Beneath the Killing Fields of the Western Front still lies a hidden
landscape of industrialized conflict virtually untouched since 1918.
This subterranean world is an ambiguous environment filled with material
culture that that objectifies the scope and depth of human interaction
with the diverse conflict landscapes of modern war.
Covering the military reasoning for taking the war underground, as well
as exploring the way that human beings interacted with these
extraordinary alien environments, this book provides a more
all-encompassing overview of the Western Front. The underground war was
intrinsic to trench warfare and involved far more than simply trying to
destroy the enemy's trenches from below. It also served as a home to
thousands of men, protecting them from the metallic landscapes of the
surface.
With the aid of cutting edge fieldwork conducted by the author in these
subterranean locales, this book combines military history, archaeology
and anthropology together with primary data and unique imagery of
British, French, German and American underground defenses in order to
explore the realities of subterranean warfare on the Western Front, and
the effects on the human body and mind that living and fighting
underground inevitably entailed.