If the troops were constantly reminded...how ironically close England was, those at home were kept equally mindful of how near the trenches were. And not just by assertions to that effect by editors and politicians. They could literally hear the war, at least if they lived in Surrey, Sussex, or Kent, where the artillery was not only audible but, with the wind in the right direction, quite plainly audible. When the mines went off at Messines, not merely was the blast heard in Kent: the light flashes were visible too. The guns were heard especially during preparation for a major assault, when they would fire unremittingly for a week or ten days, day and night. Thus Edmund Blunden recalls that in late June, 1916, as the artillery strove to cut the German wire for the Somme attack, "in Southdown villages the schoolchildren sat wondering at that incessant drumming and rattling of the windows." The preparation at Passchendaele was "distinctly" audible to Kipling at Burwash, Sussex, 100 miles from the guns.
~ From The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell, p. 68