The Diggers' is an absorbing World War I fiction by Patrick MacGill, an Irish journalist and writer known as “The Navvy Poet” because he had worked as a navvy before he began writing. This work is historically significant as it comes from a man who witnessed the war first-hand. MacGill served with the London Irish Rifles during the First World War and was injured at the Battle of Loos on 28 October 1915. He was then recruited into military intelligence.