That the leaders of the army did not make the best use of the men and material placed at their disposal during its course.
I shall endeavour in my fourth volume both to refute these accusations conclusively and to emphasize the principal lessons for our future guidance to be drawn from the campaign.
The work of the War Ministry of an Empire like ours ought not to be of a haphazard nature. Its success must depend on the amount of money allotted to military needs and the manner of expenditure of these funds. The country spends large sums on the army, thus starving numerous other urgent demands, and an unsuccessful war naturally leads to the conclusion that this expenditure has been thrown away. But, before forming any judgment, it is necessary to be in possession of full details of what had to be undertaken, and of the financial means available. The problems which confronted our War Department were the inevitable result of the policy pursued by it in former years; they were, so to speak, the legacy of the nineteenth century to the twentieth. That the size and cost of an army must be in direct proportion to the growth of a nation and the military activity of its neighbours, is a fact that cannot be ignored if we wish to rest assured of the safety of our Empire. To us, in our comparatively immature state of civilization, the burden of the armed peace necessitated by the immense growth of armaments in Europe seems almost unbearable, and our available funds are inadequate to meet all the initial and recurring financial demands. It has only been possible to satisfy the most urgent. To decide which were most important among such things as the re-armament of the artillery, the construction of fortifications and barracks, the accumulation of reserves, and the improvement of the condition of the troops, etc., was a complicated and difficult enough matter for the War Department; but the decision upon larger questions, such as which frontiers were most in danger of attack or on which side our policy of expansion called for another forward step, was beyond its scope. The solution was dependent on the general political programme, and this was, in its turn, the result of the policy followed in former centuries, and the outcome of the internal condition and needs of the Empire.
On January 1, 1898, when I took over the duties of War Minister, I found many schemes actually in progress, and numerous others—worked out and marked as urgent—for the execution of which money had not been available. Thanks to the ability and energy of my predecessor, the army was in a high state of efficiency as compared with former years, and I thus found myself in a favourable position to draw up a scheme of work for the next quinquennium.[7] But, as has been explained, the policy of my department was bound up with that of the Ministries of the Interior, of Finance, and of Foreign Affairs, and there had been a difference of opinion between the late War Minister and his colleagues on some most important points. As there was no co-ordinated programme between the War and Navy Departments, I was forced to spend my first two years in office in framing an exhaustive statement for our guidance. In this I traced out and summarized the achievements of Russian arms and what the tasks before them had been in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, showed which had been finished and which had been left over for completion to the twentieth century, and pointed out the sacrifices made by the nation towards this result. I reviewed the condition of each of our frontiers, indicated the numbers and organization that would be necessary for military operations in the different probable theatres of war, and estimated the power of offence of our most likely adversaries. Having thus arrived at some logical conclusions as to what had to be faced in the coming century, it remained to draw up definite proposals for the improvements necessary in the organization for war of the army.
The General Staff Academy assisted me in my work, Colonel Mishlaivski helping in the history, Major-General Zolotareff in the military statistics, and Colonel Gulevitch in the administration. Information on strategical matters was furnished by the General Staff. This analysis was completed and submitted to the Tsar in the spring of 1900, and a few copies—with the secret strategic matter omitted—were, with his permission, sent to the Ministers of Finance, Foreign Affairs, and the Interior, to the State Comptroller, and a few selected officials. The programme for the period 1898–1902 was framed by me upon the conclusions drawn from this statement. In 1903 a general report of all that had been carried out by my department during the previous five years was printed and submitted to the Tsar. This document showed the funds available, the total requirements which had been carried out, and those left undone owing to the lack of money. Later on in the same year a programme for the period 1904–1908 was submitted and approved. Thus, for the twelve months immediately preceding hostilities work was carried out according to a strictly defined programme, from the printed record of which the results attained can be judged. In the same way that we in the War Ministry were forced to have recourse to the lessons of the past when framing our programme for the future, so in this work is it necessary, in order to explain properly what was done in the years 1898–1904, to refer to the conclusions upon which the programme for this period was based.
My fourth and last volume consists of twelve[8] chapters. In the first chapters I shall include some necessary extracts from my analysis of 1900, and my report of 1903 upon the work of the War Ministry for the quinquennium 1898–1902, omitting, of course, confidential matter. The last chapters will be based on papers relating to the recent war, on my diaries, and on articles that appeared in the Press.
I have been so intimately connected with the important events in the Far East, and have been so largely responsible for the failure of our military operations, that I can hardly hope to take an entirely dispassionate and objective view of the men and matters that I shall deal with in the present work; but my object is not so much to justify myself by replying to the charges that have been brought against me personally, as to furnish material that will make it easier for the future historian to state fairly the reasons for our defeat, and thus enable us to avoid similar misfortunes in the future.