These local minor engagements and artillery actions were typical of the fighting on the Austro-Italian front during the next ten days, indeed, with few exceptions one might say, almost during the next two months. Day by day fights between advanced posts were reported. Thus Italian reconnoitering patrols captured prisoners on August 27, 1918, as they did, indeed, on almost every day, in the Posina Valley, in the Val di Assa, and in the Grappa region. An Austrian motor boat, maneuvering on Lake Garda in the Grentino sector, was sunk by Italian artillery.
In the Concei Valley enemy attacks were averted on August 28, 1918, by Italian fire. Advanced posts were driven back with losses. Prisoners were taken on the northern slopes of Altissimo, and north of Col del Rosso hostile reconnoitering parties were dispersed.
On the following day, August 29, 1918, in the Brenta Valley, Italian infantry parties, in a successful surprise operation, captured the village of Rivalta. Successively other detachments, with the cooperation of the artillery, occupied the village of Sasso Stefani, after having overcome in a lively fight the stubborn resistance of the enemy. Thirty-eight prisoners, including one officer, were captured. In the region to the north of Col del Rosso, on the Asiago Plateau, two enemy thrusts were again completely arrested by Italian fire.
Italian artillery carried out concentrations in the mountain area on September 1, 1918. On the Piave some boats, containing Austrian troops attempting a surprise attack, were upset. At Stelvio and on the Asiago Plateau Austrian patrols were repulsed with heavy losses to them.
Along the mountainous front Italian artillery on September 6, 1918, effectively shelled the enemy's front lines and rear areas. In the Concalaghi, Pesina, and the Assa Valley Italian patrols engaged enemy exploring and drove them back. North of Monfenera an attempt to raid the advanced lines was arrested by the garrison, which afterward, by a counterattack, put the Austrians to flight with losses. On the lower Piave Austrian scouts attempting to cross the river in small boats were driven back by rifle fire.
During the night following the French carried out a raid which was typical of the work the Allied troops accomplished on the plateau of Asiago. The two companies that made the attack had a mile and a half of no-man's-land to cross. The ground was most difficult—cut up into ravines, pitted with flooded shell holes, densely overgrown with tall grass, and littered not only with old trenches, ruined dugouts and tangles of torn barbed wire, but also with Austrian dead, who still lay there unburied since the big attack in June.
It was at night and in a dense fog that the French started out. It took three hours for the half battalion to grope its way toward the Austrian line, but shortly before 5 o'clock they were ready to attack, and at 9 minutes to 5 a fierce French box barrage—in front and behind the enemy trenches and from the flanks—was opened on the enemy trenches, and the Italian and British artillery on either side started a distracting bombardment. At 5 o'clock precisely the barrage lifted and the French infantry rushed forward to find a smashed trench in front of them, fuming with smoke and dust and strewn with dead and wounded men. Some of the stouter redoubts and machine-gun posts held out for a little while, but with bombs and fire boxes their garrisons were smoked or blasted into silence, and then with fifty prisoners the two French companies came back, having to pass, indeed, through the Austrian barrage, but losing only a few men on the way.
Austro-Hungarian patrols which attempted on September 13, 1918, to approach the Italian lines on Monte Corno, in the Grappa region of the mountain front, were repulsed by the Italian fire.
Italian infantry and ardoti parties after a short but effective artillery bombardment, and assisted by low-flying aeroplanes, in the morning of September 14, 1918, attacked and captured the whole of an Austrian defensive system on the Grovella, south of Corte. Three hundred and fifty prisoners, a number of machine guns, some hundreds of rifles, and much other war material fell into Italian hands.
In the region north and northwest of Grappa, on the northern Italian front, Italian detachments in the morning of September 15, 1918, raided the enemy lines and improved at some points the positions already occupied. The Italians took 321 prisoners and captured numerous machine guns. On the remainder of the front there were artillery duels and patrol activity.