Though this screen consisted, in the Far East, of 172[50] battalions, of which more than 100 could take the field, it was never, of course, intended that the issue of the war should hang upon their efforts alone; but our difficulty lay in bringing up our main forces soon enough, for, as the enemy could concentrate quicker than we could, our reinforcements might be destroyed in detail as they arrived. So poor was the traffic capacity of the railway that we were neither able to send drafts to the advanced troops nor to support them in time with adequate reinforcements. If the arrangements had been such as I shall detail later on, we should have had double the number of men at Liao-yang and Mukden that we did have, and the issue of the battles must have been different. But the Ministries of Ways and Communications and of Finance were unable to carry out their promises, and our army only succeeded in concentrating eight months later than it should have done. By September, 1905, we were at last able to collect an army 1,000,000 strong, ready in every respect to commence a second campaign, with troops and material of a nature to guarantee success. We had received machine-guns, howitzers, shells, small-arm ammunition, field railways, wireless telegraphy, and technical stores of all sorts, and the senior officers were mostly fresh. The War Department had, with the co-operation of other departments, successfully accomplished a most colossal task. What single military authority would have admitted a few years ago the possibility of concentrating an army of a million men 5,400 miles away from its bases of supply and equipment by means of a poorly constructed single-line railway? Wonders were effected, but it was too late. Affairs in the interior of Russia for which the War Department could not be held responsible were the causes of the war being brought to an end at a time when decisive military operations should really have only just been beginning.