An incredible turn of events was taking place after a few icy months of winter - the Boers were waking up like hibernating bears and there would be a sudden escalation in incidents across south Africa.

General Jan Smuts led a commando of around 400 men. He had survived three near misses after entering the Cape in the first week of September 1901. Remember I’d explained how he was first attacked by a group of Basutho’s, then he was ambushed by a British patrol while conducting surveillance - losing three men and his horse, then he was surrounded on a flat-topped hill in the Stormberg range.

He escaped after being led to a steep ravine by an unnamed hunchback.

General Louis Botha meanwhile, had managed to invade Natal with a much larger force of around 2000 men in his commando and had savaged a British cavalry unit near the town of Dundee. I explained last week how Captain Gough had charged straight into this commando, and lost virtually all of his 245 men.

Botha and his commando had been marching south skirting both Zululand and just clipping the Swaziland border. His men were riding fast - they had hundreds of pack mules and pack horses, leaving their cumbersome ox wagons. They had armed themselves with both Lee Metford and Mauser rifles so could take advantage of seized Britsh ammunition.

As Major Hubert Gough had discovered, this commando was moving swiftly. Remember the invasion of Natal was the other half of the grand strategy agreed with Smuts at the meeting in Standerton earlier in the year. The military aim was to divert pressure from the occupied Republics, its political aim, to prove that the war was not over.