The horrors of the First World War - the machine guns, trench tactics, barbed wire and pounding artillery - came as a ghastly surprise to the Generals. Yet they should, and could, have known better. In 1904 Japan and Russia had gone to war for dominance of the East. Journalists and military attaches had made meticulous observations, but the lessons of this dramatic conflict were dismissed as irrelevant. The war which caused the Russian Bear to tumble and the Rising Sun of Japan to begin its ascendancy in the East has long deserved the full and vivid analysis which Richard Connaughton here presents. This book should be of interest to students and teachers of military history, modern history and politics.