Taking his title from that bade farewell to an era, Rayner 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. These were calamitous blows, struck not only at an immense British Army but - as the old century passed into the new - at Victorian prestige, assumptions and complacency.