enemy a few days before war was declared. It is clear, therefore, to what extent Bezobrazoff’s project for the rapid concentration of an army of 75,000 men in Southern Manchuria [sent to me in the summer of 1903] could be carried out. The scanty population and the absence of local resources in the Pri-Amur prohibited the maintenance of a large force there in peace-time. Over the wide stretch of territory from Lake Baikal to Vladivostok there are only about a million souls, and of this total only 400,000 are in the Amur and Maritime districts. From this can be gathered what an impossible burden to the State it would have been to attempt to maintain a large army in such a desert. Consequently we endeavoured to keep in Siberia and Pri-Amur only such a number as would be sufficient, in the first instance, to contain the enemy, and to form a screen, under cover of which the reinforcements could be concentrated. The conditions are the same on the western, Caucasian, and Afghanistan frontiers: the local troops form, so to speak, an impenetrable veil, under cover of which the main forces can be concentrated. Though this screen consisted, in the Far East, of 172[50] battalions, of which more than 100 could take the field, it was never, of course, intended that the issue of the war should hang upon their efforts alone; but our difficulty lay in bringing up our main forces soon enough, for, as the enemy could concentrate quicker than we could, our reinforcements might be destroyed in detail as they arrived. So poor was the traffic capacity of the railway that we were neither able to send drafts to the advanced troops nor to support them in time with adequate reinforcements. If the arrangements had been such as I shall detail later on, we should have had double the number of men at Liao-yang and Mukden that we did have, and the issue of the battles must have been different. But the Ministries of Ways and Communications and of Finance were unable to carry out their promises, and our army only succeeded in concentrating eight months later than it should have done. By September, 1905, we were at last able to collect an army 1,000,000 strong, ready in every respect to commence a second campaign, with troops and material of a nature to guarantee success. We had received machine-guns, howitzers, shells, small-arm ammunition, field railways, wireless telegraphy, and technical stores of all sorts, and the senior officers were mostly fresh. The War Department had, with the co-operation of other departments, successfully accomplished a most colossal task. What single military authority would have admitted a few years ago the possibility of concentrating an army of a million men 5,400 miles away from its bases 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 causes of the war