The Jews marched to the Far East to assist Russia in making the province of Manchuria part of Siberia in which they were forbidden to reside. The number of Jews at the front was disproportionately large--it amounted to some thirty thousand, owing to the fact that, in accordance with the usual military regulations, the Jewish recruits from the Western governments were generally despatched to Siberia, so that, at the very outset, they were near the theatre of military operations. Disproportionately large was also the number of Jewish physicians in the reserves. They were mobilized at once, evidently for the reason that they lived on their private practice and were not allowed to occupy any state or public office, whereas the Russian physicians were not drawn upon to the same extent, so as not to divert them from their administrative, municipal, or Zemstvo services.[43] Hundreds of Jewish physicians had to work and to encounter the murderous fire of the Japanese because of the fact that an unjust law deprived them of the right of civil service in time of peace. While scores of thousands of disfranchised Jews were fighting for the prestige of Russia in the Far East, the whip of rightlessness did not cease to lash their brethren at home. In a number of places the authorities began to expel the families of the soldiers and physicians who had been sent to the war, on the ground that with the departure of the head of the family the wife and children had forfeited the right of residence, the latter being conditioned by the profession of the husband or father. This policy, however, was too monstrous even for St. Petersburg, and Plehve was soon forced to decree that the families of the mobilized Jews should be left in their places of residence, "pending the termination of the war."