Railway communication with Trans-Baikalia was then in existence, and the sea was also open to us, and by the autumn of 1900 we had collected by land and water an army of 100,000 men, and rapidly quelled the rebellion. The capture of Peking,[55] the headquarters of the Boxer movement, by the Allied troops under General Linievitch was also instrumental in restoring order in Manchuria, while the energy with which General Grodekovi organized and despatched columns into Manchuria itself, and so relieved General Gerngros in Harbin, is worthy of notice. Tsitsihar and Kirin were captured by General Rennenkampf; Mukden, by General Subotin. Once order was restored, the War Department set to work to withdraw our troops from the province of Pei-chih-li as quickly as possible, and succeeded in doing so in spite of the disapproval of Count Waldersee;[56] all the reinforcements from Siberia and European Russia returned. The damage done to the railway was considerable, and all idea of its completion during 1900 was abandoned, and a whole year—the importance of which has been little realized—was lost. Had we been in sufficient strength to maintain order on the line in 1900, the railway would have been in a far greater state of readiness in 1904; the transport of reinforcements in 1903, and the concentration in 1904, would have been accomplished far more rapidly than it was, and we should in all probability have had two or three more army corps at Liao-yang than we actually had. The rising in 1900 clearly showed that it was impossible, with our main line of railway running for 800 miles through Chinese territory, to count on maintaining secure communication with Russia in the future. To insure our position it was necessary to build a line rapidly within our own territory along the left bank of the Amur, and at the same time to place Northern Manchuria in such a condition that it would not, with the aid of the line we had already built, continue to be a source of weakness to us in the Far East. [Illustration: H.I.M. THE EMPEROR NICHOLAS II.] As the Manchurian and Korean questions were the causes of the war, it is necessary to touch on the War Minister’s views with regard to them in some detail. The duties which Russia of her own accord took upon herself in Manchuria are based on the Government _communiqué_ of September 1, 1900, in which a circular telegram from the Minister of Foreign Affairs, dated August 25, 1900, was quoted. In this telegram it was stated that our Government was mainly guided by the following axiom, amongst others, with regard to Chinese affairs: “The _status quo ante_ in China must be preserved, and everything that may tend to a partition of the Celestial Empire is to be avoided.”