When he wrote this classic, which historians of the period rank alongside Morris's more famous Washing of the Spears, Coupland was the foremost living authority on the history of the British Empire. In Zulu Battle Piece he describes, with swift and vivid strokes, the situation between whites and blacks, the great military qualities and terrifying military tactics of the Zulu warriors and the characters of the Englishmen, soldiers and politicians involved in the disaster; and then having the consummate art and scholarship prepared the reader, he sets the great action in that strange, eerie land, until the reader can truly feel that he has lived through it himself. The aftermath brings him to Rorke's Drift and the gallant British stand that averted irretrievable disaster. This was the first modern study of the battle and subsequent events at Rorke's Drift, a masterly classic by an excellent writer who vividly marshals his facts.