On the 6th and 7th I made a final attempt to wrest victory from the Japanese. Hoping that Kuroki had suffered heavily on the preceding days, and relying on the splendid material in the 1st Army, I made up my mind, after considerable discussion of the matter with its commander on the telephone, to weaken that army considerably, so as to make certain of having sufficient men at Tsu-erh-tun. I augmented my main reserve by the whole of the 72nd Division, a brigade of the 2nd Siberian, and eighteen battalions from the 1st Army and 4th Siberian Corps. The commander of the 1st Army was of opinion that if we did not soon have a success on the right this weakening of the 1st Army might be a danger, but though fully realizing the force of his contention, I considered it necessary to take the risk for the following reasons: 1. One hundred and five splendid battalions were still left under the command of General Linievitch. 2. The enemy in front of the 1st Army must, according to the reports sent in by its commander, have lost very heavily. 3. The Japanese had transferred almost the whole of Oku’s army to the right bank of the Hun Ho, immediately after Nogi’s, and we had either to break through this disposition or strengthen those of our forces on the right bank of the Hun Ho by a lateral movement. As I have described already (Vol. III.), our hopes were not realized. The movement of the reserves to Tsu-erh-tun was effected very much more slowly than we had counted upon, and, taking advantage of our reduction in strength on the front held by the 1st Army, the enemy broke through there. At the point of our position (Chiu-tien) where the enemy broke through, _there should have been, according to the arrangements of the officer commanding the 1st Army, four regiments of the troops under his command, but as a matter of fact there were only ten companies of the Barnaul Regiment_.[113] Taking all the circumstances into consideration, our retirement was, in my opinion, a day too late, and instead of throwing all the reinforcements which arrived at Tsu-erh-tun into the fight, some of them (General Zarubaeff’s force) had to be kept as a last reserve in case the enemy attempted to close us in with a ring of fire.