In January 1879, a British column camped beneath the Isandlwana hill was overrun by a Zulu army roughly twenty thousand strong, in what became one of the worst defeats the British Empire suffered during its colonial campaigns. This film from the Timeline series traces how the Anglo-Zulu War began, why Lord Chelmsford split his forces and left the camp exposed, and how Zulu commanders used speed and terrain to encircle the British position before the garrison could form an effective defense. Historians walk the battlefield in KwaZulu-Natal, using surviving accounts, maps, and period illustrations to reconstruct the collapse of the British line and the scale of the losses, over 1,300 soldiers killed. The program also weighs how the disaster reshaped British strategy for the rest of the war, feeding directly into the counterattacks and eventual siege tactics that followed. Expert interviews carry most of the analysis, grounded in the terrain and the documented sequence of the fighting rather than speculation.