During early November the operations of the Boers in the central field of war, along the Cape Colony frontier from Aliwal North to Orange River Station, were languid in the extreme. Numerous small bodies of the enemy had appeared in this region, which, as we have seen, was denuded of all defence and open to any attack; but there was no energy or combination. Had the scattered commandos been united into one body and directed by one able brain, they might with little or no difficulty have pushed south into the very heart of Cape Colony. At Cradock and Graaff Reinet they had hundreds or thousands of sympathisers, who only waited for their coming to rise. Ensconced in this mountainous and difficult country, astride of the railway which runs northward from Port Elizabeth, and threatening on the one side the line from Capetown to De Aar, and on the other the railway from East London to Stormberg, they could have rendered any advance in Cape Colony impossible till they had been dislodged. The army assailing them would have been compelled to fight in a miniature Switzerland, where roads, towns and mountains were only very incorrectly depicted on existing maps. We can guess from General Buller's troubles in Natal during the advance on Ladysmith what would have been the issue of such a campaign. For the British Government, unlike the French or Italian, had never taken the trouble to prepare its Army for the special contingencies of mountain war. It seemed to expect that by a special dispensation of Heaven it would always find level ground upon which to fight. [Illustration: [_Photo by H. Nicholls, Johannesburg._] GENERAL GATACRE'S CAMP, WITH QUEENSTOWN IN BACKGROUND.] [Illustration: AN OSTRICH FARM AT GRAAF REINET, IN THE CENTRE OF THE DISAFFECTED DISTRICT.] [Illustration: MOUNTAINS OF STORES AT NAAUWPOORT.] [Sidenote: [NOV. 1899.] We see, then, that if the gravest mistakes had been made by British generals, the enemy committed yet more colossal blunders. There was nothing whatever to prevent the Boers from detaching 10,000 men from Natal in early November and sending another 5,000 south from before Kimberley, which would have been more hopelessly isolated if the rails had been broken in the vicinity of Victoria West, far to the south of De Aar, than it was when the line was cut only at Spytfontein. It is certain that their foreign advisers, and in particular Dr. Leyds, urged such a course upon the Boers. They were, one would suppose, shrewd enough to understand the immense advantages which carrying the war so far south would give them, but it may be that their armies had the weakness of all peasant forces, hastily levied and ill-compacted, and that the individual Boers shrank from going so far afield from their homes. [Sidenote: British withdraw from Naauwpoort and Stormberg.]