Now, east of the river the situation is materially different. Between the Meuse and the level plateau, which appears in the dispatches from the front as the Woevre, is a long, narrow ridge, running from north to south for perhaps thirty-five or forty miles. This is the Côte de Meuse, or, translated, the Hills of the Meuse. The range is never more than ten miles wide and at many points less than half as wide. On the west it rises very sharply from the Meuse and on the east it breaks down quite as abruptly into the Woevre Plain. It cannot be effectively approached from the Woevre, because the Woevre is an exceedingly marshy plain, with much sub-surface water and in spring a mass of liquid clay. Now the French, when the German drive began, stood on this ridge some eight miles, rather less, perhaps, to the north of the town of Verdun; their line ran from the Meuse straight east along this ridge and then turned at right angles and came south along the eastern edge of the Meuse Hills and the shore of the Woevre Plain until it touched the river again at St. Mihiel, twenty miles to the south, where the Germans had broken through the Meuse Hills and reached the river. The German attack came south along the crest of this ridge because the German heavy artillery could not be brought over the Woevre. About halfway between the French front and Verdun, on a little crest somewhat higher than the main ridge, the French had erected a line of forts, just as they had on the Charny Ridge, Forts Douaumont and Vaux, familiar names now, were the forts most distant from Verdun. But the French here, as on the other side of the river, had come out of these forts, abandoned and dismantled them, and taken to trenches much to the north. It was upon these trenches that the main German attack fell, and in the first days the French were pushed back until their trench line followed the crests that bear the old forts, and at one point, at Douaumont, the Germans had actually got possession of one of the old forts; but the French trenches pass in front of this fort at a distance of but a few hundred yards. Now, in the first days of the battle the position of the French on the east bank of the Meuse was just this: the troops facing north were meeting and slowly yielding to a terrific drive coming south and southwest; the rest of the troops that faced east toward the Woevre were not attacked severely. But as the Germans came south, and when they took Douaumont, they were able to reach the bridges across the Meuse behind the French troops on the Meuse Hills and to destroy them by indirect fire, and these French troops, more than a hundred thousand probably, were fighting with their backs to a deep river and exposed to destruction in case their lines did not hold.