resist attacks prepared without proper resources, and were a portent of the trench warfare of World War I. Advances in firearms technology without the necessary advances in battlefield communications gradually led to the defence again gaining the ascendancy. An example of siege during this time, prolonged during 337 days due to the isolation of the surrounded troops, was the siege of Baler, in which a reduced group of Spanish soldiers was besieged in a small church by the Philippine rebels in the course of the Philippine Revolution and the Spanish–American War, until months after the Treaty of Paris, the end of the conflict. Furthermore, the development of steamships availed greater speed to blockade runners, ships with the purpose of bringing cargo, e.g. food, to cities under blockade, as with Charleston, South Carolina during the American Civil War. Modern warfare World War I Mainly as a result of the increasing firepower (such as machine guns) available to defensive forces, First World War trench warfare briefly revived a form of siege warfare. Although siege warfare had moved out from an urban setting because city walls had become ineffective against modern weapons, trench warfare was nonetheless able to use many of the techniques of siege warfare in its prosecution (sapping, mining, barrage and, of course, attrition), but on a much larger scale and on a greatly extended front. More traditional sieges of fortifications took place in addition to trench sieges. The siege of Tsingtao was one of the first major sieges of the war, but the inability for significant resupply of the German garrison made it a relatively one-sided battle. The Germans and the crew of an Austro-Hungarian protected cruiser put up a hopeless defence and, after holding out for more than a week, surrendered to the Japanese, forcing the German East Asia Squadron to steam towards South America for a new coal source. The other major siege outside Europe during the First World War was in Mesopotamia, at the siege of Kut. After a failed attempt to move on Baghdad, stopped by the Ottomans at the bloody Battle of Ctesiphon, the British and their large contingent of Indian sepoy soldiers were forced to retreat to Kut, where the Ottomans under German General Baron Colmar von der Goltz laid siege. The British attempts to resupply the force via the Tigris river failed, and rationing was complicated by the refusal of many Indian troops