Secret History: Charley's War - The Centenary Years Part 1

'Hanging on the old barbed wire'

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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HANGING ON THE OLD BARBED WIRE

I had naively thought that during the centenary of the Great War the horrors, the injustices and the mass-murders committed by the elites would be brought to light. I had no idea of the power of the State that would use its surrogates, especially the revisionist historians, to promote a completely false, jingoistic, faux-patriotic view of the Great War, dismissing  any story, book or film that gave an anti-war viewpoint.

A very British censorship.

The two conflicting points of view are aptly summed up by Michael Gove as the Voice of the State, and Harry Patch, the last surviving Tommy who, to the State’s huge but unacknowledged embarrassment was anti-war. Unacknowledged, so I’ll acknowledge it for them – think how they must have squirmed! 

Here’s Gove, the Voice of the State, as reported in the Daily Mail 2 January 2014: