Thomas Pakenham - The Boer War

A consummate masterpiece. In numerous vital respects it overturns the gospel as preached by all previous historians of the dubiously called last of the gentlemans wars Lord Anglesey, Sunday Telegraph

Not only a magnum opus, it is a conclusive work Enjoyable as well as massively impressive C. P. Snow, Financial Times

This splendid book towers over its predecessors F. S. Lyons, Irish Times

A splendid account The military history is superb New York Times

The grim story has been told before but never with such sweep and compassion Time

A definitive history of the war. Thomas Pakenham has a historians expertise with original sources, a detectives skill at tracking down new ones, and a journalists way of making a good story Scotsman

Compellingly readable Pakenhams descriptions of battles are done with great artistry New York Times Book Review

Vivid and exciting It is the anecdotal detail, the characters and action, which make this massive work readable intimate and accessible. Los Angeles Book Review

The grim story has been told before but never with such sweep and compassion. Time

A definitive history of the war. Thomas Pakenham has a historians expertise with original sources, a detectives skill at tracking down new ones, and a journalists way of making a good story Scotsman

Compellingly readable Pakenhams descriptions of battles are done with great artistry. New York Times Book Review

Vivid and exciting It is the anecdotal detail, the characters and action, which make this massive work readable intimate and accessible. Los Angeles Book Review

Published by Abacus

ISBN: 978-0-349-14194-7

Copyright 1979 Thomas Pakenham

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

Abacus

Little, Brown Book Group

Carmelite House

50 Victoria Embankment

London EC4Y 0DZ

www.littlebrown.co.uk

www.hachette.co.uk

For Val, in gratitude once again.

And to the memory of the war veterans who told me what it was like to be there

Look back over the pages of history;
consider the feelings with which we now
regard wars that our forefathers in their time
supported see how powerful and deadly are
the fascinations of passion and of pride.

W. E. Gladstone, 26 November 1879, condemning
the first annexation of the Transvaal

Thomas Pakenham is the author of The Mountains of Rasselas and The Year of Liberty. His last book, The Scramble for Africa, won both the WH Smith Literary Award and the Alan Paton Award. He divides his time between a terraced house in North Kensington, London and a crumbling castle in Ireland. He is married to the writer Valerie Pakenham and they have four children.

Cartoons

British cartoon in Manchester Evening Mail, 30 August 1899 (Authors collection)

French cartoon by Rouville, 1899 (Authors collection)

from Westminster Gazette, 27 February 1900

from the German magazine Ulk, Winter 1901

The war declared by the Boers on 11 October 1899 gave the British, in Kiplings famous phrase, no end of a lesson. The British public expected it to be over by Christmas. It proved to be the longest (two and three-quarter years), the costliest (over 200 million), the bloodiest (at least twenty-two thousand British, twenty-five thousand Boer and twelve thousand African lives) and the most humiliating war for Britain between 1815 and 1914.

I decided to try to tell the story of this last great (or infamous) imperial war, taking as my raw material the first-hand, and largely unpublished, accounts provided by contemporaries.

It was an ambitious idea, to base the book largely on manuscript (and oral) sources. No one had made the attempt for seventy years. In the decade after 1902, the public suffered a barrage of Boer War books. This culminated in a bombardment from the Long Toms, as it were: the seven-volume