"The anthology covers an immense amount of ground, aiming to bring perspectives other than 'the British soldier and his life in the trenches'"
You can’t have missed the fact that this year is the centenary of the outbreak of WWI. Documentaries by comfortingly avuncular old buffers talking to each other in leather wingback armchairs abound, and it’s offered plenty of opportunities for politicians to leap aboard the bandwagon and make some capital out of the event. Education Secretary Michael Gove enthusiastically and unsurprisingly stated his wish that the conflict be taught as a ‘just war’, fought for a noble cause, and all the lefty whiners who said otherwise should zip it forthwith. It’s a move the editors of To End All Wars, a new three-hundred page comic anthology about the war, saw coming a mile off.
When asked about the motivation to pull the book together, Brick, said, “It was a dread that the centenary commemorations as envisaged by Cameron & Co would be the same jingoistic rubbish we had fed to us at school.” It’s a sentiment echoed by his co-editor Jonathan Clode: “It struck me that I knew very little about WWI. I was also conscious that there are countless WWII comics but few of note relating to the First. Having listened to the way David Cameron unveiled the commemoration plans, I knew very early on that this book had to act as a counterpoint to the widely accepted view that this was a just war.”
One of the very few British comics about WWI is, or as Brick calls it, “the fabulous Charley’s War”, written by UK comics legend Pat Mills - whose introduction excoriates the establishment view of the war and sets the anthologies tone - and illustrated by Joe Colquhoun. Brick cites Mills as an inspiration, and a source of support throughout the making of the book. Mills believes that comics are one of the few places you can still tell the unvarnished truth without interference from “the establishment, as doubtless they think they don’t matter.”
The anthology covers an immense amount of ground, aiming to bring perspectives other than “the British soldier and his life in the trenches.” Michael Crouch and Shawn Wagner provide Kapitan Fritz’s Day Trip To Yarmouth, which covers the first recorded deaths by air raid in Britain (a zeppelin attack on Great Yarmouth). Sean Fahey and Borch Penya’s The Hunter is a beautifully illustrated tale about the psychological impact of war on a German fighter ace. In Gary and Warren Pleece’s Mud, Lice and Vice they examine the little-visited subject of sexual disease on the front lines, as well as the undiagnosed phenomena of post-traumatic stress disorder. Perhaps the most astonishing is The Stainless Steel Elephant (by Russell Wall, James Grey and Ariela Rie Kristantina), a factual story about an elephant helping to rescue people from the rubble of an air raid in Sheffield. The most haunting is The Cowards War, by Jonathan Clode and Matt Soffie, which relates the tragic life of Thomas Highgate, the first British soldier executed for ‘cowardice’ in the war. In all there are more than twenty stories by more than fifty creators from more than a dozen countries, each covering a different subject, each in a different style, each with its own nugget of unfamiliar and fascinating history to impart.
The aim, says Brick, was to get at the experiences of “the combatants and the folks left at home wondering what the hell’s going on.” Brick and Clode wanted each story to be “rooted in fact somehow”, and had a list of subjects they wanted covered, but left how those subjects were approached entirely up to the creators themselves. Only one story, The Iron Dice (by Brick himself), is about the “lords and masters of the war” and sees them up on trial in the Hague, questioned by a figure unfamiliar to British eyes but immensely well known in his native Czech literature: the “good soldier”, Šjevk.
Nottingham writers Pippa Hennessey and Ian Douglas also contributed. Pippa’s story (illustrated by Danos Philopoulos) takes on the issue of press manipulation, censorship and government propaganda during wartime. “They can spin what gets out, they can lie to discredit the ordinary people who report events, and they can produce compelling counter-claims by distorting and editing”, she says “I think we need to raise our levels of scepticism.”
Ian Douglas’ story (illustrated by Stjepan Mihaljevic) is a more traditional tale of “human courage, sacrifice and suffering” taking in the remarkable story of the U-Boat U9, and its sinking by HMS Dreadnaught after performing many terrifyingly successful raids on British shipping. “First, you have the almost Heath Robinson conditions on board these tiny primitive subs. Then you have the daring attack that claimed around 1,500 British lives. The sub sank three ships in an hour. Unbelievable. It's also ironic, because the Admiralty had dismissed the threat of U-Boats. British sailors paid the price for the Sea Lords’ indifference in blood.”
Putting the book together was a learning experience in itself. “Both JC and myself,” Brick says, “would readily admit that what we knew about the war before we started this would have fitted on a postcard.” Over the three hundred plus pages they’ve put together a wildly varied group of stories that ably fulfil their ambition to provide a counterpoint to more jingoistic views of the war.
To End All Wars will be available from Thursday 17 July by Soaring Penguin Press. All profits go towards Medecins Sans frontières.
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