"Desperate conditions," said Nelson, "require desperate remedies." The Boers' position was desperate from the first, to be saved only by the most vigorous handling of numbers which for a brief and critical period were largely superior.
Thus it was that these opening weeks decided the character and issue of the war, beyond chance of subsequent reversal.

By the Boers' own choice, interest was fixed not upon one or two, but upon several quarters, and these--save Ladysmith--determined not by their inherent, and therefore lasting and decisive, strategic importance, but by questions of commercial value and of the somewhat accidental presence in them of very small bodies of regular troops.

At two places, Mafeking and Kimberley, the assailants were, as an English journal justly put it, "foiled by colonial forces hastily organised, and stiffened by small regular detachments which have shown far more enterprise on the offensive than their besiegers have done." Such a situation, under the existing conditions of the general campaign, should have been met, not by protracted investment in force, {p.131} but by assault; or, if that were inexpedient, a sufficient detachment should have been left to hold the garrison in check, while considerations of more decisive military importance elsewhere received concentrated attention.
Immediately after the arrival of Sir Redvers Buller he found the investment of the three garrisons--Ladysmith, Kimberley, and Mafeking--already accomplished.

The question before him was complicated by the introduction of these new factors.

As has before been said, it is generally understood that the expectation of the British authorities had been to proceed at once to an invasion of the Orange Free State, presumably by the line to Bloemfontein, with flanking movements on either side of it, while the forces in Natal were to stand simply on the defensive, until, by the advance of the army of invasion within supporting distance, the time for co-operation with it should arrive.