Customer Reviews

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• P MacNeil

  In this book Hawdon, the author Ralph Smith clearly demonstrates that he is a very talented and highly skilled writer. And, in this book, Ralph Smith also amazingly crafts and produces an extremely interesting novel about a British Cavalryman – Captain James Hawdon -- who, in the late1830s, commands and trains his Cavalry troops in peace-time England while preparing them for later battle abroad in Afghanistan. When in England, Captain Hawdon has a number of very close personal relationships, one in particular that will make it most painful for him to leave and go off to battle overseas but indeed Captain Hawdon later must go and leave that dearly loved one behind, hoping that she will be there for him when he returns. Captain Hawdon and his troops then later fight rebel troops and are even ordered to kill civilians in Afghanistan and, largely because of the latter experience, he later flees from the British Cavalry and retreats to Ireland at the time of a country-wide famine there in the 1840s and then Hawdon much later returns to England. In reading this book, one is entertained by a most intriguing novel story but the reader also learns about the related history and what life was life in a class-structured society and rather poverty-stricken England – and then Ireland in the late 1830s and early 1840s and what it was like in parts of war-torn Afghanistan during the Afghan War of 1839-42 and how terrible it was for British troops to live, fight, kill and die in Afghanistan. The book, in short, is a truly extraordinary and riveting historical novel – that captures, entertains and educates the reader.

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