When Smith-Dorrien reached the Lake, Botha had already started to meet him.  Early in the morning of February 6 the British Camp was attacked, but although the attempt was furthered by a stampede of Smith-Dorrien’s horses, Botha failed.  He was compelled to draw off, but with the greater portion of his burghers wriggled round to the rear of the columns.[58] Thus when French reached Ermelo he found that he had nothing to strike at.  The Boer commandos had passed away.  After a short halt he changed direction half right, and projected his front on to a cross-veld line reaching from the Swaziland border to Amersfort; then bringing round his right he formed up his seven columns on February 18 along the Swaziland border, with an eastward front of nearly forty miles extending southwards from Amsterdam.  Dartnell was on the right of the line and Smith-Dorrien on the left.

Most of the fugitive commandos had, however, retired into the S.E. corner of the Transvaal; a movement which Hildyard, who was in charge of the district as well as of the whole of Natal, was not strong enough to check.  French was now based on Natal for supplies, and arrangements had been made that two large convoys should be sent to him by way of Utrecht.  Bad roads, bad weather, and submerged drifts impeded the progress of the painful trains, the first of which did not reach him until March 2, ten days after it was due.  Meanwhile he subsisted on dwindled rations and on what he could pick up on the veld.

When, owing to a change in the routes by which he was supplied, French was able towards the end of March to operate actively, he endeavoured to isolate the S.E. corner of the Transvaal by disposing his force in two lines.  One line ran from Piet Retief to Vryheid and acted as the driving force, and the other ran from Piet Retief along the Swaziland border and acted as the stopping force.  Within the angle enclosed by these lines were commandos under Grobler of Vryheid, Emmett, and other leaders; but all of them wriggled out with insignificant losses.  The line along the Swaziland border was rendered immobile by difficulties of supply, and the driving line was exhausted.  The closing incident of French’s ten weeks’ campaign, the chief harvest of which was the capture, surrender, wounding, or killing of 1,300 Boers, the seizure of a considerable amount of ammunition, and the taking of eleven guns, was the return of Smith-Dorrien to the Delagoa Bay Railway in the middle of April.

Botha’s projected invasion of Natal had indeed been frustrated and postponed, but he and all the other Boer leaders had escaped, unscathed and undismayed.  French’s ponderous columns had trudged painfully across the veld from Springs almost into Zululand, and had left things much as they were at the beginning of February.

During the early months of the year 1901 Viljoen for the most part contented himself with frequent attacks on the Delagoa Bay Railway, and a vigorous effort to restrain his activity was not practicable.  In March Lord Kitchener formulated a plan for the subjugation of the Northern Transvaal.  His plan was to send a column with secrecy and dispatch to Pietersburg, which would be occupied as a base from which the column would work southwards along the line of the Olifant’s River, in co-operation with columns acting northwards from the Delagoa Bay Railway.