Lord Roberts had already taken measures to curb the new activities.  His plan was to occupy certain places strongly as bases from which mobile columns could constantly move to and fro, eating up the intervening country and rendering it incapable of supporting the enemy.  Its operation was mainly confined to the northern districts of the Free State, in which lay the centre of disturbance, and the troops engaged could not be readily employed outside them.  It was so far successful, in that it drove De Wet into the Transvaal in October, but it failed to restrain his subsequent movements.  It probably was the best that could have been devised for dealing with local guerilla, but its action being centrifugal and not circumferential, it was powerless to deal with a meteoric raid of well-mounted men.  Although the British troops greatly outnumbered the Boers, yet in practice only the mounted details, which included no regular cavalry and were relatively weak, were directly effective against the enemy, and the movements of the divagating columns were sluggish.

When De Wet left Bothaville on November 6, his arm was, metaphorically speaking, in a sling, and he was footsore; but ten days later he had brought together in the Doornberg a force of 1,500 men, with whom he proposed to cut his way into the Cape Colony.  His movement south may be compared to that of a small swift steamer endeavouring to escape from a blockaded seaport.  Ahead of him and on each beam were the slow-moving vessels of the blockading squadron, most of them hull down and with banked fires.

He made at once for the scene of his April successes, the country lying between Bloemfontein and the Basuto border.  The chief obstacles in his way were a line of posts running eastwards from Bloemfontein, and the town of Dewetsdorp, which was held by 500 British troops.  The latter he might have avoided had he chosen to do so, but he seems to have been attracted to it because it was the home of his childhood, which it was incumbent upon him to redeem from bondage.

The phenomenon of a Boer column marching through the heart of a country supposed to be effectively in the possession of the British Army was again witnessed.  To borrow another metaphor, this time from Astronomy, De Wet throughout the greater part of his career was a telescopic star, invisible to the naked eye.  General Officers and column commanders helplessly watched his course through the telescopes of the Intelligence Staff, and seemed to have as little power of influencing it as an observer at Greenwich has of changing the orbit of a planet.  The astronomer can at least forecast with certainty the path which it will follow in the heavens, but there were no observations available from which the course of De Wet could be predicted for more than a few hours.  He seemed to defy the laws of gravitation.