Captured during a raid on the trench, he is killed by Adolf Hitler with a grenade when he tries to escape.

The veteran Platoon-Sgt, Ole Bill is one of the very few who makes it all the way through the war with Bourne, more or less in one piece. If you’re joining me for the first time, you can read the intro to the Secret History here , it’s available for everyone. 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. Thankfully, they had invited me and I was able to demonstrate through my new story Ragtime Soldier (the successor to Charley’s War) how Scottish soldiers at the Battle of Loos were knowingly murdered by the State. Charley reluctantly helps Blue to avoid capture whilst in Britain and later encounters him again during the infamous Etaples Mutiny in 1917.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. There was so much information about how the war was fought that was inserted into the story and which made it such an honest depiction of combat. Mills’ desire to expel the myths of war in general from the minds of its young readership and his want to do justice to the terrible legacy of the Great War can only be applauded.

Charley encounters Blue who is posing as a British officer whilst smuggling food to his gang of deserters hiding in nearby woods.

Morel, the journalist who exposed the truth about the Belgian Congo atrocities, was feared by the British state, because he was exposing their war crimes, so they imprisoned him and broke his health. Mental damage in war is something that the world of comics had never before (or since) included or even hinted at.

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. He had served bravely as a stretcher-bearer on the western front, in the Battle of Mons, and had deserted after spending a night with a man who was to be shot at dawn for cowardice when he was clearly shell-shocked. Encounters deserter Blue and aids his escape after the latter tells him of his experiences with the French Foreign Legion at the Battle of Verdun. Ignoring Snell's pleas to be put of his misery, Charley walks away leaving his nemesis to die slowly.

If you’re a revisionist, or of the revisionist persuasion, this cannot be explained away, I’m afraid. It’s why it reacted so savagely – through its surrogates The Daily Mail and The Sun – when Darren Cullen produced the hard-hitting and very watchable film Action Man Battlefield Casualties which to date, has 3. Toplis was shot dead by police in Yorkshire in 1921 after being the most wanted man in England for some five years. The platoon advances towards Germany during the final weeks of the war, taking part in the crossing of the St. In 2022, Pat Mills began to chart his own history of the powerful anti-war strip, which he co-created with artist Joe Colquhoun.

It’s only when it’s likely to appear as a major TV series or feature in a national exhibition, that they take an interest in the story and then my subversive game is up. But, in the meantime, before I relate how it all began and why it all began and what happened after it ended, it’s still worth celebrating Charley’s War as the only anti-war comic book to have slipped under the wire and achieved its objective. His posts about Charley’s War – available only to paid subscribers – are as follows… (This list last update 8th August 2023). An overtly anti war strip in the war comic Battle Picture Weekly, it was like nothing we’ve seen before or since.The mutiny happened just as the third battle of Ypres was beginning causing major concern to the British High Command. 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. In 2018 Rebellion began another series of Charley's War reprints in its Treasury of British Comics imprint. Or consider the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a member of the establishment who was decorated for bravery on the Western Front, yet admitted, ‘I believe that this War is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it.