early in October, 1904, when, as a matter of fact, we remained in Southern Manchuria. Clausewitz has truly laid down that an army should be inseparably connected with its base, but our base was Russia, more than 5,000 miles away. The way that this one difficulty alone was overcome will perhaps be eventually appreciated at its true worth. The very complicated attendant circumstances demanded great and patient efforts on the part of the whole nation in order to turn them to our advantage. Our reverses were explicable, and even in our defeat we exhausted our enemy, while ourselves increasing in strength. It was inevitable that a different complexion would have been put on the face of things as soon as circumstances became more favourable to us. DIFFICULTIES IN ORGANIZATION. The war showed that our army organization gave us too small a percentage of actual combatants as compared with the total numbers whom we rationed. By this I mean that, in spite of the immense numbers that we maintained in the face of great difficulties, we were unable to put enough men into action to win. Our establishments of all arms, of parks, hospitals, transport corps, field bakeries, staffs, and all offices and institutions, include a large percentage of non-combatants, which was swollen in the last war by the absence of any organized line of communication troops, the necessity of carrying out a large amount of railway construction, and of appointing officers and men to newly formed supply and transport units. Even so the number of non-combatants laid down in the establishments for each unit was not sufficient to perform the duties that fell to them, and it became necessary, for reasons which will be mentioned later, to detail combatants for domestic duties. As but few non-combatants were wounded in action, the proportion of them to the combatant element became still greater after every big fight. It was usual, when a battle was imminent, to order back to their units all men who were on extra-regimental duties, but in spite of all the steps taken, the fighting number was never more than 75 per cent. of the number of men on the strength. In the beginning of April, 1905, when we were preparing the theatre of war up to the River Sungari, the combatant element of the 1st Manchurian Army actually fell to 58 per cent. of the strength. As in previous wars, the infantry, of course, did most of the fighting, and also carried out by far the greater number of fatigues and extra duties. As they also lost more men in action, their fighting strength was proportionately more reduced than that of the other arms.[17] In April, 1905, the percentage of rifles in the 1st Manchurian Army to the total number of men that had to be rationed was 51·9 per cent. When the convalescents returned to the ranks, its strength amounted by the beginning of December to 192,000 men, of whom 105,879 carried rifles; but we could only put a