Meanwhile it had been rumoured that Ladysmith was on the point of surrender, but the famous heliograph had bravely answered, “We have not come to that yet,” and, indeed, rather than hand over their arms the garrison would have fought their way towards the Tugela. Each day found things more desperate, and relief came only in time. Buller drove his way to within a few miles of the town, and in the heart of the battle sent his message, “Doing well.” It was in the night of February 28 that the Boers could be heard saddling up and leaving Pieter’s Hill, and just before dawn Lord Dundonald, accompanied by some cavalry, reached the British lines. “Halt! Who goes there?” rang out the familiar challenge, at which the dramatic and long-prayed-for answer was returned, “The Ladysmith Relief Column.” Quickly the news spread through the town, the good tidings that after all they had passed through, their defence had not been in vain. The sentiment that was uppermost both in the minds of the garrison and throughout the Empire was best expressed by Sir George White himself. “I thank God we have kept the flag flying,” he said in his address to the soldiers; and it is recorded that an old Kaffir woman remarked as she watched the troops entering Ladysmith, “These English can conquer all things but death.” After the siege 2000 of the garrison, refusing to take a well-deserved and altogether necessary rest, set out upon the tracks of the retreating Boers, surely one of the most pitiful spectacles in history. “It is God’s mercy,” wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “that they failed to overtake them.” Mafeking and Bloemfontein were the only towns still to be relieved, and the former suffered from no shortage of food.