They were not under our feet at all.

They were some two hundred yards away, across a field where the telephone wires stretched over the old plow furrows and through the rank meadow grass, like springs to catch woodcock.
Here again the trick of taking a message off the telephone and shouting it forth from the mouth of a fox burrow was repeated.

Whenever this procedure came to pass a sergeant who had strained his vocal cords from much giving of orders would swell out his chest and throw back his head and shriek hoarsely with what was left of his voice, which wasn't much.
This meant a fury of noise resulting instantly and much white smoke to follow.

For a while the guns were fired singly and then they were fired in salvos; and you might mark how the grass for fifty yards in front of the muzzles would lie on the earth quite flat and then stand erect, and how the guns, like shying bronchos, would leap backward upon their carriages and then slide forward again as the air in the air cushions took up the kick.

Also we took note that the crews of the ten- centimeters had built for themselves dugouts to sleep in and to live in, and had covered the sod roofs over with straw and broken tree limbs.