A nominal roll is one of the plainest documents the Army produces. Names, numbers, ranks, a column for remarks. There is nothing in the format to suggest it carries any weight at all. The weight comes from what happens when it is read aloud and one of the names goes unanswered.

The nominal roll at the back of A Sapper’s Story – 1940 – Retreat to Dunkirk is now closed and set. It runs to 333 names.

What a nominal roll actually is

In service, a nominal roll is simply the list of who is on strength. It is used for musters and drafts, for movement orders, for pay, and for casualty returns. When a field company took losses, the roll was how those losses were recorded. Names went on. Names came off. On the surface it is administration, and behind every line there is a life.

That is why the roll call became the shape remembrance takes in the Corps, and across the services. No speech does what a list of names does. The names are read out, and the pause after each one carries more than any address from a lectern.

Three hundred and thirty three names

When pre-orders opened for A Sapper’s Story, every reader ordering a signed copy was invited to put a name in the nominal roll at the back of the book. Their own, or the name of someone they wished to honour. The roll closed on 31 July 2026 with 333 names on it: serving and former Royal Engineers, families, and friends of the Corps.

What was not expected was how few people submitted only their own name.

Who the names are for

The great majority of the entries are dedications, and they fall into a few clear groups.

There are comrades who did not come home, and comrades who came home and did not stay long afterwards. Anyone who has served will understand why those two sit together rather than apart.

There are grandfathers. Men who served in the war this novel describes, and who in a great many cases said very little about it to the families now putting their names forward. For some of those readers, a line in the back of a book about 1940 is the first time that service has been set down in print anywhere.

And there are mates. Men from the section, from the troop, from a posting years ago. Not relatives, not heroes in the newspaper sense, simply the men someone served alongside and has carried with them ever since.

Not every name on the roll is a soldier’s. Nothing about the submission was restricted, and readers put forward whoever they wanted to see set in print. Most of the names are men’s. A number are women’s. Some belong to people who never served a day and were named anyway, because somebody decided they had earned their place in the back of this particular book. That is not a dilution of a military roll. It is what a roll looks like when the people filling it in get to decide who counts.

Worth saying as well: the Corps in this novel is male from the first page to the last, which is simply what the record shows for a field company in 1940. The Corps today is not. Women have worn the Sapper badge for decades, and since 2018 every role in the British Army has been open to them. The roll at the back of this book is not a roll of 1940. It is a roll of who is reading it, and who they are carrying.

Why the roll belongs in this book

A Sapper’s Story is a novel about men whose names most people will never know. Sapper Donnie MacIver is fictional. The 59th Field Company, Royal Engineers, was not, and neither was the work it did clearing routes, wiring bridges and holding ground on the way back to the coast.

On 27 May 1940, at the Ypres-Comines Canal, three Royal Engineer field companies fixed bayonets and counter-attacked. Sixty soldiers did not come back. Almost nobody reading this could name one of them.

The same holds for the women who were there. Around three hundred telephonists of the Auxiliary Territorial Service served in France with the British Expeditionary Force, working the switchboards at Paris and Le Mans. They did not come off the beaches. They were lifted from Cherbourg and St Malo around 16 June, a fortnight after the last boats left Dunkirk, and they are barely mentioned in any popular account of the campaign. Nobody could name one of them either.

Putting a nominal roll in the back of a book about those men is not a publishing gimmick. It is the same act, at a smaller scale and eighty-six years on. Names, written down, so that they get read.

The roll is closed. The book is not.

The nominal roll closed on 31 July and has gone to typesetting. It cannot be added to, and the 333 names on it are now fixed. If your name is there, or the name of someone you wanted remembered, it will be in the book when it arrives.

Signed copies are still available ahead of publication on 1 October 2026, in B-format paperback and first-edition hardback, both with free UK delivery and signed by Billy on the title page.

Pre-order a signed copy of A Sapper’s Story – 1940 – Retreat to Dunkirk.