With his front well aligned, and with every possible precaution taken to safeguard his lines of communication, the question then before the Japanese Commander-in-Chief was the strategy to mark a resumption of hostilities. At Liao-yang, despite the sweeping nature of the victory, there can be no doubt that the Japanese were bitterly disappointed when, despite tremendously determined efforts to prevent their escape, practically the whole Russian Army had disentangled itself from a well-set net and had escaped to occupy new positions there to be fought all over again. The first thought in all of the planning of the new campaign that was to succeed the winter of inactivity, was to accomplish the actual envelopment of General Kuropatkin, forcing upon the Russian Commander a surrender as the only alternative to annihilation. The line of action decided upon is fully revealed in the details of the battle to be told later. This program of complete destruction stands out even more plainly than at Liao-yang. It came far nearer realization than in that struggle, and was not concluded with the mere taking of Mukden; but like the tentacles of a great octopus, Marshal Oyama's grim determination for complete annihilation of the foe spread far northward beyond the scene of the initial victory and relentlessly realized in large measure all that he had hoped. [Sidenote: Oyama's Plan of Battle] In brief, the plan was to hold the Russian centre in a combat which, however desperate and bloody, was only a feint. While this struggle went on with apparent success to Russian arms, the right and left flanks as aligned east and west of the Sha-ho were to press home an attack calculated slowly to bend back the Russians toward their line of retreat northward from Mukden. But the culminating fact in the entire plan was an entirely separate blow at the Russian rear north of Mukden by an army which, while it no doubt figured in the Russian calculations of probabilities, eventually burst into the plain eastward from Sinmintin with a fury of surprise attack which ultimately crumbled the entire scheme of Russian defence. [Sidenote: Nogi to Strike Culminating Blow]