I could discern their location without being able to grasp their general arrangement.

Between the nearer infantry trenches of the two opposing forces were tiny dots in the ground, each defined by an infinitesimal hillock of yellow earth heaped before it--observation pits these, where certain picked men, who do not expect to live very long anyway, hide themselves away to keep tally on the effect of the shells, which go singing past just over their heads to fall among the enemy, who may be only a few hundred feet or a few hundred yards away from the observers.
It was an excessively busy afternoon among the guns.

They spoke continually--now this battery going, now that; now two or three or a dozen together--and the sound of them came up to us in claps and roars like summer thunder.

Sometimes, when a battery close by let go, I could watch the thin, shreddy trail of fine smoke that marked the arched flight of a shrapnel bomb, almost from the very mouth of the gun clear to where it burst out into a fluffy white powder puff inside the enemy's position.
Contrariwise, I could see how shells from the enemy crossed those shells in the air and curved downward to scatter their iron sprays among the Germans.

In the midst of all this would come a sharp, spattering sound, as though hail in the height of the thunder shower had fallen on a tin roof; and that, I learned, meant infantry firing in a trench somewhere.
For a while I watched some German soldiers moving forward through a criss-cross of trenches; I took them to be fresh men going in to relieve other men who had seen a period of service under fire.