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.

This misfortune, which was to cost the Japanese so dear, may perhaps be
attributed at least in part to the continental influences under which their
army had been trained. We at least can trace the unlimited outlook in the
pages of the German Staff history. In dealing with the Japanese plan of
operations it is assumed that the occupation of Korea and the isolation of
Port Arthur were but preliminaries to a concentric advance on Liao-yang,
"which was kept in view as the first objective of the operations on land."
But surely on every theory of the war the first objective of the Japanese
on land was Seoul, where they expected to have to fight their first
important action against troops advancing from the Yalu; and surely their
second was Port Arthur, with its fleet and arsenal, which they expected to