Good-Bye Dolly Gray

It was natural for the South African-born writer Rayne Kruger to choose the Boer War for a work of non-fiction. Settled in England, he returned to Johannesburg to interview survivors and consult written records, and Goodbye Dolly Gray, first published in 1959, went on to become the first modern one-volume distillation of existing knowledge on the South African War, concentrating on the campaigning while being mindful of the political consequences for all concerned. Rayne Kruger brilliantly describes the background, the arms and armies, the campaigns and personalities of the war in which soldiers from across the British Empire marched to a succession of brave defeats at hands of sharpshooting farmers. Goodbye Dolly Gray places the glory and the savagery of the South African war into the perspective of modern Africa.