Copyrighted by Underwood & Underwood
SCENE IN SHIBA PARK, TOKIO, WHERE TOGO'S NAVAL VICTORY WAS CELEBRATED WITH WILD ENTHUSIASM
Attacks of the Russian Press
The party opposed to the Government distributed among our troops, especially in the West, hundreds of thousands of seditious proclamations exhorting the soldiers to work for defeat rather than for victory. Writers for newspapers and magazines, even though they did not belong to the anti-Government party, contributed to its success by lavishing abuse upon the army and its representatives. War correspondents, who knew little about our operations and still less about those of the Japanese, and who based their statements, not upon what they had seen, but upon what they had heard from untrustworthy sources, increased the disaffection of the people by exaggerating the seriousness of our failures. Even army officers, writing from the theatre of war, or after returning to Russia for reasons that were not always creditable to them, sought to gain reputation by means of hasty criticism which was often erroneous in its statements of fact and generally discouraging or complaining in tone. On the fighting line, heroic men without number faced and fought the enemy courageously for months, without ever losing their faith in ultimate victory; but from that part of the field little trustworthy news came. Brave soldiers, modest junior officers, and the commanders of regiments, companies, squadrons, and batteries in our advanced positions, did not write and had no time to write of their own labors and exploits, and few of the correspondents were willing to share their perils for the sake of being able to observe and describe their heroic deeds. There were among the correspondents some brave men who sincerely wished to be of use; but their lack of even elementary training in military science made it impossible for them to understand the complicated problems of war, and their work therefore was comparatively unproductive. The persons best qualified to see and judge, and to give information to the reading public, were the foreign military observers, who were attached to our armies in the field and who, in many cases, were extremely fortunate selections. These officers felt a brotherly affection for the soldiers whose perils and hardships they shared, and were regarded by the latter with love and esteem. Their reports, however, are very long in coming to us.
Stereograph copyrighted by the H. C. White Co.
JAPANESE ARTILLERY TRANSPORTING A 7½ C. M. MOUNTAIN GUN ACROSS THE HILLS
Some of our correspondents, who lived in the rear of the army and saw the seamy side of the war, wrote descriptions of drunkenness, revelry, and profligacy (at Kharbin, for example) which distressed our reading public and gave a one-sided view of army life. Our press might have made our first defeats a means of rousing the spirit of patriotism and self-sacrifice; it might have exhorted the people to redouble their efforts as the difficulties of the war increased; it might have helped the Government to fill the gaps in our thinned ranks; it might have encouraged the faint-hearted, called forth the country's noblest sons, and opened to the army new sources of material and spiritual strength. But instead of doing any of these things, it played more or less into the hands of our foreign and domestic enemies; made the war hateful to the great mass of the population; depressed the spirits of soldiers going to the front, and undermined, in every way, the latter's faith in their officers and their rulers. This course of procedure did not rouse in the nation a determination to increase its efforts and to win victory at last, in spite of all difficulties. Quite the contrary! The soldiers who went to the front to fill up or reinforce our army carried with them seditious proclamations and the seeds of future defeats. Commanding officers in the Siberian military districts reported, as early as February, that detachments of supernumerary troops and reservists had plundered several railway stations, and at a later time regular troops, on their way to the front, were guilty of similar bad conduct. The drifting to the rear of large numbers of soldiers—especially the older reservists—while battles were in progress, was due not so much to cowardice as to the unsettling of the men's minds and to a disinclination on their part to continue the war. I may add that the opening of peace negotiations in Portsmouth, at a time when we were preparing for decisive operations, affected unfavorably the morale of the army's strongest elements.