Character Analysis
Duval is an enemy soldier, a French man, who crawls into the shell crater in which Paul is hiding during a bombardment. Paul stabs him with his knife and spends hours staring at the man who slowly dies in front of him. Driven nearly insane by this encounter, and by the fact that he has killed the man, Paul searches the man's body to find some form of identification. He discovers that the man is a printer and that he has a family. Wracked with guilt, Paul vows to secretly send money to the man's family when the war is over.