Charley's War: The Great Mutiny by Pat Mills

Charley's War is always brilliant, the collection of Battle comic strips of young Private Charley Bourne, fighting in the worst hells of the Western Front. In this collection we are Etaples training camp in August 1917 where the brutal treatment of trainees by officers explodes into mutiny. Then, filled with remorse for having to shoot one of his comrades for desertion he joins the stretcher bearer's, unarmed soldiers charged with going out of the trenches unarmed to collect the wounded with only armbands with the words SB on them to protect them. As ever Mills and Colquhoun express the unfairness and slaughter of the Western Front with brilliant black and white illustrations and show rather than tell us the horrors of shell shock, malnutrition, gas attacks, class hierarchies and black humour.