Charley's War Vol. 1: Boy Soldier: The Definitive Collection: Volume 1

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A working-class London lad from a close-knit family, he enlists in the British Army in 1916, age sixteen and arrives in the trenches on the Western Front shortly before the start of the Somme Campaign. Now we come to Charley’s War , where I take you behind the scenes to show you how your favourite subversive characters were created. I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organising nothing better than legalised mass murder. All the issues that come up in Charley’s War, and notably in the stretcher bearer story, such as shell shock, now known as PTSD or complex PTSD, are still around today. With their heyday in the 60s to the 80s, they’ve nearly disappeared without a trace now, perhaps seeming a relic of the past.

Charley prevents rogue Bolshevik Colonel Spirodonov from capturing a White armoured train loaded with refugees and royal gold. Because today it’s the only example of mainstream popular culture – outside of film and television – that challenges the establishment view of World War One. Charley cannot bring himself to put the dying Scholar out of his agony but the deed is performed by newcomer Skin. In 2015, hosting problems with the site meant I had to make the decision to import its postings and features to downthetubes to ensure its survival. Bandits at 12 O’clock’s tales of air combat are exciting enough that even the most ardent pacifist risks finding their heart pumping.That the blockade of Germany, designed to starve the country into submission, was a charade, until after the armistice when it was savagely enforced to ensure German compliance with consequent mass civilian deaths by starvation. Why also can a government not do something and own it as a decision- but instead slaps a State Secrets act on it? I think going back over ‘Charley’s War’ will do the same and give anyone who guides schools around the battlefields some great ideas on where to pitch our stories for the kids. This is because it was aimed at a mass market audience of 10-15 year-old boys and their no-nonsense tastes very much reflect my own. A Sandhurst historian – writing a rejected introduction to the first volume of Charley – had insisted, with killjoy relish, that British machine gunners firing off belts of bullets to boil their tea was completely apocryphal.

Instead, there was a surprising flood of incredibly boring biographies – which I forced myself to read – extolling the hitherto unknown virtues of supreme Butcher and Bungler General Haig with titles like Haig, Architect of Victory and The Good Soldier: Douglas Haig .After all, when I wrote Charley’s War, I consciously set out to subversively attack the State for its war crimes in the Great War. The script had a knack of forcing the reader to think about subjects such as the barbaric punishments inflicted by the British Army on its own men. Charley’s War , the comic book story of a young soldier in the Great War, beautifully illustrated by Joe Colquhoun, is still in print today, as a superb three-volume collection from Rebellion. And so is this introduction to Charley’s War, which is long enough to split into two parts, so make sure to check out Part 1 if you missed it.