His armies, indeed, had been tragically reduced in numbers in every combat that had yet taken place. The arrival of the Tenth and Seventeenth Army Corps had put him in a better position; but against this had to be set the loss of nearly 30,000 men killed or wounded since the battle of the Yalu proved the magnitude of the task which lay before him. Yet he now possessed a force of about 132,000 men, with 400 guns, and he held a position of enormous strength. All of his troops, indeed, had tasted the bitterness and discouragement of defeat in the course of the fifteen engagements which had taken place since the outbreak of the war, but he himself had not yet been present in person upon the field of battle, and he might well hope that the failure which had attended all the efforts of his lieutenants would give place to victory when he took the direction of affairs into his own hands. [Sidenote: Kuropatkin's Urgent Motives] At all events, whatever the issue of the battle might be, there could be no doubt that a retreat from Liao-yang without fighting was for every reason impossible. The Court of St. Petersburg had already been rendered restive by the continual withdrawal of the main body of Muscovite armies to the north; his enemies were busy with their detractions; and the irrepressible Alexeieff was always near to make capital out of the difficulties, and to distort and misrepresent the actions of his abler rival. But beyond all these personal reasons, powerful enough in themselves in the eyes of a man holding such a position as Kuropatkin, there were more worthy considerations which weighed heavily in the scale in favor of boldly submitting his fortunes to the cast of the die and risking all in one mighty struggle. The honor of the Russian arms and the prestige of the Empire were at stake; a continued retreat without a supreme effort to roll back the tide of invasion was politically dangerous to a Dominion which owed its very existence in the East to the preservation of a haughty and determined front; and, more serious even than the growing restlessness of all those Oriental races who yield unwilling allegiance to the Little White Father, was the increasing discontent in Russia itself, and the uprising once more of the forbidding spectre of Nihilism and revolution. A pitched battle on a grand scale was, therefore, for every reason unavoidable, and, in spite of all the risks he ran, Kuropatkin faced the prospect before him with calm courage and resolution. [Sidenote: Oyama's Great Resources]