On the other hand, as the result of the advance of the main German right before the Battle of the Marne, the armies commanded by the Crown Prince of Prussia and the Duke of Wurtemburg had succeeded in turning Verdun, so that although the Germans had never got up to the wall of the fortresses, much less broken through it, they had, on the Verdun-Toul section, got to the farther side of it and the Meuse. There was a time, before the point which we have now reached, and before the Battle of the Marne, when, east and west of this stretch of the Meuse, two French armies, part of General Sarrail’s force and part of the left wing of the Second Army, with the Toul garrison force to help them, were actually fighting back to back, on opposite sides of the river. But the more important part of this double engagement—Sarrail against the Crown Prince of Prussia—was on the west side of the Meuse, and does not therefore belong, strictly speaking, to the scope of this book; the fighting on the right bank, except that extending a few miles south of Verdun on its east side, between part of its garrison army and part of the garrison army of Metz, was not at first very serious. There was, as I have said, at that time a gap of some miles, across the base of what afterwards became the St. Mihiel triangle, in the otherwise continuous line of the two opposing forces. But in the period immediately following their defeat at the Grand Couronné the enemy began to attack this part of the barrier of fortresses with extraordinary vigour; on the rest of the line, the part with which we have already dealt, they confined themselves on the whole to the task of maintaining the positions to which, after their first advance, they had been driven back, and it was the fighting which resulted in the formation of the St. Mihiel wedge that became the really interesting part of the eastern campaign.