of the battle. As this computation was based on the strength of the regiments when they entered the fight, and as many of them came out of it sadly depleted, it is estimated that many soldiers must have fired as many as 1500 rounds. In the Russian organization, the supply of rifle ammunition per man, including the field and reserve parks and the supply carried in the flying artillery parks, is only 422 rounds for infantry, and much less for mounted troops. The expenditure of artillery ammunition has been as excessive. At Liao-Yang some Russian batteries fired more than 600 rounds per gun. Russian field artillery carries in its limbers and battery wagons only from 108 to 150 rounds, according to the character of the gun, while the total visible supply, including the divisional, flying, and reserve parks averages about 475 rounds per gun. These figures will give some idea of the strain put upon the supply departments during a great battle. More ammunition has been used in a single day in Manchuria than was required to fight the Spanish-American War. Besides the items of food and ammunition, the wastage of other forms of war material is enormous, and constitutes an unprecedented drain upon logistical resources. The officers who direct this important branch of the art rarely receive the credit that is due them.
Turning from grand to minor or fighting tactics, the first arm of the service to be considered is, naturally, the infantry. Nothing has occurred in this war to cause this arm to lose prestige. Infantry is still the fighting backbone of an army, and must bear the brunt of all great battles. Apparently it is still the only arm that can accomplish, unaided, decisive results. Infantry tactics in this war is that commonly taught in all modern armies, and described as “extended order tactics” to distinguish it from the old close formations. Anyone who pays the slightest attention to military matters knows that soldiers no longer fight shoulder to shoulder, but are spread out with a view to presenting as poor a target as is possible to the destructive and accurate fire of modern weapons. We saw the highest possible development of extended order fighting in the South African War. No great numbers of troops can ever be brought to a state of efficiency in this tactics equal to that attained by the Boers. The problem has been to determine how far, with ordinary material and training, extended order tactics can be carried without losing control over troops. Many contradictory speculations have been indulged in pending a practical demonstration. In Manchuria we have seen this tactics employed in actual war on a huge scale, and it only remains to state the results so far as they have appeared.
I may as well say now that the superior individual intelligence of the Japanese soldier, coupled with an assiduity in perfecting their military organization not approached elsewhere in the world during the last decade, have combined to produce in this war a fighting machine capable of carrying the modern theory of infantry tactics as near to perfection as can probably ever be reached on a large scale, under conditions which surround military service in most countries. While, on the other hand, the Russian army falls below an average standard, it in my opinion comes nearer representing average results. In this war both belligerents have acted on the theory that where sacrifice of human life is necessary to secure decisive results it should be made without hesitation. It was the failure of British generals to act upon this accredited military principle that made the Boer War so lacking in satisfactory tests. I have no hesitation in saving that the Russian infantry tactics in this war has probably been as good as most great armies would have displayed, and in this estimate I include our own. In making this statement I assume that our officers would employ the tactics they have been taught, and that our army would be principally composed of and officered by volunteers. In infantry tactics the Russian officers have simply followed, in most cases, a prescribed routine, which admonished them to move upon the enemy in certain formations, to be varied at stated intervals of proximity. The instructions governing this tactics do not differ materially from those prescribed in the British, German, and American armies. These dispositions are the result of experience and deductions from it.
The experience of this war seems to indicate that these dispositions should be radically revised. The practice of attacking in a triple-line formation, however extended, with a few hundred yards separating the firing line, supports, and reserves, merely