So effective did these prove that their use was extended to the more dangerous portions of the country, and lines were pushed through the Magaliesberg district to form a chain of posts between Krugersdorp and Rustenburg.

In the Orange River Colony and on the northern lines of the Cape Colony the same system was extensively applied.

I will now attempt to describe the more important operations of the winter, beginning with the incursion of Plumer into the untrodden ground to the north.
At this period of the war the British forces had overrun, if they had not subdued, the whole of the Orange River Colony and every part of the Transvaal which is south of the Mafeking-Pretoria-Komati line.

Through this great tract of country there was not a village and hardly a farmhouse which had not seen the invaders.

But in the north there remained a vast district, two hundred miles long and three hundred broad, which had hardly been touched by the war.