Robert Edgerton is one of the leading historian writers around and wrote a masterpiece covering one of the most intense wars in history which is the Zulu War. the most famous and dramatic anti-colonial war in Africa the Zulu War is still often rehashed by British historians and I wonder if reenactments are ever done as is done with the Civil war in America. Mr Edgerton details the war from the fist British defeat at Isandlwana in 1879 where the Zulu savages impaled all the red soldiers and even all the animals with their vicious spears and the author manages to give grim details and results of past-battle carnage of corpses by the Zulu's. Lord Chelmsford's blunders and misjudgments cost the British much in this battle and they would mercilessly go back on the counter attack hunting the Zulus and avenging the most famous defeat of the British empire.
Robert Eggerton does a marvelous job in describing the Zulu forces under King Cetshwayo and the methods and mobilization the Zulus were as the most effective fighting unit of the African continent that menaced hundreds of other African tribes often massacring them out of existence or incorporating them into their growing ranks. The Zulus had magical and religious beliefs to many mundane things that made them superstitious in battle against the British and which helped the smaller out-numbered British army to win countless victories after Isandlwana none more famous that Rorke's drift where a small detachment of British and native soldiers fought back eight hours of Zulu suicidal charges and was portrayed in the Movie Zulu. Eight hundred Zulus had been slaughtered in their determination to repeat Isandlwana and fill their spears with British blood. This book captures the very minute detail of this short war. the Zulus were eventually cowered and their power in south African halted as the last of the major expanding African powers that fell to the determination, courage, and technology of the British empire
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