Beneath Flanders Fields

Below the battlefields of the Western Front, fifty thousand tunnellers, sewer workers, and miners were engaged in mine warfare in the Ypres Salient--a secret struggle beneath No Man's Land that combined daring engineering, technology, and science with calculated assassination. Few on the surface knew of the barbaric and claustraphobic work of the tunnellers, who not only suffered from mine explosions but regularly encountered hazardous gas and waterlogged ground. The result of over twenty-five years of research, Beneath Flanders Fields reveals how this intense underground battle was fought and won. The authors give the first full account of mine warfare in World War I through the words of the tunnellers themselves as well as plans, drawings, and previously unpublished archive photographs, many in colour. Beneath Flanders Fields also shows how military mining evolved. The tunnellers constructed hundreds of deep dugouts that housed tens of thousands of troops. Often electrically lit and ventilated, these tunnels incorporated headquarters, cookhouses, soup kitchens, hospitals, drying rooms, and workshops. A few dugouts survive today, a final physical legacy of the Great War, and are seen for the first time in photographs in Beneath Flanders Fields.