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Charley's War: 1 August 1916- 17 October 1916 by Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun
01/05/2006 . Source: Paul Hanley 
pub: Titan Books. 112 page graphic novel. Price: £14.99 (UK), $19.95 (US). ISBN: 1-84023-929-8. Buy Charley's War in the USA - or Buy Charley's War in the UK  check out websites: www.titanbooks.com
We normally review SF/Fantasy but I am very pleased to have the opportunity to review 'Charlie's War' which is about an underage boy who volunteers for the British army during World War One. This is the second book. The first apparently covers the period from June 1916 to 1 August 1916 and this takes on the story to October 1916.
It is in the form of a comicstrip reminiscent of the 'Commando' stories which are told in pictures. Like them, the detail of weapons uniforms and so forth seems very accurate.
01 July 1916 saw the start of the Battle of the Somme. There were some sixty thousand British casualties on that day alone. The fighting in this battle, really a campaign, rolled on towards the end of the year. 'Charley's War' tells various stories from this period and gives a flavour of events. It is very much told from an ordinary soldier's perspective and I have no objection about that. What I would object to is that the illustrator author has marked down on officers whom he shows to be uncaring, incompetent and cowardly. I should declare an interest that I was an infantry officer but did start my soldiering as an ordinary rifleman. I think this bias is a little unfortunate. The reason why the trench system became established between the North Sea and Switzerland was that both sides had sufficient men to man it and modern communications, manufacturing, food production and so forth meant it was possible to keep these huge armies fed, supplied and armed throughout the year. Usually, soldiers try to work their way around an enemy's flank but here there was no flank. Instead, it took on the form of some enormous siege. Artillery, magazine rifles and machine guns provided enormous firepower which proved more useful to defence than attack.
This was the first war where there was effectively no mobile arm. In earlier wars, horsed cavalry had exploited a success on the battlefield and been able to turn a battlefield defeat into a rout as Napoleon's cavalry did to the Prussians after the battle of Jena. In World War Two, tanks provided the mobile arm as in the Blitzkrieg when the German panzers swept across France in a few weeks. Nor were there any effective tactical battlefield communications. In WWII, there were radios and eventually walkie-talkies down to platoon level to maintain command and control. At Waterloo, the battlefield was so small, comanders like the Duke of Wellington could see most of it from the back of a horse and influence events directly but this was not possible over hundreds of square miles of Flanders. Despite the best efforts of all sorts of people, once the troops went over the top, all contact was generally lost and where there were opportunities for fresh reserves to have exploited, by the time word got back to them, the chance had generally disappeared.
I do not wish to sound too critical. I enjoyed the book which is beautifully illustrated and as it represents real events rather than simply a fantasy, provides much food for thought. It graphically tells stories from the period and one can only marvel at the stoicism of the men who went through the experience of manning trenches on the Western Front.
The book also illustrates the problems with the early tanks which were slow, unwieldy and very debilitating for their crews who had to contend with noise and fumes as well as the risks of death, particularly by fire.
If you are interested in the World War One, this book does graphically illustrate what the men wore, their weapons and the sort of conditions they had to endure and is an excellent starting point to build a wider understanding of this war and its aftermath. Consider Communist Russia, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Palestine were all results of this war and you will see that its effects are very much still with us.
Paul Hanley
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