The Boers had found it necessary to consider the situation seriously.  They had been driven into a relatively minute area, which was morally congested with a pair of Presidents and their parasites, remnants of Government offices, superfluous commandants, and commandos some of which were eager and some of which were not eager to continue the struggle; and physically by the accumulation of stores, supplies, guns, ammunition, and rolling stock which had been rammed down into the last section of the Delagoa Bay railway.

Kruger was induced to lighten the ship which he had so signally failed to keep on her course.  He left Nelspruit on September 11 for Lorenzo Marques, where he was taken under the protection of the Portuguese Government, and where he remained until the eve of the first anniversary of the opening scene of the drama, the battle of Talana Hill.  On October 19 another nation offered him asylum, and he sailed for Marseilles in the Guelderland, a cruiser of the Dutch Navy; thus symbolically repatriating the French and Dutch emigrants who had quitted Europe for South Africa in the seventeenth century.

The positions of Buller on the north of the railway, of French at Barberton, and of Pole-Carew ready to advance centrally, made immediate action imperative; but Botha was hampered by the presence of not a few unwilling and unmounted commandos.  These he sent under Koetzee to Komati Poort and left to arrange their own destiny; and with the rest, which numbered 4,000 burghers, he broke away in two directions, himself with B. Viljoen leading the northward trek, while T. Smuts endeavoured to escape southward into Swaziland.

Thus when Pole-Carew, who had been joined by Ian Hamilton and whose advance had been delayed to allow French and Buller to get into position on his flanks, reached Komati Poort on September 24, he found himself hitting at vacancy with the wreckage of two lost republics around him, derelict railway stock, disabled guns, abandoned ammunition, and burning stores.  Koetzee’s men had disappeared, most of them into Portuguese territory, which they had been partly persuaded and partly compelled to enter by the Portuguese authorities, who, although they had regarded the Boer cause with a more than benevolent neutrality during the earlier stages of the war, now saw that a fight near the frontier would be a most embarrassing episode; and, while offering an asylum to the fugitives, threatened to allow Lord Roberts to land troops at Lorenzo Marques if it were not accepted.  On the 28th Pole-Carew was engaged not in battle with the Boers, but in celebrating the birthday of the King of Portugal, a singular interlude between the acts of the war drama.

Botha in making for the north hoped to establish his remnant and cultivate the germs somewhere in the Leydsdorp or Pietersburg districts, which were the only portions of the Transvaal not occupied by British troops.  Lord Roberts’ expectations that they would be denied to the enemy by the Rhodesian Field Force under Carrington were not fulfilled, and he could not spare any of his own troops to occupy them.