At this time the war entered on a new phase. The Boer generals felt the necessity of tiding over the 15th of the month, the date fixed by the Proclamation of the 7th August as the limit of time within which, by voluntarily surrendering, the leaders might avoid certain penalties threatened by that proclamation. And by dint of unusual activity they succeeded. There were few surrenders, it is true, but the tactics adopted by the enemy cost them, in the end, more heavily than their previous evasive methods. They broke out in the Ermelo and Vryheid districts about the middle of the month. Their harassing rushes and their escape into the Ermelo district had been difficult to arrest owing to the unfinished state of the blockhouse line then being built from Wakkerstroom to Piet Retief by the 2nd Battalion Scots Guards and 2nd Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment under General Bullock. At Belfast, on the 16th, the garrison was attacked by Grobelaar and 100 men evidently in need of supplies. They were handsomely repulsed, and only one of the garrison was wounded; but bullets that fell in the refuge camp caused the death of a woman. General Lyttelton had now assumed command in Natal in place of General Hildyard, who, after a long spell of brilliant service, had gone home on leave. The new chief at once turned his attention to the rumour of assembling commandos, and to frustrate concentration Major Gough's Mounted Infantry with Colonel Stewart and the Johannesburg Mounted Rifles moved from Dundee to De Jager's Drift. Meanwhile Pulteney's troops were at Volksrust, and those of Garratt moving, _viâ_ Wakkerstroom, on Utrecht.