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. On either side of the narrow and precipitous gorge of the Brenta River, at the point where it leaves the Austrian lines and enters the Vallian, an eyewitness of some of these attacks says, there has existed since last winter a formidable barricade of wire and a complex system of enemy trenches. Wire fills the whole valley with an impassable tangle. It lies half under water in the rushing stream itself and writhes up each wall of the steeply sloping rock on either side. Moreover, on the ledges and in the caves and crannies of those high cliffs were hidden Austrian machine guns to sweep the narrow gorge below.