On the front of the Mosa, on September 8, 1914, the fort of Troyon-sur-Meuse, sixteen kilometers south of Verdun, was sieged.
On the front of the Mosa, on September 8, 1914, the fort of Troyon-sur-Meuse, sixteen kilometers south of Verdun, was sieged. For five days, the Germans subjected him to intense artillery shelling.
The German emissaries invited the fort to surrender on two occasions, "in the name of the Kaiser." When defenders answered "never," the Germans fired 236 shells in half an hour; in total they fired ten thousand shells. Twenty-two men were crushed to death when a missile blew up the roof of the narrow underground corridor through which they were trying to reach the main defenders.
The French officer in command, Commander Toussaint, and a single infantry detachment, consisting of 472 men, along with a dozen pieces of artillery and two machine guns, endured for five days, but in the end they were crushed. The French High Command decided to retire completely from Verdun, but the local commander, General Sarrail, disregarded the order and remained in front of the city and its fortresses.
Having been denied triumphal entry into Paris, the German army would continue to fight on the Western Front for four more years, with as much hope in victory in August 1918 as in August 1914, but the hopes of a month before, to be able to defeat France with a lightning strike and then directing all its military power against Russia, had been truncated, the war of quick victories had become a strategy of the past and a dream for the future.
Germany would have to fight simultaneously and with constant danger, both in the East and West, France would have to fight on French soil. Russia, would have to regain ground in the west and Austria would have to take back ground in the east.
There were still three and a half months until Christmas, but each of the belligerant states would have to look for new strategies and even new allies.

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