Anthony Mockler

This book is a mess. Simon Mann may have been brought up on John Buchan, educated at Eton and Sandhurst, and taken Conrad and the Iliad with him on his African travels, but his style is appalling — a sort of demotic militarese. Short sharp sentences. Few verbs. Acronyms sprinkled like confetti. The third sentence reads: ‘Rock-crag fingers claw my arse.’ And we skip all over the place, between Angola, Equatorial Guinea, South Africa and Sierra Leone, with flashbacks and fast-forwards and no index. The publisher’s boast that identities would be revealed and the mighty shaken on their thrones turns out to be empty. ‘The Boss’ goes unnamed, as does ‘the Croc’.

Every cavalryman must envy the hero of this book. Between 1936 and 1941 he led no less than five charges on horseback in Abyssinia, the final and most famous being the last cavalry charge that the British army has faced. And he survived to tell his tale. Indeed Tenente Amedeo Guillet is still living, aged 93, in Co. Meath, to which, very suitably, he retired for the hunting after a highly adventurous life, and where he still rides out. The last charge of the British cavalry was, as far as I know, in 1920, on 13 July, by the 20th Hussars - a thousand yards' successful dash against the flank of Kemal Ataturk's advancing troops in the Ismid Peninsula during the Chanak crisis.