Germans take Saint-Mihiel

On 24 September 1914 German troops occupied the small town of Saint-Mihiel on the Meuse, halfway between the fortresses of Verdun and Toul. The next morning Fort Camp des Romains, on the hill above the town, surrendered. Within a few days the Germans had driven a wedge into the French lines and formed a salient that they held for almost the whole war. The date of the town’s capture is given consistently by an American guide to the battlefields from 1938 and by French studies. The latter also indicate that the fighting for the heights above the Meuse had begun a few days earlier.

The thrust from Metz

After the retreat from the Marne the Germans did not give up their attempts to cut Verdun off. The fortress formed a projecting arc of the front, and its communications with the rest of France ran along the Meuse valleys and through Bar-le-Duc. To the south-east of it, on the wooded heights above the Meuse, stood only a chain of older barrier forts, and at the beginning of September the German artillery had long shelled one of them, Fort Troyon, without taking it. At the end of September an army group under General Hermann von Strantz, formed from the left wing of the German Fifth Army, went into the attack from the area of Metz. According to French studies, from 22 September the Germans, crossing the Woëvre plain, seized successive stretches of the heights above the Meuse. Most of the soldiers of the Saint-Mihiel garrison were then far away, on other sectors of the front.

The town and the fort

On 24 September units of the Bavarian III Corps of General Ludwig von Gebsattel entered Saint-Mihiel after an artillery bombardment. The same day the Bavarian 11th Infantry Regiment attacked Fort Camp des Romains on the hill south of the town. According to French studies the fort was defended by about 650 men with thirty guns and four machine guns, but it had been largely disarmed and could not count on support from the neighbouring forts, as communications with them had been cut. The first assault was repulsed. During the night the Bavarians received reinforcements and the heavy mortars that had previously shelled Troyon. On 25 September at 5.30 a.m. they attacked in eight columns, broke onto the rampart of the fort and began throwing explosive charges into its openings. At 8.30 a.m. the garrison raised a white flag. The commandant, Lieutenant-Colonel David Grignot, signed the act of surrender on honourable terms: the garrison went into captivity, but the officers kept their swords. The Germans also crossed the Meuse and occupied Chauvoncourt and the hill on the left bank, forming a bridgehead there.

The French Third Army of General Maurice Sarrail brought up reinforcements and counter-attacked, but failed to retake the town. The Germans did not, however, advance further west, and the forts beyond, including Troyon and Les Paroches, remained in French hands. Even so, the loss of Saint-Mihiel was painful. The railway along the Meuse, from Verdun to Commercy and Toul, was cut, and Verdun was left linked to the rear only by a single railway line from the west and the road to Bar-le-Duc. President Raymond Poincaré, whose summer residence at Sampigny lay a dozen or so kilometres from the new front, demanded explanations. The commander-in-chief, Joseph Joffre, put the blame on Sarrail, and after the war a commission of inquiry examined the defence of the fort.

A salient for four years

The front froze in the shape of a triangle whose apex lay at Saint-Mihiel and whose sides ran north, towards Verdun, and east, towards the Moselle at Pont-à-Mousson. From 26 September the French struck at its faces. First the fighting was in the Bois d’Ailly south of the town, then in the forest of Apremont, and in 1915 on the ridge of Les Éparges and across the whole Woëvre plain. All these attacks brought heavy losses and at most a few hundred metres of ground gained. The several thousand inhabitants who stayed in Saint-Mihiel lived through four years of occupation right by the front line, under fire from both sides. The salient was eliminated only in September 1918 by American and French troops.