In 1935 the troops of Benito Mussolini’s sinister-clownish Roman Empire II invaded Ethiopia, in large part out of spite for Italy’s embarrassing defeat there 40 years earlier.

Initially largely uncontested — thanks both to Emperor Haile Selassie’s desperate faith in international brotherhood and to a hearty dose of Quislingism from his leading nobles — when ‘war’ eventually did break out it was so one-sided that Ethiopian women were gathering spent bullet casings for reuse while Italian planes (the older Ethiopians believing these were dragons) dropped poison gas on them.