Another of Collier’s photographers, Robert L. Dunn, was sent to Chemulpo before hostilities broke out and “beat” the newspaper and periodical world with his pictures of the first battle of the war and the landing of Japanese troops. The greater portion of the Russian pictures were taken by Victor K. Bulla, whose work in this country was controlled exclusively by Collier’s. Dozens of photographs which the reader may survey at his ease were taken only after long marches over frozen and wind-swept country. Films were developed in the field with the help of Korean coolies or Japanese commissary officers, and they reached Collier’s office only after being carried scores and perhaps hundreds of miles by coolie runners through a country where a mail service was unknown. Every one of the photographs printed in this book represents an outlay of time, energy, and money of which the uninitiated reader can have only a slight understanding. CHAPTER I THE CAUSES OF THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR The war between Russia and Japan was a fight for disputed territory. Its immediate cause was the failure of the two nations to agree on the relation which each should maintain toward Korea and Manchuria. The underlying cause of the struggle was the mighty clash that was bound to come when those measures which Japan believed were necessary to her self-existence met the glacier-like progress of Russia eastward toward the Pacific. Through nearly three centuries the Russian Empire had advanced from the Ural Mountains to outposts and outlets on the Pacific Coast. Her mighty plans met no serious check until they came athwart the ambitions and policy of the modernized Japan, which saw in this alleged expansion for industrial development a menace to her integrity as a kingdom. Korea, a buffer between these two powers, became involved in the dispute by the results of the war between Japan and China in 1894. The intervention of the European Powers in the terms of treaty settlement robbed Japan of her chief spoil, the Liaotung Peninsula, whose stronghold was Port Arthur. Russia, Germany, and France intimated that Japanese occupation of this base must be regarded as a permanent threat to the independence of China and Korea. Three years later, Russia began to fortify Port Arthur, on the pretext that German acquisition of Kiaochau would otherwise disturb the balance of power in North China.