De Wet, having shaken off the columns which had been pursuing him from the Doornberg, had now a free course of 100 miles to the next obstacle, the Orange.  It was evident that the speed of the columns must be increased and Knox was put upon the railway for the first time and Hamilton for the second and dispatched to Bethulie.  The energy of a considerable portion of the British Army was devoted to an attempt to make the barrier of the Orange impassable.

North of the river was De Wet; south of it Hertzog and Kritzinger were waiting for him.  There was every reason to fear that should he succeed in joining either of them, the smouldering embers of rebellion would again break out in the Cape Colony.  Troops were hurried by train from the Transvaal, from Kimberley, and from Capetown.  Lyttelton was brought down from the Delagoa Bay line to Naauwpoort to take general charge of the operations, and to build as rapidly as possible a wall that could not be scaled or breached.

For some reason which is not apparent De Wet, although he had an open country in front of him in which not a single British column was operating, moved slowly, and thereby gave more time for the carrying out of Lyttelton’s arrangements.  Possibly he may have been delayed by trouble with his Free State commandos, some of which a few days later refused to cross with him into the Colony.  On January 31 he passed through Dewetsdorp, gratified no doubt to find that since his capture of it in November his enemies had not ventured to set foot again in it.  At that time he had not made up his mind whether to cross the Orange east or west of Norval’s Pont.  If the former, he would soon be able to join Kritzinger, who after the Willowmore raid had returned to the Zuurberg, between Stormberg and Naauwpoort; if the latter, he would be able to call up Hertzog, who had returned from the shores of the Atlantic and was hovering in the Carnarvon district west of De Aar.

De Wet had from time to time to time been in communication with Kritzinger and Hertzog during their raids.  His advanced patrols soon discovered that the section of the Orange lying eastward of Norval’s Pont was very strongly held.  The dispositions of Lyttelton’s troops seem to have been made on the assumption that De Wet would endeavour to join Kritzinger, who was little more than one day’s march from the left bank, rather than Hertzog, who was 150 miles away.  The river section westward of Norval’s Pont was therefore held lightly by a line of outposts at the drifts, thrown out from the main barrier based on Naauwpoort, nearly forty miles south of the river.  Of this De Wet was at the time unaware.  His information was that the eastward section was impassable.  The westward section might possibly not be so, and he determined to make for it.