Remarkable among these are the letters to the Czar. Kuropatkin's
correspondence with him is given in detail, documents which naturally
would not appear within fifty or a hundred years from the time when
they were written. And upon the letters and reports of the General
appear the comments and marginal notes of the Emperor. The war was
forced against the will of the sovereign and the advice of the War
Department. It was ended, Kuropatkin shows, when Russia was just
beginning to discipline and dispose her great forces, because of the
lack of courage and firmness in the Czar.
Japan certainly would have been crushed, says Kuropatkin, if war had
continued. At the time of the Treaty at Portsmouth, the military
struggle, from Russia's standpoint, had only begun. She was then
receiving ammunition and supplies properly for the first time; her men
were becoming disciplined soldiers; and the railroad, whose service
had increased from three to fourteen military trains a day, had now,
at last, brought the Russian forces into the distant field. For the
first time, just when treaty negotiations were begun, Russia had more
soldiers in her army than Japan. There were a million men, well
equipped and abundantly supplied, under General Linevitch, who
succeeded General Kuropatkin as Commander-in-Chief; and he was about
to take the offensive when peace was declared.
Beyond the individual conflict General Kuropatkin shows the Russian
nation, a huge, unformed giant, groping along its great borders in
every direction to find the sea.
"Can an Empire," he asks, "with such a tremendous population, be
satisfied with its existing frontiers, cut off from free access to the
sea on all sides?"