On the men who made up a Royal Engineers section, the bonds that held them together, and why a novel is the right place to find them.

There is a line Billy MacLeod MBE uses about his old trade, and he is careful to say it is not a slogan.

“Once a Sapper, always a Sapper. That isn’t a slogan to me. It’s a fact.”

Anyone who has worn the cap badge knows what he means, and a fair number who never served know it too, because they have lived alongside it in a husband, a father, a grandfather. It is the thing that does not switch off when the uniform comes off. It is why a man in his seventies still calls himself a Sapper in the present tense. And it is the quiet engine underneath A Sapper’s Story – 1940 – Retreat to Dunkirk, a novel that is far less interested in the grand sweep of the campaign than in the handful of men who got each other through it.

The men who became Sappers

Start with where these men came from, because it tells you almost everything.

The Royal Engineers in 1940 were not filled with career soldiers. They were filled with working men. Bricklayers, fitters, miners, drivers, joiners, men who had a trade in their hands long before the Army got hold of them. The skills that made a man useful in a shipyard or down a pit made him useful with a charge, a bridge or a length of decking. The Corps took the grafters of industrial Britain and pointed them at a war.

Donnie MacIver, the man at the centre of the novel, is one of them. He grew up on Byron Street in Partick and spent seven years in the Glasgow shipyards, starting as a catch boy at fifteen and working up to riveter, the same job as his father. The book opens with him inside the hull of a ship, the rivet gun hammering inches from his head, the vibration lodged in his jaw. That is not a war scene. It is a working scene. And it matters, because the man who learns to stay steady on a swaying staging with hot steel flying past him is already half a Sapper before he ever sees a recruiting office.

Donnie is invented. The world that made him is not. His parents are drawn from Billy’s own grandparents, Donald and Catriona, who came off the Isle of Lewis and made a home in Glasgow. The tenement in the book is the tenement Billy was born in. The streets are real streets. When the detail rings true, it is usually because it is.

What a section actually is

Gather a dozen men like that, hand them a job that can get them killed, and something forms between them that is hard to explain to anyone who has not felt it.

Two Section, the small group of Sappers the novel follows, is made up of working men from different parts of Britain, each shaped by labour before the Army ever reached them. They do not all like each other. They do not need to. What binds them is the work and the knowledge that the man beside you will not let you down when it counts.

Billy writes about a particular type, and every old soldier will know him on sight. The bloke who was always on a charge, always one bad decision from real trouble. The one the sergeants despaired of. And yet when things went wrong, really wrong, he was the one you looked to. Not because he was brave in a way you could write up in a report, but because he was steady when it mattered and he knew the work. A section is full of men who do not look like heroes and quietly turn out to be exactly what you needed.

Then there is the humour, which is the part outsiders most often get wrong about soldiers. It is not jolly. It is dark and dry and it arrives precisely when everything is falling apart, because that is when it is needed most. Billy is plain about where it comes from. “Their humour is real, the dark, dry kind passed around a section when everything is going wrong. I didn’t invent that.” You cannot research that into a book. You can only have lived it.

Written by a man who was there

This is where Billy’s own service earns the story its weight.

He walked into a careers office as a boy and joined the Royal Engineers at sixteen, trained as a Combat Engineer and an Amphibious Engineer, and served until injury ended it. He knows what a section feels like from the inside. So when the novel reaches the silence in the historical record, the gap where we know what a field company was ordered to do but never what one Sapper actually saw, Billy fills it with the truth of how men behave under pressure rather than with guesswork. Some of the men of Two Section even carry the names and backgrounds of men he served with. They are a tribute as much as a cast.

That is also the case for telling this as a novel rather than a history. Lieutenant General Sir Mark Mans, former Chief Royal Engineer, puts it well in his foreword. Fiction handled with care, he writes, can sometimes bring us closer to the human truth of soldiering than a report or a diary ever could. A war diary records that a bridge was held. A novel can put you on the bridge, next to the man holding it, listening to the man next to him crack a joke he should not.

Why this lands with readers

You do not have to know one end of a Bailey bridge from the other to be pulled into this.

The bonds in the book are military, but the feeling is not. Anyone who has worked a hard job alongside people they came to trust will recognise it. The loyalty. The impatience with anyone who is all talk. The refusal to give in when conditions are at their worst. The dark laugh in the bad moment. Strip away the year and the uniform and you are left with something every reader understands, which is what it is to belong to a group of people who would not let you fall.

The Royal Engineers have a battle cry that goes back to the Crimean War of the 1850s, and it carries straight through to 1940 and beyond. Follow the Sapper. It is the spine of the whole six-book series Billy is writing, and the promise underneath it is simple. These men were always there, at the front and at the back, first in and last out. This is their story told from the inside, by one of their own.

A Sapper’s Story – 1940 – Retreat to Dunkirk is published on 1 October 2026. Pre-order before 31 July and your name will be printed in the Nominal Roll at the back of the book. You can pre-order, and follow the series as it builds towards launch, at billymacleodmbe.com/pre-order.