The Boer War

New York: Random House, 1979. First American Edition [stated], Presumed First printing. Hardcover. Good/Good. xxix, [3], 718, [2] pages. Illustrated endpapers. With nine maps and 32 black and white illustrations. Chronology. Sources. Bibliography. Notes. Index. There is some soiling on fore-edge. DJ has some wear, edge tears and sticker residue and other soiling. The author uses firsthand accounts to reconstruct Britain's last great imperial war which proved to be one of the costliest, deadliest, and most humiliating wars in British history. Thomas Francis Dermot Pakenham, 8th Earl of Longford (born 14 August 1933), known simply as Thomas Pakenham, is an Anglo-Irish historian and arborist who has written several prize-winning books on the diverse subjects of African history, Victorian and post-Victorian British history, and trees. After graduating from Belvedere College and Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1955, Thomas Pakenham traveled to Ethiopia, a trip which is described in his first book The Mountains of Rasselas. On returning to Britain, he worked on the editorial staff of the Times Educational Supplement and later for The Sunday Telegraph and The Observer. He divides his time between London and County Westmeath, Ireland, where he is the chairman of the Irish Tree Society and honorary custodian of Tullynally Castle. He has seven siblings, among them the award-winning historian and biographer Lady Antonia Fraser, (who is the widow of playwright Harold Pinter); Lady Rachel Billington, also a writer (and the widow of the director Kevin Billington); and Lady Judith Kazantzis, a poet. Derived from a Kirkus review: The Boer War (1899-1902) looms in retrospect as Britain's Vietnam: a limited engagement that would "be over by Christmas," it turned into the longest, the bloodiest, "and the most humiliating war for Britain between 1815 and 1914." Powerful Britain could take no comfort, moreover, from its terminus, for even if the Boer guerrillas "lost the war, they won the peace." Thomas Pakenham, one of the auspiciously prolific Longfords, has now given this epochal contest its first full-length treatment in nearly 70 years. In the course of his narrative, he skillfully maps out the causes, the course and the aftereffects of the war. He examines the actions of the leading personalities on both sides, and carefully traces the transformation of the conflict into a war of attrition. Among the book's many strengths are Pakenham's use of unpublished and even some previously unconsulted sources (including some 52 veterans whom he interviewed); his vivid descriptions of military engagements and his attention to ways and means, from the "smokeless, long-range, high velocity, small-bore magazine bullet" to "the Boers' secret weapon, the spade"; and, perhaps most notably, his focus on the "invisible" black majority, which suffered at the hands of both sides during the war and saw its political rights sold out at the peace. Pakenham also offers a number of key reinterpretations. He regards High Commissioner Alfred Milner as the single individual most responsible for starting the war, and moreover asserts--"contrary to the accepted view of later historians"--that such Rand millionaires as Alfred Bett and Julius Wernher were his accomplices. He is less than usually harsh, however, toward British general Buller, damned for his unsuccessful tactics early in the war. Anticipating a future conflict in South Africa, he observes finally that "black nationalism" will probably "match Afrikaner nationalism in stamina and perhaps outmatch it in bitterness." An intelligent, vigorous, firmly grounded presentation--and, self-evidently, the new standard work.