Many of his devices were as unsubstantial as stage scenery; the besiegers were the villains of the piece who would meet with their deserts before the curtain fell; there was comic by-play in his ways of beguiling the tedium and the lassitude of the siege, in the bantering messages he sent out to the besiegers, and now and then even in his garrison orders.  The little garrison was permeated by the exosmose action of his cheery optimism and humour during seven weary months of waiting; and while it might seem to some that he was treating the serious situation with unbecoming levity, he wisely kept the tragedy of it, of which he was fully conscious, in the background.

His methods were so far successful that in a few weeks he had driven away two-thirds of the force originally opposed to him, and had firmly gripped the place.  The enemy’s superiority in artillery was neutralized by the construction of underground shelters and warrens in which the women and children took refuge during the daytime, leaving an apparently deserted town to be bombarded.  Thus Baden-Powell was relieved from the moral pressure which a large number of casualties among them would have caused; and the garrison suffered but little in the redoubts and trenches.  Supplies were plentiful and the water supply secure.

What Cronje had failed to do, Snyman could hardly be expected to accomplish with a considerably reduced force, and the attack became more faint-hearted.  He carried out the Cronje policy of comfortable, lethargic squatting, doubting not that the place must fall into his hands sooner or later.  Friends and relations tripped over from Johannesburg to admire and encourage his brave burghers at their posts, and some were even allowed as a treat to fire a shot at the Khakis.

No serious operation occurred until the end of the year.  On the morrow of Christmas Day, Baden-Powell made an unsuccessful attempt to carry a fort on Game Tree Hill, which commanded the approach to the town from the north.  He was unaware of its strength, and the casualties amounted to nearly one-fifth of the force engaged, a loss which he could ill afford; but early in January he compelled the big gun, which could neither face the shells of his little battery of 7-pounders nor the rifles of his marksmen, to withdraw to a more distant emplacement east of the town.  Towards the end of the month an encouraging message was received from Lord Roberts at Capetown.

The Boer line of circumvallation was in plan an irregular hexagon, of which the north-east face was pushed inwards and a re-entrant angle formed at the Brickfields; where a fort was built nearer to the town than any other post of the attack, and the operations during February and March were mainly a struggle for the possession of it.  After several weeks of sapping and counter sapping, the Boers, though supported by the fire of the big gun in its new emplacement, were expelled from the Brickfields on March 23.