Secret History: Charley's War Intro 2

Last week’s post wrapped up the Marshal Law section of my new book, The Secret History of Comics, which also sadly turned out to be a farewell and eulogy to my co-creator on Law, Kevin O’Neill.

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 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.

Every subsequent post has a free preview, but the rest of it is for paying subscribers only – so if you’d like full access to ALL of my Secret History of Comics as I release it every week (plus other benefits, check them out), please consider subscribing: it’s £5 per month or £50 per year, and it helps me to continue giving you my best writing. I’m offering a free seven-day trial on Iconoblast, so you can try it first.

Introduction Part 2

Gary Sheffield, the current leading revisionist, told me Morel was ‘sadly mistaken’. 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. No mistake about that, Gary. 

There’s a simple test to know whether there is any truth in the establishment perspective. 

If your case is strong, if truth is on your side, it can happily and easily take alternative views and criticism. Healthy debate should be actively encouraged.  So an audience can weigh up the evidence and make up their own minds. Instead, all alternative views, criticisms and debates have been provably suppressed in the mainstream media for the last two decades.

There is now only one point of view that is centre stage – the view of the establishment. Yet if I, as a layperson, have access to documents which prove beyond any reasonable doubt it’s a lie, then they must, too. That’s the most disturbing part. They know how they’ve doctored our history.

A brief example just now. British soldiers were famously – or infamously – sent to the front in cattle-trucks marked ‘Hommes 40, Chevaux 8’. As part of my research for a thriller I am writing, I watched the BBC’s Railways of the Great War, presented by Michael Portillo. And Railways of the Western Front, presented by Chris Tarrant. In neither documentary are the trucks even mentioned. I watched both documentaries twice, to be sure. It’s fascinating to see, or rather not see, this blatant example of revisionism. Normally, the establishment are better at covering their tracks and have their excuses ready, such as when a classic anti-war TV series – Monocled Mutineer – wasn’t shown on TV. ‘Contract problems,’ according to The Times.

Censorship in Britain is subtle but widespread and usually involves plausible deniability that it even exists. So why did they exclude the trucks? Similarities to World War Two cattle-trucks going to concentration camps, perhaps? It’s not a similarity that had ever occurred to me before. But if there is such a disturbing comparison, that’s no reason for the cattle-trucks not to be shown. Because so many Tommies were travelling in them to an equally tragic and awful fate. Whatever the dubious reason for such blatant censorship, our forefathers deserve better.

Here’s what the soldiers themselves had to say, which Portillo and Tarrant would have known about, but chose to exclude from their presentations:  

The men complained bitterly about the way they were transported to the front-line. As Private W. T. Colyer commented: “We were not expecting to travel first or even second class on the train, but we thought we might have a reasonable chance of 3rd. It turned out we were to go about 7th class; i.e. in plain cattle-trucks with a little straw on the floor of them.” Another remarked that the experience convinced him that the: “Army have no consideration for the men at all”. (Spartacus Educational)

Here’s a quote from The Reluctant Tommy, by Ronald Skirth and Duncan Barrett:

‘I look along the train…it’s the longest I’ve ever seen – with open gun-carrying wagons hitched behind the engine, followed by what looks like half a mile of cattle-trucks. Everyone bears the same legend as ours stencilled on its side:

                                                            HOMMES 40

                                                            CHEVAUX 8

   

You would think this would be important and centre-stage rather, than some of the trivia presented in Portillo’s documentary.

Would any establishment historian disagree with this analysis of how they have withheld the truth from the public? If so, I have reams more evidence they would need to address first. Evidence that should really be collated in an academic study, except most academics are also part of the establishment and, should they ever decide to investigate the revisionists, a lack of funding will quickly bring them to heel. From what I’ve observed, historians, authors, journalists and academics will just keep quiet, their mission to put the clock back a hundred years now successfully complete. Just as historians, authors, journalists and academics supported the establishment during the Great War. So that new generations today will believe that the Great War was a just war, that Britain was ‘the good guy’, and the generals and politicians were heroes, not the mass-murderers of our forefathers. All of them have gotten away with their war crimes.

This brings us back to Charley. 

Hitherto, I would have been content for Charley to have been a classic series of the past, just like my Judge Dredd Cursed Earth saga, with no especial importance today and with other writers picking up the baton and continuing in the same anti-war tradition.

Sadly they haven’t continued. And as the revisionist plot to rewrite history took shape in the new century and then I learnt – to my horror – that the conflict was started and prolonged by Britain, Charley took on a new importance.

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.

It will never be on any official schools curriculum – my scathing commentaries in the back of each volume have put paid to that – but it is widely and unofficially used by teachers to bring the conflict to life. 

So the aim of this Secret History is not just to reveal the back stories behind the making of Charley, by Joe and myself, but also to suggest where I might have added to the existing narratives, where appropriate, to broaden our understanding of the conflict. Scenes and episodes I might have included if I’d know the full truth at the time of writing. And if I’d got them past the censor, of course. 

The documented widespread distribution of cocaine – ‘Forced March’ – to ordinary soldiers like Charley, for example, creating a generation of addicts after the conflict. It sounds unlikely that I would get such a scandal past the censor, but I became rather expert at featuring equally subversive information in a suitably matter of fact and non-challenging way. As a result, because Charley was so popular, it was rarely censored. As for the establishment, they would have had no interest in what was being related in a ‘kids’ comic’. 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.

Similarly, I’ve since read the full extent of the horrors of the British occupation of Russia in 1919. It makes the Americans in Vietnam seem like boy scouts. Britain, of course, has forgotten all about its dirty and murderous deeds in Russia, but I’m sure the Russians haven’t. I had no idea at the time of writing just how terrible the occupation was and that’s something I’d like to have added to my account of Charley and his fellow Tommies fighting the Bolsheviks.

There were lighter moments I wish I could have included, too. 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. I paid a researcher to prove it was true (these days I try not to fall into such tedious troll traps). Yet in just recent years I’ve discovered that the truth was actually even more bizarre and humorous. Machine guns actually rapped out rhythms of popular tunes and were answered by other machine guns!

‘Musical machine guns were commonplace on quiet fronts…Thus in front of the 41^st division, the German gunners were known as Duckboard Dick, Fritz, Peter the Painter, Parapet Joe and Happy Harry. ‘As for “Happy Harry”, he came to be quite liked, even as he was much admired. His skill at producing recognizable tunes in his staccato manner was a great incentive to our own gunners to get so familiar with their own guns as to be able to emulate his example.’ (Tony Ashworth: Trench Warfare 1914 – 1918)

Just imagine what I might have done with Charley’s friend, Smith 70 and his musical machine gun, playing the popular tunes of the era.

I can’t prove it, but I have the distinct feeling that the majority of historians – even those who focus on the lives of soldiers – exclude anything that’s too humorous and too humanising and I find myself asking why. Most accounts I’ve read present the Tommies as noble but cipher-like figures, usually happy to lay down their lives for their country to protect freedom and democracy. Their country that was in alliance with Czarist Russia with its pogroms against the Jews. Thus I wasn’t aware of the significance of Tommies calling themselves the  ‘Ragtime Infantry’ because no historian, in all the years I researched and wrote Charley, seemed remotely interested in why. In fact, it’s because Ragtime – an early form of jazz – was the rock and roll of its day. Ragtime would have been as important to young soldiers like Charley as the music of the Doors and the Animals would have been to young American soldiers serving in Vietnam. There was none of the government approved sentimentality of Keep the Home Fires Burning. Anti-war poet Siegfried Sassoon actually wanted to kill its writer Ivor Novello. Knowing our forefathers love of the ‘hot’ music of Ragtime, thoroughly disapproved of by an older generation, brings them back to life. And that is not the objective of revisionist historians.

They are not just ciphers, but untrained, raw and, by implication, stupid ciphers who needed to be herded around like cattle. Hence the trucks they’d been unloaded from. According to the revisionists, much of the blame for the failures in the Battle of  the Somme (except when the revisionists are calling it a victory) are allegedly down to the inexperience of this New Army. Not the generals. I wish I’d know that when I was writing Charley and his comrades going over the top on July 1^st 1916. I’d certainly have had Lieutenant Snell talking in such disparaging terms, echoing the revisionists of today.

All this makes for a Secret History of Charley’s War. The stories that still need to be told.

I also tried to tell them in other ways and came up hard against gatekeeper publishers. At the same time, the more I researched, the more horrifying the picture became. I discovered there was widespread collusion and trading between the British, French and German governments during the conflict. 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. That the war was deliberately prolonged by this and other means for years. All this forms part of the Secret History, and is related later.

It’s a need to get the truth out there – facts that rarely reach a mainstream audience conditioned by today’s revisionist propagandists – that makes this Secret History so significant.

As I’ve demonstrated, today Charley’s War is more important than ever and I really wish it wasn’t.  

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. It shows the establishment and its historians can yet be defeated. Even now.

Sam Flintlock sums it up well in an article in The Social Review:

‘Charley’s War is one of the most effective anti war comics ever created. The vast majority of anti war art has aimed squarely at those already opposed to wars, or at least the war in question. From Oh What a Lovely War! to Crass, this has been the general approach followed. It’s produced some great work, but I’d politely suggest that Charley’s War is likely to have been far more effective in putting off working class boys from joining the army.’

Mission accomplished!

Next week: The Battle of the Somme