"There has been very little moving about of burghers from one part of the Transvaal or Free State to the other....

In the latter, the eastern commandos have gone to Natal, the western ones to Kimberley, and to the southern ones, numbering probably less than 4,000 men altogether, have been left the double task of invading Cape Colony and keeping off the Basutos; and as the ordinary Free State burgher is much more anxious about his own farm than about turning our colony upside down, the result is that practically nothing has been done to attack the most vulnerable point in our defence." The {p.120} same correspondent, writing from Cape Town, October 25, said that there were not 3,000 men of regular troops, and no artillery, in Cape Colony when the war broke out.

His means of information were doubtless better than those of Steevens, who was in Cape Town less than forty-eight hours and made his guess--4,100--before he had time for personal observation over the ground.
It is scarcely necessary to point out what an opportunity was here presented for a rapid succession of blows at isolated detachments, such as military history has often before witnessed.

It is difficult to believe that the frontier could not have been swept clean from end to end, and the entire railroad system, essential to the advance and centralised action of the British forces, hopelessly dislocated and smashed by an operation embodying the most elementary conceptions of concentration.

Instead of that the centre of the line was kept almost undisturbed, the principal demonstrations of the Boers across the border being on the flanks--Kimberley and Mafeking on their right, Stormberg and the {p.121} districts north and east of it on their left; the railroad from Naauwport to De Aar, and thence to the Orange River, being scarcely molested, and for working purposes remaining intact.