The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [107]
All over the landscape were the black silhouettes of burnt tanks; somehow they blended into the wreckage of trees and the circles of black charred grass so that they were camouflaged as in the child's picture-game where the faces of famous men are concealed in the leaves of trees. A litter of wreckage lay all over the field. There were the dead bodies of Japanese soldiers everywhere, and in one place on a small ridge, where the Japanese had entrenched themselves for a few hours, the artillery had torn great crumpled holes in the earth.
The men wandered through the field, which was perhaps a quarter mile long. In the grass they could see the twisted bodies of a few dead men, and they lay very far from repose, their bodies frozen in the midst of an intense contortion. They skirted around them, and continued to stroll down the road. A few yards away a destroyed Japanese half-track and an American tank had careened on their sides, leaning against each other like old houses ready to totter. They had burned together, and they looked black and crippled. The bodies of the Japanese had not been carried away, and the driver of the halftrack had almost fallen out of his seat. His head was crushed from his ear to his jaw and it lay sodden on the runningboard of the vehicle as if it were a beanbag. One of his legs was thrust tensely through the shattered glass of the windshield and the other one, which had been lopped off at the thigh, lay at right angles to his head. It seemed to have a separate existence from him.
Another Japanese lay on his back a short distance away. He had a great hole in his intestines, which bunched out in a thick white cluster like the congested petals of a sea flower. The flesh of his belly was very red and his hands in their death throe had encircled the wound. He looked as if he were calling attention to it. He had an anonymous pleasant face with small snubbed features, and he seemed quite rested in death. His legs and buttocks had swollen so that they stretched his pants until they were the skin-tight trousers of a Napoleonic dandy. Somehow he looked like a doll whose stuffing had broken forth.
At an angle to him lay a third soldier, who had received a terrible wound in his chest. His thighs and torso had been burned in escaping from the half-track, and he was stretched out on his back with his legs separated and his knees raised. The singed cloth of his uniform had rotted away and it exposed his scorched genitals. They had burned down to tiny stumps but the ash of his pubic hair still remained like a tight clump of steel wool.
Wilson poked about the wreckage, and then sighed. "They done stripped 'em all of souvenirs," he said.
Gallagher swayed back and forth drunkenly. "Who did? Who the fug did? Wilson, you're a goddam liar. You stole all the souvenirs."
Wilson ignored him. "It's a damn shame's all Ah can say when a bunch of men like us is risking our ass for a whole goddam week, and they ain't even any souvenirs left." His voice trailed off bitterly. "Goddam shame," he repeated to himself.
Martinez prodded with his shoe the genitals of the charred corpse. The genitals collapsed with a small crispy sound as if he had stuck his finger into a coil of cigar ash. He felt a trace of pleasure, which was lost in the gloominess he now felt. This liquor had made him despondent and the walk had intensified this; he felt no horror nor any fear at the bodies; his own terror of death had no relation to the smells and the cruel shapes into which physical death could force a body. He could not have said why he was gloomy, but he had to fasten it upon something. He resented the money he had spent for the whisky, and for the past half hour he had been trying to calculate how long it would take him to replace that money with his pay.
Red leaned against the half-track.