Pass, forty-three miles away, Kuropatkin had lost 170,000 men, killed, wounded and missing. His army had lost fifty per cent. of its strength, a slaughter not equalled in the history of civilization. No parallel exists until the half mythological days of Asian conflicts are reached. CHAPTER XIX. Battle of the Japan Sea--Fleet Russia's Last Hope--Tragedy of the North Sea--Reaches Asiatic Waters--On the Eve of the Struggle--Russians in Double Line--Borodino First to Go Down--Russians in Full Flight--Admiral Nebogatoff Surrenders--Togo's Reports of the Battle--Rozhdestvensky a Prisoner--Searching Sea for Remnants--Japan's Loss Only 424 Men--Your Utmost for the Empire--Russian Line Enveloped--Destroyers Took Last Thrust--As Sailors Saw the Battle--Blowing up the Izumrud--The News Reaches Russia--Russian Story of Disaster--Why Russians Were Defeated. [Sidenote: Battle of the Japan Sea] The Japanese-Russian war has added many pages of awe-inspiring achievement to the vast volume of the world's valorous records of land and sea. Notable, among all of the amazing array, ever will stand the naval battle of the Sea of Japan, fought in the Straits of Korea, Sunday, May 28; Monday, May 29, and continuing as a pursuit on Tuesday, May 30, 1905. Russia's enormous armada of thirty-seven fighting ships, and one hundred ships in all, had been sent to the Far East to recover command of the sea from Japan, which had been won from her in the naval campaign of 1904, when the Russian Port Arthur fleet had been destroyed and the Russian Vladivostok squadron had been weakened to a helpless condition. The result was overwhelming victory for Japan, achieved at the cost to Russia of the annihilation of her entire armada. No naval battle of history equals this in the enormous power of the fighting array; none exceeds it in the degree of its decisiveness. Trafalgar, a hundred years earlier, affords the only possible parallel, and Trafalgar, for a century the world's greatest naval struggle, was outdone. The story begins eight months before these thrilling events in the Straits of Korea, when the Russian fleet, variously called the Baltic Fleet and the Second Pacific Fleet, sailed from Cronstadt, in the Baltic, on its 20,000 mile journey, around Africa and by way of the Indian Ocean to the Orient. [Sidenote: Fleet Russia's Last Hope]