At Night All Blood Is Black: A Novel

Alfa explains that he preserved his second through eighth severed hands by salting and drying them in the kitchen fire. His first severed hand was stolen by his friend Jean-Baptiste, the “trickster, the joker” while he was returning with the second (46). Jean-Baptiste is introduced as Alfa’s “only real white friend” and the only person who consoled him after Mademba’s death (48). After stealing the hand, Jean-Baptiste plays with it, saluting the other soldiers with it, using it to shake their hands, and telling them they will all be court-martialed for shaking hands with the enemy.

Jean-Baptiste uses the rotting, severed hand to torment the German soldiers, raising its middle finger, holding it up on his bayonet, and shouting “Up yours, Krauts!” (52). Jean-Baptiste is intentionally trying to draw the enemy’s attention because he “received a certain perfumed letter,” which is implied to be a disappointing letter from a sweetheart (51). Jean-Baptiste assures his own death when he leaves the trench with the hand, turbaned in gauze and still raising its middle finger, attached to his helmet. The Germans hold their fire at the beginning of the attack, giving time for an artilleryman to identify Jean-Baptiste and shoot off his head.

After Jean-Baptiste’s death, Alfa crawls for hours in no-man’s-land to the German trenches. He waits until the sounds of singing die down, and he sees the smoke from a cigarette rising from a nearby trench. He leans into the trench, extracts the young soldier who is smoking, and makes him his victim. Alfa knows that the small, teenage soldier has likely not killed Mademba or Jean-Baptiste, but he murders him despite his pitiable youth.

When Alfa returns to the trench, however, his reception is not warm. Jean-Baptiste is no longer there to stir up the others to celebrate Alfa’s exploits, and the other soldiers see the role that the severed hand played in Jean-Baptiste’s death. The soldiers now see Alfa as “a dangerous madman, a bloodthirsty savage” (59).

Alfa refuses to tell Captain Armand and Ibrahima Seck where the hands are, for he knows that with them as evidence, they will be able to lock him up. He is convinced that after his rest period, Captain Armand will arrange to have him killed by the enemy.

He then recounts an incident in which some of the Toubab soldiers attempted a mutiny by refusing to leave the trench at the captain’s whistle. Armand had their arms bound and ordered them up the ladders and out of the trench, forcing them to choose between being shot in the trench as traitors or being killed in no-man’s-land and receiving a posthumous Croix de Guerre and a pension for their loved ones. Alfa admires Alphonse, the leader of the traitorous friends, who died climbing out of the trench with his wife’s name on his lips.

Returning to the confrontation with Armand over the hands, Alfa concludes that it is Armand who is the dëmm, a man so in love with the war that he will sacrifice anything to serve it. He thinks that Armand wants to do away with him because he sees him as a rival.