There remains the fourth justification for surrender--a justification that may be pleaded by humanitarians, but not by those who believe that the first duty of a commander in the field is toward the living and not toward the dead and dying. The condition of the sick and wounded in Port Arthur was undoubtedly deplorable. Yet it was not so terrible as the first Russian statements led us to believe. In his despatch to the Czar, dated December 28th, General Stoessel wrote:--“The position of the fortress is becoming very painful, our principal enemies are scurvy, which is mowing down men, and eleven-inch shells which know no obstacle, and against which there is no protection. There remain only a few who have not been attacked by scurvy. We have taken all possible measures, but the disease is spreading. The passive endurance of the enemy’s bombardment, the eleven-inch shells, the impossibility of replying for want of ammunition, the outbreak of scurvy, and the loss of a mass of officers--all these causes diminish daily the capabilities of the defence, and the tale of losses of higher officers is an indication of the enormous losses we have sustained.” At the conference which arranged the terms of surrender, Count Ballaschoff, chief of the Red Cross Society, stated that in the hospitals were over twenty thousand sick and wounded, for whom there were neither drugs nor bandages. That number was afterwards reduced to fifteen thousand. At the same time we were told that when communication with the North was broken the garrison in Port Arthur--exclusive of naval men--numbered 35,000; that between fifteen and sixteen thousand had died during the siege, and that there remained only between nine and ten thousand combatants, of whom five thousand were effective. We were also informed that fifty per cent. of the officers had been killed, and that only twenty-eight officers had passed through the ordeal unscathed.