regiments, did not write—they had no time to scribble of their labours and exploits—and there were few pressmen who elected to witness their deeds: it would have entailed sharing their hardships and their dangers. Of course, there were brave men among the correspondents, and men who were genuinely desirous of rendering assistance; but, lacking as they were in the most elementary military knowledge, their efforts were, not unnaturally, of little value where complicated operations were concerned. The persons really most capable of forming a judgment upon what they saw, and of putting matters in their proper light before the reading public, were the foreign military attachés. Many of them were in every sense picked men. They were interested in our soldiers, shared all their dangers and hardships, and, in return, gained their affection and respect. But while none of their reports were seen in Russia for a long time, many of our Press correspondents, who stayed in the rear and saw only the reverse side of war, revelled in harrowing accounts of the orgies and dissipation that went on in Harbin, and presented to the public an absolutely distorted picture of the life of the army. The result was that our Press to a great extent played into the hands of our foreign and domestic enemies; instead of which, it might have called into being with the news of our first defeats a wave of patriotism and self-sacrifice, and, as the difficulties at the front grew thicker, might have appealed to the Fatherland for fresh efforts, cheered the faint-hearted, and summoned all the best of the country’s manhood to fill the gaps in our ranks caused by the enemy. What it did accomplish was to instil a hatred of the war into the masses, depress those departing for the front, undermine the private soldier’s confidence in his officers, and weaken the authority of those in command. Truly the army had little encouragement to issue victoriously from its difficulties. On the contrary, the troops sent forward from Russia carried with them the seeds of fresh disaster in the seditious proclamations with which they were loaded. A large number of valuable works upon different subjects suggested by the late war have appeared, many of them written with a sincere desire to do justice to the army; but, owing to ignorance of what really happened, they contain numerous and serious mistakes. Passions are now calming down, and it is possible to separate into different categories the charges levelled at our forces and their representatives during and after the war. These accusations, in so far as they refer to the War Department, were mainly as follows: That the army was not ready for war with Japan. That, having taken insufficient steps to prepare for war, the War Department did not attempt to prevent it. That the leaders of the army did not make the best use of the men and material placed at their disposal during its course.