New York: Random House, 1979. First American Edition [stated], Presumed First printing. Hardcover. xxix, [3], 718, [2] pages. Illustrated endpapers. With nine maps and 32 black and white illustrations. Chronology. Sources. Bibliography. Notes. Index. There is some soiling on fore-edge. DJ has some wear, edge tears and sticker residue and other soiling. The author uses firsthand accounts to reconstruct Britain's last great imperial war which proved to be one of the costliest, deadliest, and most humiliating wars in British history. Thomas Francis Dermot Pakenham, 8th Earl of Longford (born 14 August 1933), known simply as Thomas Pakenham, is an Anglo-Irish historian and arborist who has written several prize-winning books on the diverse subjects of African history, Victorian and post-Victorian British history, and trees. After graduating from Belvedere College and Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1955, Thomas Pakenham traveled to Ethiopia, a trip which is described in his first book The Mountains of Rasselas. On returning to Britain, he worked on the editorial staff of the Times Educational Supplement and later for The Sunday Telegraph and The Observer. He divides his time between London and County Westmeath, Ireland, where he is the chairman of the Irish Tree Society and honorary custodian of Tullynally Castle. He has seven siblings, among them the award-winning historian and biographer Lady Antonia Fraser, (who is the widow of playwright Harold Pinter); Lady Rachel Billington, also a writer (and the widow of the director Kevin Billington); and Lady Judith Kazantzis, a poet. More