More than in other sectors of the front, the initial difficulties in Carnia were immediately obvious for the Italian army. The testimony given by the Member of Parliament Michele Gortani in the inquiry on Caporetto allows several surprising and absurd details to be learnt: "as I was saying, all that is necessary for trench warfare was missing […] for some time General Lequio made up for the lack of hand grenades in Carnia by means of some improvised equipment […] he had obtained a considerable amount of ladles for cooking, joined them to each other, made a hole in the centre of one of them and attached a tin cylinder […] for the explosives." (in Novella Cantarutti, Il Memoriale Gortani: le responsabilità del Comando Supremo e la rotta di Caporetto, in AA.VV., Guida ai luoghi delle battaglie della ritirata di Caporetto, 2nd volume, Gaspari, Udine, 2011, page 35).
Despite all this, the Alpini and the Feldjäger who were deployed at the top of Val But fought very hard battles around the strategic Mount Croce Carnico Pass. The Alpine troops took possession of Pal Piccolo and Pal Grande while the Feldjäger occupied Freikofel. The commanders were, however, determined to create a safe line of control and so the two armies were given the order to remove the respective adversaries from these peaks. In June and July 1915 the Alpine troops and the Feldjäger faced each other furiously without, however, obtaining any positive result: all the peaks were occupied only partially and the frontlines were merely a few metres away from each other. In this way, already in the first weeks the troops had to face an intense conflict based on positional warfare that only the onset of winter was able to halt temporarily.
With less perseverance but with the same violence several other actions took place also on the peaks of the upper Val Degano (westward of the pass) as well as in Val Chiarsò (to the east). Especially in the latter, there was an advance by Austro-Hungarian troops thanks to an offensive on Mount Lodin and on Cima Puartis while the strong Italian defensive line that had been prepared on Mount Zermula blocked action by the Habsburgs.
