By the battle of Tsushima the territorial object was completely isolated by sea, and the position of Japan in Korea was rendered as impregnable as that of Wellington at Torres Vedras.  All that remained was to proceed to the third stage and demonstrate to Russia that the acceptance of the situation that had been set up was more to her advantage than the further attempt to break it down.  This the final advance to Mukden accomplished, and Japan obtained her end very far short of having overthrown her enemy.  The offensive power of Russia had never been so strong, while that of Japan was almost if not quite exhausted.

Approached in this way, the Far Eastern struggle is seen to develop on the same lines as all our great maritime wars of the past, which continental strategists have so persistently excluded from their field of study.  It presents the normal three phases—­the initial offensive movement to seize the territorial object, the secondary phase, which forces an attenuated offensive on the enemy, and the final stage of pressure, in which there is a return to the offensive “according,” as Jomini puts it, “to circumstances and your relative force in order to obtain the cession desired.”

It must not of course be asked that these phases shall be always clearly defined.  Strategical analysis can never give exact results.  It aims only at approximations, at groupings which will serve to guide but will always leave much to the judgment.  The three phases in the Russo-Japanese War, though unusually well defined, continually overlapped.  It must be so; for in war the effect of an operation is never confined to the limits of its immediate or primary intention.  Thus the occupation of Korea had the secondary defensive effect of covering the home country, while the initial blow which Admiral Togo delivered at Port Arthur to cover the primary offensive movement proved, by the demoralisation it caused in the Russian fleet, to be a distinct step in the secondary phase of isolating the conquest.  In the later stages of the war the line between what was essential to set up the second phase of perfecting the isolation and the third phase of general pressure seems to have grown very nebulous.

It was at this stage that the Japanese strategy has been most severely criticised, and it was just here they seem to have lost hold of the conception of a limited war, if in fact they had ever securely grasped the conception as the elder Pitt understood it.  It has been argued that in their eagerness to deal a blow at the enemy’s main army they neglected to devote sufficient force to reduce Port Arthur, an essential step to complete the second phase.  Whether or not the exigencies of the case rendered such distribution of force inevitable or whether it was due to miscalculation of difficulties, the result was a most costly set-back.  For not only did it entail a vast loss of time and life at Port Arthur itself, but when the sortie of the Russian fleet in June brought home to them their error, the offensive movement on Liao-yang had to be delayed, and the opportunity passed for a decisive counter-stroke at the enemy’s concentration ashore.