Secret History: Charley's War & the conspiracy of silence
'Hidden History' looked impressive, but I decided it was not for me. I put the book back on the shelf and forgot all about it. Or, as they say in books on the Writer’s Journey, ‘I refused the quest’.
Welcome to my Secret History of Comics: my new book serialised on Substack. The first section was on Marshal Law: now it’s all about Charley’s War.
If you’re joining me for the first time, you can read the intro to the Secret History here, it’s available for everyone, and so is the intro to Charley’s War.
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A few years before the centenary, I started to write Fred’s War – in the tradition of Charley’s War. My premise would be the same: that WW1 was a heartless conflict where the lives of millions were wasted by stupidity and elitism. I duly went round the London bookshops looking for new books that would bear this out and support my anti-war view of the conflict. I was really rather surprised to find there weren’t any, apart from To End All Wars by Adam Hochschild. It was so different to the 1970s when there were anti-war books everywhere in Foyles with scathing titles like Eye Deep in Hell, The Donkeys and British Butchers and Bunglers of World War One. It seemed like the clock had gone back to the 1950s where the State was never challenged.
Then, just as I was leaving Foyles, I saw, tucked away in a corner, Hidden History The Secret Origins of the First World War by Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor. I could see from the cover which featured a series of heavy redactions that it was some kind of conspiracy book and I thought – even if it were true – that conspiracies were hardly relevant to Fred’s War. Plus I have a fairly ‘normal’ reaction to conspiracies – true or false, I prefer not to know about them, I prefer the ground to be firm beneath my feet, so I try not to read them so I can go through life in blinkered security. And, if I do read them, I expect hard evidence that it’s not the work of a fantasist.
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