ZULU BATTLE PIECE - ISANDHLWANA. BY SIR REGINALD COPELAND IN SOUTH AFRICA

1991. Hard cover with dust cover; 144 pages. Very good condition. Tightly bound, neat and clean. Under 1kg. When he wrote this little classic, which historians of the period rank alongside Morris's more famous Washing of the Spears, sir Reginald Coupland was the foremost living authority on the history of the British Empire.   In Zulu Battle Piece he describes,with swift and vivid strokes, the situation between whites and blacks, the great military qualities and terrifying military tactics of the Zulu warriors and the characters of the Englishmen, soldiers and politicians, involved in the disaster: and then having the consummate art and scholarship prepared the reader, he sets the great action in that strange,eerie land, until the reader can truly feel that he has lived through it himself. The aftermath brings him to Rorke's Drift and the gallant British stand that averted irretrieveable disater.   In his new introduction to this readable and concise work, Ian Knight discusses Coupland's thinking and sets the book in its proper historical and literary perspective.