day, and the next, and the next, further fierce onslaughts on the fort by large numbers of Germans were driven back with great slaughter by the garrison, strongly reinforced by the cavalry division and a Toul battery of 75’s, and the attack on Troyon was finally abandoned on the 13th. The German losses in front of the fort, as the result of the five days’ fighting and a second unsuccessful attack which they made on it a week later, were between seven and ten thousand men. This splendid defence of Troyon was typical of what happened in several of the Meuse forts when the enemy, on September 20th, resumed their efforts, but with many more troops, to force their way across the Hauts de Meuse to the river. Having reoccupied Thiaucourt, on the Rupt de Mad, eight miles north-west of Pont-à-Mousson, they took up a position well to the west of it, with a long front extending north and south in front of St. Mihiel, through Heudicourt (eight miles north-east of the town) along the Hauts de Meuse. The gap in the line of the German front between the Fifth and Sixth Armies was now at last permanently filled up, for the first time during the war. From this forward position they began a systematic bombardment of Troyon, les Paroches, the Camp des Romains, Liouville, and the other river forts. Their base position behind this line reached from Thiaucourt to Fresnes, on the edge of the Hauts de Meuse, seventeen miles across the plain in the direction of Verdun, and ten miles short of it. This position it is worth while to notice with some care, because it forms the base of the triangle of which St. Mihiel (of which we shall hear something) forms the apex. Its strength lay in the fact that it had Metz, with its big supplies of stores and men, less than twenty miles behind it, with direct railway communication; its weakness in its exposure to flank attacks, on its right to the north by the garrison army of Verdun, on its left by that of Toul and the left wing of de Castelnau’s army. The driving force of the Metz supplies of men and ammunition from the rear was strong enough to enable the centre of the German line to push forward like the point of a wedge to St. Mihiel in the west. But the lateral pressure of the two French forces on their right and left flanks was also strong and compelled them, as the point of the wedge advanced, to extend their forces on each side of it, facing outwards in two almost opposite directions. And that was how the original St. Mihiel triangle came to be formed, with a seventeen-mile base from Thiaucourt to Fresnes, and two equal sides, each fourteen miles long, from Fresnes to St. Mihiel on the north-west, and from St. Mihiel to Thiaucourt on the south-east. Nearly parallel to this lower side of the triangle, and five or six miles to the south of it, most of the road from Commercy to Pont-à-Mousson, a distance of twenty-five miles, was in the hands of the French. Their only railway ran along the