A photographic record of the Russo-Japanese war

Chapter V · THE RUSSIAN ADVANCE TO THE FRONT

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The supreme difficulty under which Russia labored during the early months of the war was the enormous distance from her military base to the battle front. The only line of land communication between Russia and Manchuria was the single-track Siberian railroad, and when war began this line was broken by the ice-locked Lake Baikal. Russia had need of 300,000 men in Manchuria as soon as they could be rushed there, and with Lake Baikal frozen to the depth of nine feet, less than four thousand and more often not more than one thousand men could cross it in a day.

Lake Baikal, this weakest link of a very weak chain, is the largest body of fresh water in the Old World, except the Victoria Nyanza in Africa. It is nearly 15,000 square miles in extent, and therefore inferior only to Superior and Huron among the great American lakes. It is 600 versts long, with a width varying from 27 to 85 versts. It is 3,185 feet deep. The railroad was broken by the southern end of this lake, where it is about 40 miles wide. This is the gap that disastrously impairs the utility of the Trans-Siberian for the moving of troops and war supplies to the Manchurian and Korean frontier.

The lake begins to freeze in November, is completely ice-bound by the middle of December, remaining so for five months. The ice freezes to a thickness of nine feet, which would make sledge traffic perfect, were it not for the fact that wide fissures break its surface, which have a way of frequently closing up and piling the ice high into impassable windrows. These crevices have a width of three to six feet, and are often more than a verst in length, forming a serious impediment to progress on the ice and rendering next to impossible the marching of troops across the lake or the safe sledging of supplies. A thunderous crash, as of an explosion, marks the forming of the crevice, followed by a long, rolling reverberation. The rift instantly fills with water to the level of the ice, and is so agitated at the surface by currents or other forces that eight to fourteen days are required for it to freeze over, when the operation of cracking begins anew, and is repeated throughout the coldest portion of the winter.

The obvious solution to this difficulty was to build a railroad round the end of the lake, a detour of nearly 150 miles, and necessitating the construction of four tunnels. This was out of the question. A powerful ice-crusher, the “Baikal,” modeled after the ice-crushers successfully used in the Straits of Mackinac, had been built. She could break ice four feet thick, but on the nine-foot ice of the Russian inland sea she made no successful impression. The result was that a line of track had to be laid across the lake, and that before this was completed the troops had to be marched across the forty-mile stretch of wind-swept ice, while their supplies and baggage had to be dragged after them in sledges. Many of the men, wandering on to treacherous ice, were drowned; many were frost-bitten, and all suffered extremely from the arduous labor of the march and the bitter cold.