In spite of the efforts made to improve the line, the connection of the Russian forces in East Asia with their home country was, and remained, an unreliable and uncertain factor in the calculations of Army Headquarters. No measures, were they ever so energetic, could be designed to remove this uncertainty, and it was only gradually, as the Manchurian Army itself increased and concentrated, and as the railway works advanced, that greater freedom of action was assured to the Commander-in-Chief; but even then the army as a whole, with all its wants and supplies, remained dependent on the Siberian and Eastern Chinese Railways. What the railways did was to enable the Russians to collect at the theatre of war, by the time the war itself came to an end, an army of 1,000,000 men--of whom two-thirds had not yet been under fire--together with machine-guns, howitzers, shells, small-arm ammunition, field railways, wireless telegraphy, supplies, and technical stores of all kinds. Kuropatkin says of this achievement:-- The War Department had, with the co-operation of other departments, successfully accomplished a most colossal task. What single authority would have admitted a few years ago the possibility of concentrating an army of a million men 5,400 miles away from its base of supply and equipment by means of a poorly-constructed single-line railway? Wonders were effected; but it was too late. Affairs in the interior of Russia for which the War Department could not be held responsible were the cause of the war being brought to an end at a time when decisive military operations should really have only just been beginning. Russia, in fact, agreed to make peace at a time when the prospect of her being able to secure a victory was greater than it had been at any time during the earlier phases of the war; but the Japanese failed to attain all they had hoped for, the primary causes of such failure, in spite of their repeated victories, being, as told in the British "Official History" of the war, that "Port Arthur held out longer than had been expected, and the Trans-Siberian Railway enabled Russia to place more men in the field than had been thought possible."[49] Thus, in respect to rail-power, at least, Russia still achieved a remarkable feat in her transport of an army so great a distance by a single-track line of railway. Such an achievement was unexampled, while, although Fate was against the ultimate success of her efforts, Russia provided the world with a fresh object lesson as to what might have been done, in a campaign waged more than 5,000 miles from the base of supplies, if only the line of rail communication had been equal from the first to the demands it was called upon to meet. Apart from this main consideration, there were some other phases of the Russo-Japanese War which are of interest from the point of view of the present study.