Secret History: Charley's War The Clay-kickers

The challenges these poor devils had to face are understood and we’re empathising with them as they ‘clay-kick’ their way through the earth.

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.

Every subsequent post has a free preview, but if you want access to my entire rant post, you’ll need to subscribe. Full access to ALL of my Secret History of Comics as I release them every week (plus other perks, check them out), will set you back just £5 per month or £50 per year, and it helps me to continue giving you my best writing. I even have a free seven-day trial on Iconoblast, so you can try it first.

Research can be a frustrating business. No matter how many files I keep, there’s always something missing. Thus, at the time, I read about a giant, horribly expensive, ‘steam punk’, mole machine that was shipped over from the UK and was designed to tunnel under the trenches and lead the way to victory. Under conditions of great secrecy it was brought into position – just like the tanks – and switched on. It began drilling away and then became promptly… stuck! It was abandoned, and lies under the Western Front to this day. I’ve lost my original file and searched and searched on the web but can find no reference to it, yet I can assure you I didn’t imagine it. Maybe it’s vanished from the records because the whole story is so embarrassing? But the twenty-one mines actually dug under the Messines Ridge are equally fantastic, like a science fiction story by H.G. Wells or Jules Verne.