The first really alarming tidings on this subject that we received came to hand, oddly enough, from Japan; and it bears testimony to the efficiency of our Far Eastern Ally's intelligence service that the Island Empire should have been so intimately acquainted with the military conditions in a State with which it had been at war only a very few years before. This information reached us, I think, in October 1914. But as far as I recollect, that warning, inexorable as it was, only touched the question of ammunition. We were told plainly that the Russians were likely to run out of this indispensable at an early date; but the message did not mention rifles, although these already began to run short within eight months of the commencement of the struggle. How it came about [p.283] that there should have been so deplorable a breakdown in respect to war material can only be a matter of conjecture; but we may hazard a pretty shrewd guess that the collapse which was to lead to such deplorable results in the early summer of 1915, was attributable to graft on a Homeric scale. For the Russian army budgets had for several years before the war been framed on lavish lines; that for 1914, for instance, mounted up to 725,000,000 roubles, which represented a higher figure than the corresponding budgets in either Germany or France. General Sukhomlinoff, the War Minister on the Neva from 1910 to 1915, was, as is well known, disgraced in the latter year, and he was tried for his life after the Revolution. The Russian victories in Galicia during the winter of 1914-15, followed as they were by the reduction of the important place of arms, Przemysl, caused unbounded satisfaction in this country. But those behind the scenes feared, with only too good reason, that such triumphs represented no more than a flash in the pan, and that, should the Germans decide to throw heavy forces into the scale, the Grand Duke Nicholas would speedily find himself obliged to abandon the conquests which looked so gratifying on paper. We in the War Office learnt, indeed, that the Russian generalissimo, who recognized that the munitions situation did not justify offensive operations on an ambitious scale, had been indisposed to undertake the capture of Przemysl, but that political pressure had been brought to bear on him.