By Pat Mills & Joe Colquhoun & various (Rebellion)
ISBN: 978-1-78108-619-3 (TPB/Digital edition)
This book includes Discriminatory Content produced during less enlightened times.
On July 27th 1914, Austrian foreign Minister Berchtold had Emperor Franz Joseph sign a Declaration of War in hopes of stealing a march on the empire’s political opponents of the Triple Entente and ensure any peace proposals would be pointless. The Great War officially began the following day…
When Pat Mills & Joe Colquhoun began their tale of an impressionable lad who joins up just in time to fight in the disastrous Somme campaign, I suspect they had, as usual, the best of authorial intentions but no real idea that this time they were creating comics history. The landmark feature was originally published in British war anthology Battle (AKA Battle Picture Weekly, Battle Action, etc.). A surprise hit, the serial proper launched in #200, running from January 1979 until October of 1986.
It recounted, usually in heartrending and harrowing detail and with astounding passion for a Boys’ Periodical, the life of an East-End kid who lies about his age to enlist with the British Army reinforcements setting out to fight the Hun in 1916.
The stunning strip contingent contained within this edition – 86 weekly episodes in all – span January 6th 1979 through 25th October 1980, forming one of the most powerful and influential characterisations of the oh-so-ironic “war to end all wars” ever depicted. Lovingly researched, lavishly limned and staggeringly authentic, the saga touches upon many diverse aspects of the conflict – even the effects on the Home Front – all delivered with a devastating, sardonically understated dry sense of horror and injustice, albeit frequently leavened with gallows humour as trenchant as that legendarily “enjoyed” by the poor trench-bound “Tommies” of the time.
This magnificent (mostly) monochrome mega-compilation opens with a 4-page instalment (for much of the middle run the series came in 3-page episodes) ‘Charley’s War – the Story of a Soldier in World War One’, following 16-year-old London Bus Company worker Charley Bourne as he eagerly enlists and so-quickly graduates to unending, enduring horrors of muddy, blood-soaked battlefields, beginning with The Somme.
Military life was notoriously hard and unremittingly dull – except for brief bursts of manic aggression and strategic stupidity which ended so many lives. Closely following the recorded course of the war, Mills & Colquhoun put young Charley in the Westshire Regiment and show a rapidly changing casualty-shaped cast being constantly whittled away by various modes of combat attrition.
The weekly hellscapes show lesser-known, far-from-glorious aspects of the conflict readers in the 1970s & 1980s had never seen in any other war comic. Each strip was cunningly punctuated and elucidated by the telling narrative device of the simple lad’s letters to his family in “Blighty” whilst also cleverly utilising reproductions of cartoons and postcards from the period.
With Boer War veteran Ole Bill Tozer as his mentor, Charley narrowly survives shelling, mudslides, digging details, gas attacks, the trench cat, snipers, callous stupidity of his own commanding officers – although there are examples of good officers too – and the far-too-frequent insane absurdity of a modern soldier’s life. Slowly but irrevocably the callow, naïve boy becomes a solid, dependable warrior – albeit one with a nose for trouble and a near-divine gift for lucky escapes.
When Tozer leads a party across No-Man’s Land to capture prisoners for interrogation, new pal Ginger sustains a frankly hilarious wound in his nether regions. As a result, however, and despite the sortie establishing the inadvisability of an attack, Allied generals continue their plans for a “Big Push”. Thus, Charlie is confronted with an agonising moral dilemma when he catches a comrade trying to wound himself and get sent home before the balloon goes up. This time, grim fate intervenes before the boy soldier can make his terrible choice…
The unit’s troubles increase exponentially when arrogant, ruthless aristocrat Lieutenant Snell arrives; constantly undermining if not actively sabotaging every effort by sympathetic Lieutenant Thomas to make the riffraff cannon fodder’s lives tolerable. The self-serving toff officer takes an extremely personal dislike to Charley after the lad drops in trench mud a huge picnic hamper belonging to the rich twat…
On July 1st 1916 The Battle of the Somme begins. Like so many other unfortunates, Charley and his comrades are ordered “over the top”: expected to walk steadily into mortars and machine gun fire of entrenched German positions. Thomas, unable to stand the stupidity, cracks and commands them to charge at a run. It saves his squad but lands his men in a fully-manned German dug-out…
After ferocious fighting the lads gain a brief respite, but retreating Huns have left insidious booby-traps to entice and destroy them. Many beloved characters die before Charley, Ginger and poor shell-shocked Lonely are finally captured by “the Boche”.
As they await their fate, the traumatised veteran of 1914 reveals to Ginger and Charley the horrific events of the previous Christmas and why he so wants to die. Moreover, the sole cause of that appalling atrocity is the same Snell now commanding their own unit…
Through Charley’s signature dumb luck they escape, only to blunder into a gas attack and British Cavalry. The mounted men gallop off to meet stiff German resistance (resulting in some of the most baroque and disturbing scenes ever depicted in kids’ comics) whilst Bourne and the lads are miraculously reunited with their lost comrades. The combat carnage has not ceased, however. Awaiting orders to attack, Lt. Thomas and his embattled men are suddenly subjected to a terrific barrage. With horror the officer realises they are being shelled by their own big guns and dispatches a runner to Snell who has a functioning line to Allied HQ.
The role of messenger was the most dangerous in the army but, with no means of communication except written orders and requests, failure to get through was never acceptable. By the time Charley volunteers a dozen men have failed. With British shells still butchering British troops, Bourne resolves to test his luck as the “Thirteenth Runner”…
As previously stated, Charley’s War closely follows the war’s key events, using them as a road map or skeleton to hang specific incidents upon. This was not the strip’s sole innovation. Mills’ detailed research concentrated more on characters than fighting – although there was still plenty of heartrending action – and declared to the readership (which at time of original publication were categorically assumed to be boys between ages 9-13) that “our side” could be as monstrous as the “bad guys”.
Mills also fully exercised his own political/creative agendas in the series and was constantly amazed at what he got away with and what seeming trivialities his editors pulled him up on (more fully expanded upon in the author’s informative and detailed ‘Strip Commentary’ concluding this edition)…
With the Thirteenth Runner storyline, likable everyman Charley Bourne slowly began his descent from fresh-faced innocent to weary, battle-scarred veteran as the war reached beyond cataclysmic opening moves of the Somme Campaign into the conflict’s most bloody events. Frantically making his way to the rear positions, Charley successfully passes twelve fallen runners but only encounters more officer arrogance and Professional Soldier stupidity before the battle ends. Snell refuses to even read the message until he has finished his tea…
Helpless before aristocratic indifference, Charley angrily returns to the Front. Finding everyone apparently dead, he snaps. Reduced to a killing rage he is only dragged back to normal when Ginger, Smith Seventy and the Sarge emerge from a shattered support trench.
The lad’s joy is short-lived. Thomas is arrested for showing cowardice in the face of the enemy, and with him gone Snell commands the unit of despised disposable commoners…
Removed to the Rear to have their wounds treated, Charley and his chums meet Weeper Watkins. The former ventriloquist cries permanently. His eyes are ruined by exposure to poison gas but he is still considered fit for duty. All too soon they fall foul of sadistic military policeman Sergeant Bacon who has earned his nickname as “the Beast” over and again…
With a chance to blow off steam – like a hilarious volunteer Concert Party show – Charley and Weeper are soon in the Beast’s bad books. However, his first attempt to beat and break Bourne goes badly awry when a couple of rowdy Australian soldiers join the fray and utterly humiliate the rogue Red Cap.
Bullies are notoriously patient, however, and Bacon’s turn comes at last when Lt. Thomas is found guilty. Charley and Weeper refuse to be part of the firing squad which executes him and are punished by military tribunal, leaving them at the Beast’s non-existent mercy. Enduring savage battlefield punishments including a uniquely cruel form of crucifixion, their suffering only ends when the base is strafed by German aircraft. With sentence served and Bacon gone, Charley is soon back in the trenches, just in time for the introduction of Tank Warfare to change the world forever. A fascinating aspect of the battle is highlighted here as the strip concentrates heavily upon German reaction to the innovation. The Central Powers considered the tank an atrocity weapon in just the same way modern soldiers do chemical and biological ones.
In the build-up to the Big Push, Charley is singled out by a new replacement. Unctuous Oliver Crawleigh is a cowardly spiv and petty criminal, but he’s also married to Charley’s sister Dolly. The chancer ignobly attaches himself to the young veteran like a leech, offering to pay Charley to either protect him or wound him some minor way which will get “Oiley” safely back to Britain…
The next day the British Empire’s new landships make their terrifying debut with army infantry in close support. The effect on the Germans is astounding. In a ferociously gripping extended sequence, Mills & Colquhoun take readers inside the hellish iron leviathans as outraged Huns devote their manic utmost efforts into eradicating the titanic tin terrors. The carnage is unspeakable but soon Charley, Oiley and Smith Seventy are inside one of the lumbering behemoths, reluctantly replacing the dead crew of clearly deranged tank man Wild Eyes. The modern-day Captain Ahab drags them along for the ride, seeking a madman’s redemption for the loss of his pals, the slaughter of a town and destruction of a church…
In the quiet of the weary aftermath, Oiley deliberately puts his foot under a tank to “get a Blighty” (a wound sufficiently serous to be sent home) and attempts to bribe Charley into silence. The disgusted, exhausted teenager responds in typically cathartic manner. During this lull in the fighting, events on the German side see despised commoner and Eastern Front veteran Colonel Zeiss spurn his aristocratic Junker colleagues’ outdated notions, devising a new kind of Total Warfare to punish the British for their use of mechanised murder machines…
Charley, meanwhile, is wounded and his comrades celebrate the fact that he will soon be home safely. Naturally, things are never that simple and the callous indifference of the British army’s medical contingent – especially notorious “Doctor No” who never lets a man escape his duty – means any soldier still able to pull a trigger is sent back into battle.
Bourne returns just in time to meet the first wave of Zeiss’ merciless “Judgement Troops”, who storm British lines, slaughtering everyone – including German soldiers who get in the way – in a savage, no-holds-barred assault. The “Blitzkrieg tactics” overwhelm everything in their path. Charley and his mates reel from fresh horrors: battlefield executions, flamethrowers, experimental forms of poison gas, strafing by steel javelins and brutal, uncompromising hand-to-hand combat in their own overrun trenches before the bloody battle peters out indecisively…
Zeiss is subsequently cashiered by his own appalled superiors, but knows that one day his concepts of Blitzkrieg and Total War will become the norm…
Exhausted, battle-weary Charley is again injured, losing his identification in the process and returned eventually to England as a shell-shocked amnesiac. His mother undergoes slow torture as she receives telegrams declaring her son, missing, dead, found wounded and lost again…
Mills & Colquhoun now begin a masterful sequence that broke all the rules of war comic fiction; switching emphasis to the Home Front where Charley’s family mourn his apparent death, and work in the war industries. It’s at this time that German Zeppelin raids on British cities begin. Mills’ acerbic social criticism makes powerful use of history as our recovering boy soldier experiences the trials of submarine warfare, when the troop ship carrying him and Bill Tozer back to Blighty is torpedoed…
When their perilous North Sea odyssey at last brings Charley back to Silvertown in London’s West Ham, it is in the wake of a catastrophic disaster in which 50 tons of TNT detonate at a munitions factory, killing more than 70 workers and injuring a further 400. No longer comfortable around civilians and with no stomach for jingoistic nonsense of stay-at-homes or covert criminal endeavours of boastful “war-hero” (and secret looter) Oiley, Charley hangs out in pubs with the Sarge and reconnects with old soak/Crimean War survivor Blind Bob…
London is under constant threat, not just from greedy munitions magnates who care more for profit than safety of their workers or even victory for their homeland, but also increasingly common aerial bombing raids which provoke mindless panic and destruction at the very heart of the British Empire.
Focus here divides as Charley’s days are contrasted with the zealous mission of devoted family man Kapitan Heinrich von Bergmann who leads his Zeppelin squadron in a carefully calculated night sortie against the hated English. When Blind Bill is evicted from his rooms, Charley invites him to stay with the Bournes and the beggar’s incredible hearing (coupled with the area’s quaint air-raid listening devices) provides enough warning to seal Bergmann’s doom, but not before the airman has rained tons of explosive death on the capital…
During the bombing, Charley discovers his mum is still toiling in the local munitions works. The exploitative owner has decided not to sound his air raid evacuation alarm as he has profits and contracts to consider. Charley is not happy and dashes to get her out…
This stunning collection ends with a sharp jab at dubious practices of British recruitment officers (who got bonuses for every volunteer they signed up) as Charley stops his extremely little brother Wilf from making the same mistake he did, and teaches the unscrupulous recruiter a much-deserved lesson…
To Be Continued…
Charley’s War is a highpoint in the narrative examination of the Great War through any artistic medium and exists as shining example of how good “Children’s Comics” can be. It is also one of the most powerful pieces of fiction ever produced for readers of any age.
I know of no anti-war story that is as gripping, as engaging and as engrossing, no strip that so successfully transcends its mass-market, popular culture roots to become a landmark of fictive brilliance. We can only thank our lucky stars that no Hollywood hack has made it a blockbuster which would inescapably undercut the tangibility of the “heroes” whilst debasing the message. There is nothing quite like it and you are diminished by not reading it.
Included in this volume are a full cover gallery and restored colour sections (reproduced in monochrome for earlier collections but vibrantly hued here to vivid effect) and writer Mills’ wonderfully informative chapter notes and commentary on the episodes. Not just a great war comic, Charley’s War is a highpoint in narrative examination of the Great War through any artistic medium. I won’t belabour plot, script or even the riveting authentic artistic depictions. I won’t praise the wonderful quality. I simply state if you read this you will get it, and if you don’t, you won’t.
Let’s all make ensure that it’s NOT all over by Christmas!
© 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985 & 2018 Rebellion Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved. Charley’s War is ™ & © Rebellion Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved.
