At the Allied Supreme Headquarters in Constantinople, the capture of the Bosphorus Strait should, by all rights, have been a great victory worth celebrating. Yet reality was exactly the opposite.
After seeing the casualty figures, no one could bring themselves to rejoice.
Because the Russian army had spent too much time in the Ava landing battle, they had given the enemy ample time to react. The Ottoman Empire had massed heavy forces and set up defenses.
The result of a head-on clash was grievous casualties. Relying on their advantage in equipment, the Russian army had won the battle, but the price they paid was far from small.
The casualty figure of thirty thousand alone was enough to prove how brutal this war had been. Including the Ava landing battle and casualties from fighting in other regions, Russian casualties had already broken through the forty-thousand mark since the war began, with the number of dead nearing ten thousand.
Perhaps this figure was not worth mentioning to the Russian Empire, but for an expeditionary force with only one hundred and fifty thousand men, it was utterly crippling.
The morale of the Russian army had now clearly declined. Even victory could not erase the aftereffects of such heavy losses. Even if the wounded received effective treatment, no more than twenty thousand Russian soldiers would be able to return to the battlefield later.
This meant that, from this point on, the Russian army had permanently lost twenty thousand men from its total strength. In the short term, it could deploy only one hundred and ten thousand troops. With men needed to garrison the Bosphorus Strait, its mobile force numbered less than eighty thousand.
As the commander of the Allied Supreme Headquarters, General Arest also felt the pressure. He did not care about the Russian