One Mountain Thousand Summits: The Untold Story of Tragedy and True Heroism on K2, by Freddie Wilkinson, Broadway Books RRP$24.95, 336 pages

No Way Down: Life and Death on K2, by Graham Bowley, Viking RRP£18.99, 341 pages

K2: Life and Death on the World’s Most Dangerous Mountain, by Ed Viesturs with David Roberts, Broadway Books RRP$14.99, 352 pages

The Mountains of My Life, by Walter Bonatti, translated by Robert Marshall, Penguin Modern Classics, RRP£12.99, 442 pages

As a freezing Himalayan night fell on July 31 2008, there were an astonishing 48 climbers attached with varying degrees of precariousness to the flanks of K2, on the border between Pakistan and China. At 8,611m, K2 is the second highest mountain in the world, and the most notoriously lethal.

In the globalised spirit of the times, the climbers came from a host of nations: France, Italy, Ireland, Sweden, Spain, Serbia, Singapore, Norway, Netherlands, US, South Korea, Pakistan and Nepal. Most were altitude and adrenaline junkies; 12 were Nepalese Sherpas and Pakistani high-altitude porters, lured less by the romance and addiction of mountaineering than by the prosaic need to make a decent, if dangerous, living.

Thirty-six hours later, after 18 climbers had reached the summit and following the deadliest event in the history of K2 mountaineering, 11 were dead, including two Sherpas and two Pakistanis. In a freak accident a giant serac, or overhanging block of ice, broke off the mountain, wiping out the fixed lines on which many of the climbers depended for their descent, leaving them stranded without ropes above the infamously steep, avalanche-prone Bottleneck section in the oxygen-starved “death-zone” above 8,000m. With a Babel-like confusion of languages at this hallucinatory high altitude, the grimly inevitable mistakes, misjudgments, miscommunication and panic wreaked havoc. The disaster made headlines around the world.

Extreme adventures and misadventures like these tend to result in a slew of books with similar titles. Among those published after the tumultuous 1986 season on K2, during which 13 climbers were killed, was Jim Curran’s K2: Triumph and Tragedy, a gripping tale of human drama, hubristic ambition and utter recklessness.

After reading Curran’s book and learning to climb, the young American mountaineer Freddie Wilkinson became a K2 obsessive: “K2 became a symbol of everything climbing meant to me. It represented what the addiction was all about, distilled down to its most basic, primal form.” He thrills to its “beguiling power not only to push climbers to the very brink of their capabilities, but also to sow confusion and disorder on its flanks”.

In the wake of K2’s single bloodiest harvest in 2008, three new books with similar titles home in from different perspectives on what climbers call the Savage Mountain. In One Mountain Thousand Summits, Wilkinson focuses on the generally unsung guides and porters employed by the ill-fated 2008 expeditions, including a potted history of the Sherpas. He describes the bleak career options they faced in the early 20th century: indentured servitude, life in a monastery or carrying loads up the valleys. An alternative was the three-week walk to Darjeeling to seek a fortune satisfying “the Englishman’s strange predilection for climbing mountains”.

In No Way Down: Life and Death on K2, Graham Bowley, a former FT journalist, uses his reporter’s investigative skills to weave together an unputdownable narrative, based on hundreds of interviews and a trip to K2 base camp. As he points out, early accounts of the 2008 disaster were contradictory: “It was clear that memory had been affected by the pulverising experience of high altitude, the violence of the climbers’ ordeals and, in a few instances, possibly by self-serving claims, of glory, blame and guilt.” His book is a portrait of extreme courage, folly and loss, leavened by a small dose of survival, as complete a version of the calamitous story as will probably ever emerge, including the tragic account of what may be “one of the most selfless rescue attempts in the history of high-altitude mountaineering”.

Both Wilkinson and Bowley tell a good story very well. Theirs are step-by-faltering-step recreations of the thin-air fight to survive, bristling with cinematic immediacy. Both describe the harrowing scene during the descent when shattered climbers come upon three Korean mountaineers in dire straits, two of them hanging upside down on a rope against a sheer face of ice, their faces battered and bloodied by a fall, slowly freezing to death, the third distraught and unable to respond. All three later died.

In K2: Life and Death on the World’s Most Dangerous Mountain, Ed Viesturs, the first American to reach the summit of all 14 of the world’s 8,000m peaks, and co-writer David Roberts look at the wider history of K2, a starkly pyramidal peak that is to a certain breed of high-altitude mountaineer what Homer’s Sirens were to passing sailors. Steep, storm-prone and fatally unforgiving, K2 regularly lures men and women to their destruction, claiming more than one life for every four attempts made to climb it. For Viesturs it is the “holy grail” of climbing. “I am neither the first nor the last of its many worshippers to travel to the ends of the earth for the chance to grasp it in my hands.”

With such impressive credentials in this vertiginous world, Viestur is worth listening to. The main reason he is alive today, one suspects, is because – with the sole exception of a lucky escape on K2, when he succumbed to summit fever and climbed into a worsening storm – he has always been guided by the mantra that summits are optional, descents mandatory, a wise line for would-be mountaineers.

A certain scepticism about mountaineering’s literary appeal to the general public seems reasonable. There are only so many descriptions of cols and couloirs, shoulders and summits, ridges, bivouacs and ex­hausted “brewing up” in wind-whipped tents one can take. Oversized egos, sensationalised dramas and a tendency towards solipsism can be self-defeating, as WE Bowman’s parody The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956) makes hilariously clear. Mountaineers can’t necessarily write – hence Ed Viesturs “with David Roberts” – and writers can’t always climb. Three of the writers get away with it because they are relating genuinely extraordinary stories and one, a genuine climber, because he is also a maverick philosopher of the mountains.

Joe Simpson, author of the phenomenally successful Touching the Void (1988), an epic of survival in the Peruvian Andes, handsomely republished in a new Folio edition, says that 90 per cent of his readers are not climbers, evidence of how mountaineering literature can attract a wider audience.

This is key. Mountains do not just appeal to mountaineers; they speak to an elemental instinct within us all. Viewed with fear and loathing in the west a couple of centuries ago, as Robert Macfarlane explains in his magnificent Mountains of the Mind (2003), today these cathedrals of snow, rock and ice arouse admiration from the increasingly comfortable, cossetted and keyboarded lives we lead today.

Mountains represent the untamed beauty and otherworldliness of nature, its splendid lack of sentimentality and a wildness from which the modern age has retreated. They ignite the inherently human need to explore, even if for most of us this appetite can only be satisfied at a literary level.

Extreme expeditions – and the deaths they invariably involve – have always generated mass interest. The conquests of the North Pole, South Pole and Everest were all major news events, with rival newspapers bidding spectacular sums for exclusives. As Wilkinson remarks, “stories of life-and-death survival sell papers”. And books.

In other words, just as we are instinctively inspired by mountains, so do we respond to stirring accounts of human endeavour pitched high in the heavens. Such stories rarely get more dramatic than the wreckage on K2 in 2008. Bowley writes about the husband and wife team tragically ripped apart by an avalanche, and describes a courageous Irishman staggering off in “a hypoxic haze” to his death, having done his best to save the dying Koreans. K2 is uniquely lethal, Wilkinson explains, because it forces climbers to negotiate stomach-churning gradients while under “extreme psychological and cognitive duress” brought on by high altitude.

If the trio of K2 books are distinctly modern, The Mountains of My Life evokes a more heroic age. Born in 1930, the Italian Walter Bonatti is widely considered one of the greatest mountaineers of the 20th century. He was a member of the expedition that made the first ascent of K2 in 1954.

Although instrumental to its success – he and a Pakistani high-altitude porter hauled up heavy oxygen tanks that allowed his team-mates to reach the top, enduring a tortuous overnight bivouac on a tiny ice shelf at more than 8,000m – Bonatti did not make the summit and became embroiled in increasingly bitter controversies with the Italian climbing establishment.

There were accusations that he had abandoned the Pakistani porter to the elements, resulting in severe frostbite and emergency amputations; had tucked into the oxygen supplies intended for his colleagues and plotted with the porter to strike out for the summit ahead of them. Despite a successful libel suit to clear his name, the controversy never went away, propelling him into the darker world of the solo climber. “My disappointments came from people, not the mountains,” he writes.

Bonatti surveys – as if from the summit – an extraordinary life scaling some of the most formidable faces of rock and ice on the planet. There is something of the classical composer about this complicated man. Instead of a string of symphonies, concertos and operas to his name, he lists a series of stunning climbs and summits, each one a remarkable feat of grace, elegance and stamina, laced with sheer bloody nerve: in 1949, at the age of 19, the north face of the Grandes Jorasses, regarded as one of the three hardest climbs in the world; the solo ascent of the “impossible” south-west pillar of the Dru in 1955; and then, most audacious of all, to mark his retirement from mountaineering and the centenary of Edward Whymper’s first ascent, a solo ascent, in winter, of the unclimbed direct line – the direttissima – up the north face of the Matterhorn in 1965.

For Bonatti the value of any climb, the heart of his concept of alpinism, is the sum of three inseparable elements: “aesthetics, history and ethics”. The real essence of mountaineering is not escape, he writes, underplaying his own escape from everyday life, but “victory over human frailty”. He believes that “courage makes a man master of his own fate. It is a civilised, responsible determination not to succumb to impending moral collapse.”

These days it is perfectly legitimate to ask whether much Himalayan mountaineering is less a voyage of discovery than a heavily sponsored ego trip. There was precious little heroism in evidence when numerous climbers filed past a dying British climber on Everest in 2006, when 12 lost their lives on the mountain. Mutual responsibility and shared endeavour appear to have given way to individualism and self-preservation at all costs, Wilkinson notes, despite the acts of courage that both he and Bowley record. One might as well lament modern footballers berating referees, or batsmen refusing to walk, but many will share Bonatti’s preference for a simpler and less commercial approach to the highest mountains.

As for the great “why?”, which for many people lurks beneath these epic mountaineering stories and which these books valiantly pose and attempt to answer, the British climber George Mallory’s uniquely pithy response, “Because it’s there,” still serves as well as any.

Many of the criticisms levelled at today’s high-altitude mountaineers may be justified, but it is surely missing the mark to dismiss this sort of life-endangering climbing as pointless in the post-heroic age of exploration. There will always be those, like Bonatti, for whom the adventurous life is “the true measure of a man”. We should celebrate and applaud them. After all, mountaineering is no more pointless than working in a bank.

Justin Marozzi is a travel writer and historian. His latest book is ‘The Man Who Invented History: Travels with Herodotus’ (John Murray)

The belief that ours is the most gloriously modern of ages, rooted in reason and revelling in novelty, is so widely held that Ferdinand Mount’s elegant riposte comes as something of a shock. It is disconcerting to think that we’ve been here before, that the ancients were absorbed by exactly the same sorts of fads and foibles that enliven and trouble our lives today, that in so many ways we are them and they us.

Think of the cult of the celebrity. You can trace a line directly from the mawkish excesses of the public’s reaction to Jade Goody’s illness and death last year, to the extraordinary aftermath of the death in AD 130 of Hadrian’s lover Antinous. So distraught was the Roman emperor that he founded a city bearing the handsome lad’s name, a vast project three miles in circumference, every column along the mile-long main street bearing his statue. Napoleon’s surveyor Jomard counted 1,344 busts or statues of Antinous in two streets alone. Seventy cities across the empire rushed to erect temples in his honour. His profile even popped up on Roman coins. Antinous was duly deified, the last non-imperial mortal to be made a god. Celebrity culture gone mad, as the tabloids might put it.

Talking of religion, today’s spiritually consumerist pick-and-mix smorgasbord recalls the panoply of choices for the inquisitive Roman. On the one hand there was official religion, on the other were the clutches of cults and the widespread worship of Mithras, Isis, Serapis and a host of others. For anyone who thinks astrologers belong firmly in the ancient world, when they enjoyed enormous authority under the Romans, remember Ronald Reagan consulting his pet astrologer Jean Quigley on weighty matters of state, such as exactly when to sign the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987. Then there is Cherie Blair and her feng-shui expert, her magic pendant that served as a Bioelectric Shield and her attachment to the New Age guru Carole Caplin. Across the Atlantic, Sarah Palin, George Bush and Barack Obama all profess born-again experiences.

Mount mounts a compelling and amusing case for parallels between the sexual free-for-all of ancient Greece and Rome and the no-strings-attached world of today’s “zipless fuck”, a phrase he enjoys so much he can’t help spraying it across a memorable chapter on The Bedroom. He reminds us of the Neo-Pagan yearning for a return to the sexual laissez-faire of the ancient world, quoting Lytton Strachey’s exuberant response to reading Plato’s Symposium in 1896, wishing he had sat at the feet of Socrates and seen the Athenian statesman and general Alcibiades. In EM Forster’s Maurice, when undergraduates reach the part of Plato’s Phaedrus in which he describes same-sex passion with poetic force, the teacher remarks with wearily Christian fervour: “Omit: a reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks.” The ancients may not have been forever capering around with erect penises to the fore, yet their sexual behaviour and thinking were a world away from the joyless Christian dogma of sex and original sin.

Ancient baths and today’s spa “experiences” and “pampering”; Socratic dialogue and trial by Paxman; the Greek gymnasium and our cult of fitness; pretentious galloping gourmets such as Archestratus, devotee of grey mullet and sea bass, and the obsessive creations of Heston Blumenthal. However dispiriting it may be to acknowledge, it’s hard to duck the conclusion of this splendid book that we’ve been here before, that the Christian-dominated space between the ancients and our era was a strange, normal-rules-do-not-apply interregnum.

It reminds me of the wise observation by Joseph Brodsky in Of Grief and Reason, not mentioned here, that “one of the saddest things that ever transpired in the course of our civilisation was the confrontation between Greco-Roman polytheism and Christian monotheism, and its known outcome”, an altercation that was neither intellectually nor spiritually necessary.

Patrick Hennessey was one of the British army’s self-proclaimed Bright Young Things, an Oxford graduate with a lust for combat and a literary bent. Born in 1982, he belongs to a generation of uniformed men and women who would, as he puts it, ‘do more and see more in five years than our fathers and uncles had packed into twenty-two on manoeuvres in Germany and rioting in Ulster’. Hard on the older generation, perhaps, but such have been the opportunities afforded by the War on Terror.

The Junior Officers’ Reading Club charts Hennessey’s four-year journey from the square-bashing of Sandhurst to front-line duty in Iraq and Afghanistan as a Grenadier Guards Platoon Commander and Operations Officer, and his subsequent departure from the army. If the journey itself is unremarkable — the usual suspects of barking Non-Commissioned Officers, a general disdain for Rear Echelon Motherfuckers or REMFs, high-octane thrills of men with guns and the camaraderie forged under fire are all present and correct — what impresses is the sheer candour and immediacy of his reporting. A literary soldier, especially one still in his twenties rather than a bewhiskered sixtysomething general penning his memoirs, is something to be treasured.

We can therefore excuse the gung-ho tone of much of the book. This is a young man fortunate enough, unlike so many soldiers of a previous generation who missed out on a good war, to be doing just what he has always dreamed of. During one particularly intense fight with ‘Terence’ Taliban in Afghanistan, he says he wants to sit down with the Major who has come along for the ride and try to understand the adrenaline and euphoria of it all and ask what could possibly compare.

‘…the winning goal scoring punch, the first kiss, the triumphant knicker-peeling moment? Nowhere else sells bliss like this, surely? Not in freefall jumps or crisp blue waves, not on dance floors in pills or white lines — I want to discuss with him whether it’s sexually charged because it’s the ultimate affirmation of being alive…’

The answer is very little or nothing can compare because war is uniquely different. It confers an experience that those who have not donned uniform can ever quite understand. As the Company Sergeant Major puts it in a dash of graffiti at the Sangin District Centre when the tour comes to an end, ‘for those who have fought for it, life will always have a flavour the sheltered cannot taste’.
Hennessey’s generation is naturally the most media-savvy there has ever been. The Inkerman Company’s exploits are scrupulously and tirelessly recorded on camera so the officers and men can make video montages to impress friends and girlfriends back home.

‘We went into battle in bandanas and shades with Penguin Classics in our webbing, sketch pads in our daysacks and iPods on the radio, thinking we knew better than what had gone before,’ he writes. Hennessey is driven by the glamour of it all, from Sandhurst to Iraq and into deployment in Afghanistan. After the tedium of all that drill, the relentless boredom of waiting and hoping for action which is the soldier’s lot, killing the enemy is ‘fun’, never mind the rights and wrongs of the conflict,
which are not discussed.

There is an inevitability about the reality-check which comes of seeing comrades killed and grotesquely injured. Casualties become shockingly regular. We don’t know whether Hennessey’s virtual reading club included Herodotus, history’s first war reporter, but the irrepressible Greek put his finger on it in lines that ring as true today as when he wrote them 2,500 years ago: ‘No one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace — in peace sons bury fathers, but in war fathers bury sons.’

As Hennessey contemplates the carnage around him, the tone becomes darker, more measured and reflective, a welcome and sensitive contrast to the flippant banter, dripping with irony, that has come before. These passages are some of the most important and affecting in what ultimately proves to be a very fine book, a powerful despatch from the front line and required reading for the families of those in the armed forces. Let us hope his move into conflict and international humanitarian law will provide material for future books because he would be an amusing, probably caustic, observer of the field.

A final note. When I called the Panorama producer Hennessey accuses of being a little yellow under fire in Afghanistan to check the author’s version of events, he disputed them with a chuckle. He also described Hennessey as the bravest man he had ever met.

Land of Marvels: A Novel by Barry Unsworth (Hutchinson, £18.99)

JOHN Somerville is an English archaeologist working in the deserts of Mesopotamia on the brink of the First World War. After years of disappointment in the subterranean world of history, he is pinning his hopes on this latest excavation.

His funds are running out and time isn’t on his side. He is hoping for fame but is braced for disaster. This is his last chance.

The German-funded Baghdad railway linking Constantinople to the Persian Gulf is getting inexorably nearer. Its route looks likely to smash through the ancient mound of mud and rock that holds the key to Somerville’s future.

Another man keeping a beady eye on proceedings is Jehar, an unscrupulous Bedouin in the archaeologist’s pay. He, too, hopes to make his fortune, with which he will be able to pay the elusive bride-price of 100 pounds demanded by the uncle of Ninanna, a beautiful Circassian girl.

Somerville’s wife Edith, deeply conventional yet unfulfilled, wonders about the future of her marriage in the stultifying heat of the desert.

Into the fray steps Alex Elliott, a breezy American geologist-cum-corporate sleuth posing as an archaeologist, ostensibly working for British interests on a top-secret mission from the cynical financier Lord Rampling while concealing his own darker motives. In Edith’s eyes, at least, Elliott brings with him a refreshing whiff of glamour and excitement.

After a midnight, moonlit ride out into the desert, she succumbs to the romance of the setting and the enigmatic stranger, and the two embark on a fleeting affair.

While Britain, France, Germany and the United States plot to carve up the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, Somerville’s dig starts to take on greater significance.

The hitherto unremarkable mound starts to reveal itself as something infinitely more history-making. It looks like an ancient Assyrian palace containing a wholly unexpected royal tomb. As the archaeological prize grows by the day, promising to launch Somerville into international stardom, the railway continues to approach and the Englishman unaware of his wife’s night-time wanderings with the American impostor feels his own impending doom.

Outside Mesopotamia questions begin to be asked about Elliott. Suspicions as to his true intentions are raised. Is he working for the Germans? For Lord Rampling, the American’s reports on oil in the desert represent the prospect of a personal financial windfall and a patriotic triumph for Britain. They cannot be jeopardised for one moment. The American has to be assassinated.

Tensions mount in the desert as spies and assassins join the cast of soldiers and archaeologists, and the story hurtles on towards its fiery denouement.

Unsworth’s novel abounds with parallels between pre-war Mesopotamia and present-day Iraq. In Rampling’s words, “What was it Churchill had said…? Mastery itself is the prize. Prophetic words. He who owns the oil will own the world, he will rule the sea and the land, he will rule his fellow men.

The day will come when oil will be more desired, more sought after than gold.” Who said history never repeats itself ?

We take it for granted that the state should have a monopoly on the use of violence. Previous generations, however, were more relaxed about private-sector involvement in the bloody business of war.

‘Persians, Greeks and Romans all relied on hired muscle, to the extent that the Persian victory over Egypt at the Battle of Pelusium in 525 BC saw both sides field armies largely consisting of Greek mercenaries,’ Stephen Armstrong writes in this breezy canter through the recent history of guns for hire.

For much of the Middle Ages, European battlefields were the playgrounds of condottieri, puffed-up mercenary captains such as Sir John Hawkwood and Sigismondo Malatesta hired by Italian city-states to wage war.

The tradition persisted into the 19th century. Many of the troops Wellington mustered at Waterloo in 1815 were mercenaries.

Armstrong kicks off his story with the mercenary renaissance of the 1960s and the story of dashing David Stirling, founder of the Special Air Service.

Had it not been for Stirling and the British Mercenary Organisation, royalist forces in Aden would likely have collapsed under the onslaught of Nasser’s invasion in 1962.

In 1967, having embarked on a profitable business connection with King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, Stirling founded Watchguard International, the world’s first private security company. The Brits have been well represented in private security ever since.

Fast-forward to the second Gulf War in 2003. Much of the battlefield was by now a privatised business.

KBR (Kellogg Brown and Root), formerly a subsidiary of the Halliburton corporation, provides everything from accommodation, laundry and linens to vehicle maintenance, military canteens and convoys.

Private-security companies, most of them British and American, mushroom to fill the sudden demand for convoy protection, bodyguarding and armoured taxi services. Some are good. Others, such as Custer Battles and Triple Canopy at the cowboy end of the market, are not.

By the end of Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure as Secretary of Defense in 2006, there were 100,000 contractors in Iraq, a ratio of one to one with American troops.

With 14,000 personnel in uniform in early 2008, the British security company Erinys has more men in Iraq than the British Army. The work is dangerous, but the money is good.

From an Iraqi perspective, the arrival of large numbers of pumped-up young men with goatee beards who look as though they are dressed for a paramilitary catwalk, has been an unwelcome development.

Armstrong quotes an eyewitness describing the deployment of a security team from Blackwater, the American company awarded a $27.7 million no-bid contract to provide security for the American viceroy Paul Bremer.

‘The guards were chiselled like bodybuilders and wore tacky, wraparound sunglasses. Many wore goatees and dressed in all-khaki uniform with ammo vests or Blackwater T-shirts with the company’s trademark bear claw in the cross hairs, sleeves rolled up.

“Their haircuts were short, and they sported security earpieces and lightweight machine guns. They bossed around journalists and ran Iraqi cars off the roads.’

And, he might have added, hurled mineral water bottles into the windscreens of innocent Iraqi drivers and screamed, ‘F—ING BACK OFF!’

It is this sort of behaviour and character – physically ludicrous, overconfident, culturally insensitive and intellectually challenged – that gives the private security industry such a poor reputation.

Armstrong’s original inspiration for this book came from the disgraceful shooting by a Blackwater team of 16 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad last September.

Blanket immunity, guaranteed by Bremer in one of his last acts in Iraq, is not the best way to deal with this problem of perception.

Armstrong quotes lengthy conversations with Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer, founder of the British group Aegis, which at one point had the world’s largest security contract in Iraq.

The story of Aegis, for whom this reviewer established a nationwide civil affairs programme in Iraq, demonstrates how effective a modern private security company can be in a dangerous environment where aid agencies and humanitarian organisations are simply unable to operate.

Whatever one thinks about it, Spicer argues the private security industry is here to stay and there is little reason to doubt it.

Darfur crops up repeatedly here. Frustrated at the unwillingness and inability of sovereign states to supply sufficient troops to the UN/African Union peacekeeping mission, the actress Mia Farrow recently called for a private-sector response, suggesting that Blackwater should intervene.

Spicer envisages a future conflict in a failed state when the UN will debate interminably while the bodies pile up, the international community will wring its hands and eventually a private company will be legally contracted to assist.

As he puts it, ‘Which is worse? Dead babies or a private company?’

Far-fetched? Perhaps not. In 2005, Blackstone launched Greystone, a subsidiary company designed to put a military force into the field – quickly.

In the company’s own words: ‘The Greystone peacekeeping solution provides a flexible force with the ability to provide a properly trained force in a short period of time. The force provides a light infantry solution that is self-contained and self-sufficient. The Greystone peacekeeping programme leverages efficiency of private resources to provide a complete cost-effective security solution.’

Given Khartoum’s hostility to the West, tackling Darfur might be a little optimistic at this stage. Providing a ‘solution’ to lazy corporate jargon would be a good start.

We take it for granted that the state should have a monopoly on the use of violence. Previous generations, however, were more relaxed about private-sector involvement in the bloody business of war.

‘Persians, Greeks and Romans all relied on hired muscle, to the extent that the Persian victory over Egypt at the Battle of Pelusium in 525 BC saw both sides field armies largely consisting of Greek mercenaries,’ Stephen Armstrong writes in this breezy canter through the recent history of guns for hire.

For much of the Middle Ages, European battlefields were the playgrounds of condottieri, puffed-up mercenary captains such as Sir John Hawkwood and Sigismondo Malatesta hired by Italian city-states to wage war.

The tradition persisted into the 19th century. Many of the troops Wellington mustered at Waterloo in 1815 were mercenaries.

Armstrong kicks off his story with the mercenary renaissance of the 1960s and the story of dashing David Stirling, founder of the Special Air Service.

Had it not been for Stirling and the British Mercenary Organisation, royalist forces in Aden would likely have collapsed under the onslaught of Nasser’s invasion in 1962.

In 1967, having embarked on a profitable business connection with King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, Stirling founded Watchguard International, the world’s first private security company. The Brits have been well represented in private security ever since.

Fast-forward to the second Gulf War in 2003. Much of the battlefield was by now a privatised business.

KBR (Kellogg Brown and Root), formerly a subsidiary of the Halliburton corporation, provides everything from accommodation, laundry and linens to vehicle maintenance, military canteens and convoys.

Private-security companies, most of them British and American, mushroom to fill the sudden demand for convoy protection, bodyguarding and armoured taxi services. Some are good. Others, such as Custer Battles and Triple Canopy at the cowboy end of the market, are not.

By the end of Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure as Secretary of Defense in 2006, there were 100,000 contractors in Iraq, a ratio of one to one with American troops.

With 14,000 personnel in uniform in early 2008, the British security company Erinys has more men in Iraq than the British Army. The work is dangerous, but the money is good.

From an Iraqi perspective, the arrival of large numbers of pumped-up young men with goatee beards who look as though they are dressed for a paramilitary catwalk, has been an unwelcome development.

Armstrong quotes an eyewitness describing the deployment of a security team from Blackwater, the American company awarded a $27.7 million no-bid contract to provide security for the American viceroy Paul Bremer.

‘The guards were chiselled like bodybuilders and wore tacky, wraparound sunglasses. Many wore goatees and dressed in all-khaki uniform with ammo vests or Blackwater T-shirts with the company’s trademark bear claw in the cross hairs, sleeves rolled up.

“Their haircuts were short, and they sported security earpieces and lightweight machine guns. They bossed around journalists and ran Iraqi cars off the roads.’

And, he might have added, hurled mineral water bottles into the windscreens of innocent Iraqi drivers and screamed, ‘F—ING BACK OFF!’

It is this sort of behaviour and character – physically ludicrous, overconfident, culturally insensitive and intellectually challenged – that gives the private security industry such a poor reputation.

Armstrong’s original inspiration for this book came from the disgraceful shooting by a Blackwater team of 16 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad last September.

Blanket immunity, guaranteed by Bremer in one of his last acts in Iraq, is not the best way to deal with this problem of perception.

Armstrong quotes lengthy conversations with Lieutenant Colonel Tim Spicer, founder of the British group Aegis, which at one point had the world’s largest security contract in Iraq.

The story of Aegis, for whom this reviewer established a nationwide civil affairs programme in Iraq, demonstrates how effective a modern private security company can be in a dangerous environment where aid agencies and humanitarian organisations are simply unable to operate.

Whatever one thinks about it, Spicer argues the private security industry is here to stay and there is little reason to doubt it.

Darfur crops up repeatedly here. Frustrated at the unwillingness and inability of sovereign states to supply sufficient troops to the UN/African Union peacekeeping mission, the actress Mia Farrow recently called for a private-sector response, suggesting that Blackwater should intervene.

Spicer envisages a future conflict in a failed state when the UN will debate interminably while the bodies pile up, the international community will wring its hands and eventually a private company will be legally contracted to assist.

As he puts it, ‘Which is worse? Dead babies or a private company?’

Far-fetched? Perhaps not. In 2005, Blackstone launched Greystone, a subsidiary company designed to put a military force into the field – quickly.

In the company’s own words: ‘The Greystone peacekeeping solution provides a flexible force with the ability to provide a properly trained force in a short period of time. The force provides a light infantry solution that is self-contained and self-sufficient. The Greystone peacekeeping programme leverages efficiency of private resources to provide a complete cost-effective security solution.’

Given Khartoum’s hostility to the West, tackling Darfur might be a little optimistic at this stage. Providing a ‘solution’ to lazy corporate jargon would be a good start.