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.

“His organization of his vast material is masterly”—TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

“At a time when South Africa and its racial crisis make daily news, this highly readable, lively history recreates the long, grim years of the Boer War […] Th[is] book tells it all. Paul Kruger, Cecil Rhodes, Joseph Chamberlin, Winston Churchill, the Kaiser, General Kitchener, and many others appear as central or fascinating peripheral figures in the telling. And the great battles of Natal and Ladysmith come alive again with exciting, dust-boiling, brutal verisimilitude. Nor are the political forces behind these years of chaotic fighting neglected. The result is an entertaining, instructive historical work of the first order.”—KIRKUS REVIEW