If these lines had been more efficient, we could have brought up our troops more rapidly, and, as things turned out, 150,000 men concentrated at first would have been of far more value to us than the 300,000 who were gradually assembled during nine months, only to be sacrificed in detail.... If we had had a better railway and had been able to mass at Liao-yang the number specified, we should undoubtedly have won the day in spite of our mistakes.
Kuropatkin himself certainly did all he could to improve the transport conditions. In a statement he submitted to the Tsar on March 7, 1904, he declared that of all urgently pressing questions that of bettering the railway communication between Russia and Siberia was the most important; and he added:—"It must, therefore, be taken up at once, in spite of the enormous cost. The money expended will not be wasted; it will, on the contrary, be in the highest sense productive inasmuch as it will shorten the duration of the war."
On the Trans-Baikal section six new stations were added, and additional crossing places to facilitate the passing of trains were provided elsewhere, so that by May some additional trains per day could be run. In June orders were given by the Government for the execution of extensive works designed to increase the capacity of the Siberian and Eastern Chinese main lines to seven trains per day in each direction, and that of the southern branch to twelve per day. The cost of these improvements was estimated at £4,400,000.
In November, 1904, Kuropatkin submitted to the Tsar a recommendation that the lines should be at once doubled throughout their whole length. The reinforcements, he declared, were even then still coming in driblets. "Supplies despatched in the spring are still on the Siberian side. Waterproofs sent for the summer will arrive when we want fur coats; fur coats will come to hand when waterproofs are wanted."
There was need, also, to provide stores of provisions for the troops. So long as the army was a comparatively small one it could depend mainly on local resources. In proportion as it increased in size it became more and more dependent on supplies from European Russia; but the collection of a sufficiency for a single month meant the running of five extra trains a day for a like period. Even when ample supplies were available at one point, weakness and inefficiency in the transport arrangements might lead to the troops elsewhere suffering privations which should be avoided.
Whether for financial or other reasons, the Russian Government did not adopt the idea of converting the single track of the railway system into double track; but the improvements made in the traffic facilities (including the provision of sixty-nine additional places for the passing of trains) were such that by the time peace was concluded, on September 5, 1905, the Russians had ten, or even twelve pairs of full-length trains running in the twenty-four hours, as compared with the two per day which could alone be run six months before the outbreak of war and the three per day which were running nine months later. The capacity of the lines had been increased practically fourfold; though the general situation remained such as to evoke the following comment from the writer of the official German account of the war[48]:—
In spite of the efforts made to improve the line, the connection of the Russian forces in East Asia with their home country was, and remained, an unreliable and uncertain factor in the calculations of Army Headquarters. No measures, were they ever so energetic, could be designed to remove this uncertainty, and it was only gradually, as the Manchurian Army itself increased and concentrated, and as the railway works advanced, that greater freedom of action was assured to the Commander-in-Chief; but even then the army as a whole, with all its wants and supplies, remained dependent on the Siberian and Eastern Chinese Railways.
What the railways did was to enable the Russians to collect at the theatre of war, by the time the war itself came to an end, an army of 1,000,000 men—of whom two-thirds had not yet been under fire—together with machine-guns, howitzers, shells, small-arm ammunition, field railways, wireless telegraphy, supplies, and technical stores of all kinds. Kuropatkin says of this achievement:—
The War Department had, with the co-operation of other departments, successfully accomplished a most colossal task. What single authority would have admitted a few years ago the possibility of concentrating an army of a million men 5,400 miles away from its base 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 cause of the war being brought to an end at a time when decisive military operations should really have only just been beginning.