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

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Don’t be distracted by the establishment hyenas who came sniffing round him in his final years, trying to manipulate his words to their jingoistic advantage. 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. Censorship in Britain is subtle but widespread and usually involves plausible deniability that it even exists. Another plotline, which was pretty radical, was the virtually unknown story of the only mutiny the British Army has ever had, at Etaples training ground otherwise known as ‘The Bull Ring’, in France in 1917.

Charley follows Snell into the tunnels, intending to kill the latter but another soldier with the same plan gets there before him. Meaux, near Paris, is the equivalent of, and has the same status as, the Imperial War Museum, only it’s more anti-war and and it’s very poignant. He shoots down several German planes but narrowly avoids death when he is shot down and his pilot Captain Morgan is killed. Making Charley unquestioning and patriotic ensured there was no polemic that might put off the more jingoistic reader, but there still needed to be a critical voice and that came in the form of his best mate Ginger, brilliantly rendered by Joe.

My grandfather, born in 1900, had the misfortune to serve in both world wars; the first voluntarily, the second by compulsion. This was because it was widely accepted at that time that World War One was mass-murder, carried out by incompetent generals and politicians under the banner of patriotism.

Pat Mills seems to drive the point home time and time again, making the usual enemies of war comics become almost allied (British and Germans) and fingers the real enemy as the ruling classes who treated the war as some kind of sport. The British publishers helped by acting as gatekeepers, blocking authors who dared to tell the truth about the war and General Haig. Public-schooled but enlightened, brave but never blood-thirsty, Thomas is a decent man who represents the best of his class.This third volume of Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun's masterpiece continues to tell the story of an ordinary soldier's experiences in World War One, including the vibrant re-mastered colour pages from the original comic. Although Germany could have been defeated quickly, the war was deliberately prolonged for three and a half years for profits and to utterly destroy it. The villainous Lieutenant Snell (a man so heartless he’s willing to use Charley as a bullet shield) is perhaps the exemplar of this trope.

The title fame below is the very true event of the stand off at the beginning of the Mutiny on the bridge over the river that led from the camp to the town at Etaples. Charley intervenes and he and Grogan eventually fight but the latter is accidentally killed when a discarded shell he picked up to throw at Charley turns out to be live and explodes in his hand.

He would never wear a poppy for remembrance day, as he viewed it as a disgusting glamourisation of the sacrifice of war and – especially – a glorification of Douglas Haig, whom he decried as a mass-murderer. By taking a huge, strong and tempestuous Irishman not afraid to be seen knitting he was playing with what people regard as ‘normal’. Snell murders an African-American Doughboy named 'Pig-Iron' that Charley has befriended and then later kills a British officer who witnessed the earlier crime.