In the latter part of January the well-informed correspondent of the London _Times_ at Peking telegraphed an estimate of the Russian forces east of Lake Baikal, which, in its circumstantiality and exhaustiveness, bore the evidence of truth. According to this authority, Russia had available at that time a total of 3,115 officers, 147,479 men, and 266 guns; and these numbers included the railway guards over the whole of the Manchurian railways and the garrisons of the principal fortresses. The infantry of this force numbered 108,000 officers and men, and the cavalry 22,000 officers and men, of whom nearly the whole were Cossacks. The garrisons of Port Arthur and Vladivostock alone absorbed 45,000 men, and remembering that the railway line to be guarded, east of Lake Baikal, was over 1,500 miles in length, and traverses a country of which the inhabitants were more or less hostile, it is evident that the troops available to take the field at the end of January could not have exceeded, on this estimate, more than 50,000 men. Lake Baikal is 400 miles in length, and though a railway round its southern extremity was in course of construction, it was far from completion at the outbreak of hostilities. The lake is frozen over during the winter months, when transit has to be effected by sledges. But in the emergency the Russians laid railway lines across the lake, and thus by the end of February had established a through service of sorts. But even then the number of reinforcements and the quantity of supplies that could be moved up to the theatre of war were strictly limited by the delays inseparable from the working of a single track railway, and it is doubtful whether more than 25,000 men at the outside had been added to the field force by the beginning of March. [Sidenote: Weak Communications]