The canvas is a tapestry of still-life elements

The following text is about . It says "The canvas is a tapestry of still-life elements" while the painting shows a large number of soldiers. Is it referring to the belongings of the soldiers and the environmental elements?

Context:

Collective memory manifests itself in many ways. With war art it enables a single painting – Alex Colville’s Infantry near Nijmegen, for example – to resonate for many of the thousands of Canadians who served in the Netherlands during the Second World War. The canvas is a tapestry of still-life elements– the material of soldiers’ lives interwoven into the fabric of the artist’s imagination. The result looks historically true – the cold, the wet, the burdensome Bren gun, the webbing, the pale watery sun of winter – and therefore could have been lived, but it is really a reconstruction that the artist based on his own memories and the sketches that he retained (Art and War by Laura Brandon).