered that British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, whose grandfather founded Macmillan Publishing, graduated from Eton, served in World War I, and read Aeschylus’ Prometheus while in the trenches. I gave these details to my character Frederick as a nod to Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Macmillan and the publisher of Secret Soldiers.
If reading this book has sparked your curiosity about the tunnellers of World War I and the Battle of Messines, I recommend the Tunnellers’ Memorial website and the following wonderful resources that proved so invaluable to me.
“A Memorial to William Hackett VC and the Tunnelling Companies of the First World War.” http://www.tunnellersmemorial.com/.
Barton, Peter, Peter Doyle, and Johan Vandewalle. Beneath Flanders Fields: The Tunnellers’ War 1914–1918. Montreal: McGill–Queen’s University Press, 2014.
Jones, Simon. Underground Warfare 1914–1918. Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military, 2010.
Passingham, Ian. Pillars of Fire: The Battle of Messines Ridge, June 1917. Stroud, Gloucestershire: Spellmount, 2012.
Secret Tunnel Warfare. Directed and produced by John Hayes Fisher. Produced by John Farren. Performed by Jay O. Sanders. Public Broadcasting Service. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/secret-tunnel-warfare/