Now the separate reports strung out until you could count perhaps three between reports; now they came so close together that the music they made was a constant roaring which would endure for a minute on a stretch, or half a minute anyhow.

But for all the noticeable heed which any uniformed men in my vicinity paid to this it might as well have been blasting in a distant stone quarry.
This attitude which they maintained, coupled with the fact that seemingly all the firing did no damage whatsoever, only served to strengthen the illusion that after all it was not the actual business of warfare which spread itself beneath our eyes.
Apparently most of the shells from the Allies' side--which of course was the far side from us--rose out of a dip in the contour of the land.
Rising so, they mainly fell among or near the shattered remnants of two hamlets upon the nearer front of a little hill perhaps three miles from our location.

A favorite object of their attack appeared to be a wrecked beet-sugar factory of which one side was blown away.
There would appear just above the horizon line a ball of smoke as black as your hat and the size of your hat, which meant a grenade of high explosives.

Then right behind it would blossom a dainty, plumy little blob of innocent white, fit to make a pompon for the hat, and that, they told us, would be shrapnel.

The German reply to the enemy's guns issued from the timbered verges of slopes at our right hand and our left; and these German shells, so far as we might judge, passed entirely over and beyond the smashed hamlets and the ruined sugar-beet factory and, curving downward, exploded out of our sight.
"The French persist in a belief that we have men in those villages," said one of the general's aides to me.