The string of Japanese victories at Pyongyang and then at the Battle of the Yalu River had increased what had until then been only lukewarm Western interest in the war. By the time of the assault on Port Arthur, a number of Western reporters were attached to the Japanese Second Army. Western reporting on the massacre was controversial. Most correspondents such as James Creelman, writing for the "New York World", and Frederic Villiers, a writer and illustrator for the "London Black and White", described a wide scale and cold-blooded massacre, while Amédée Baillot de Guerville alleged in the pages of the "New York Herald" that no such massacre had occurred. Writing a decade later, de Guerville amended this view, claiming that though some 120 civilians were killed it still had not been a massacre.