Allied troops landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944. In that vicinity, around August, the bodies of young German soldiers were lying in bumpy fields, under dusty bushes in inland fields and roadsides. Many of the German soldier dead also often had their complexion the gray-green of their uniforms. Many of the dead German soldiers were victims of sniper fire. The blood loss had already made the cheeks of the German soldiers thin and rusty. Always these young men had blackened tips of their yellow fingernails that gripped the earth. In most cases, despite the severe pain caused by the gunshot wounds on the bodies of the German soldiers, their faces looked very strangely peaceful after death.
The bodies that passed by the corpses had become unknown warriors. The corpse stabbed at his heart, but he never again felt the discomfort he had the first time. It was depressing how quickly one became accustomed to death in war. It wasn't the threat of disease or aging, but the various horrors for a healthy young man. They were not fully prepared to accept death. On the battlefield, however, they were ready to accept death as the norm. Death was there like the shadow of a sundial, though death was coming suddenly, to be expected and to be acknowledged. On the battlefield, death was received as part of victory.
In the means by which the war nullified and ignored the lives of men, it was too late to deal with. It is impossible to resuscitate and recreate an individual from someone soldier that death has fallen. It is not difficult to replenish and accept soldiers. A lone death on the side of the road, far from home, is not a matter of military government, but a mass replenishment of soldiers, a mass of human goods recreated by a large number of applicants in hopes of being drafted. His life was short and he had hardly tasted it. Now he had a hint of what life was to his face. A telegram of death, his family grieves, grief beyond redemption incubates, and the world is a poor citizen who knows no one.
The men shrink in rigor mortis. Their uniforms hang in disarray, as if they were suddenly a size too big, too loose, too ill-fitting in style. When the bodies of the soldiers were gathered for burial and blankets covered their faces, bloody letters from home, wrinkled photographs, smoked cigarettes, chewing gum, old, half-eaten chocolates, string, jackknives, and foreign edition books were all that was left. The young soldier's possessions were more poignantly found in his pockets and in a smaller assortment. The bodies were covered with canvas that shone white in the sun, and only clenched hands and strands of hair appeared here and there. On the first day of the Normandy landings alone, the Germans lost about 4,000 to 9,000 men killed or wounded. The Allied forces suffered about 10,000 casualties, of which about 4,414 were killed in action.
