Gérard Duval
Gérard Duval is a French compositor (printer) whom Paul Bäumer stabs to death in a shell-hole during a night patrol in No Man's Land. The encounter is the only killing Paul ever performs with his bare hands, face to face, and it becomes the novel's most sustained examination of the ethical cost of war. Duval's identity—his name, his trade, his family photographs—transforms him from an abstraction into a man, and Paul's subsequent attempt to make amends reveals the impossibility of undoing what war has forced him to do.
Identity and Background
Duval is identified only after his death. When Paul opens his pocket-book, he finds a small amateur photograph of a woman and a little girl taken against an ivy-clad wall, along with letters. From these Paul learns Duval's name and occupation: Gérard Duval, compositor—a printer who sets type. The letters are in French, which Paul can barely read, but each word he manages to translate "pierces me like a shot in the chest." The photographs make clear that Duval was not a rich man. Paul's discovery of these personal effects turns the dead soldier from an anonymous enemy into a specific human being with a wife, a child, and a trade that belongs to the world of peace, not war.
The Killing
The killing occurs during a night patrol. Paul, disoriented and terrified after his leave, crawls into a large shell-hole to escape a bombardment. When the barrage lifts and the attack begins, he lies motionless in the water, his face pressed into the mud. A body falls into the hole and lands across him. Acting on pure animal instinct, Paul stabs blindly and repeatedly with his dagger. Only afterward does he realize that the man is dying, not dead. For hours Paul lies beside Duval, listening to his gurgling breaths, fetching water from the muddy bottom of the crater, and trying to bandage the three stab wounds in his chest. He cannot bring himself to finish the man off with the knife, and he has lost his revolver. Duval dies at about three in the afternoon. Paul closes his eyes and props the body into a comfortable position, though he knows the dead feel nothing.
The Aftermath and Paul's Promise
In the shell-hole, alone with the corpse, Paul speaks to Duval directly. He says, "Comrade, I did not want to kill you. If you jumped in here again, I would not do it, if you would be sensible too. But you were only an idea to me before, an abstraction that lived in my mind and called forth its appropriate response. It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me." He promises to write to Duval's wife, to tell her everything, to help her and the child. He opens the pocket-book and reads the name: Gérard Duval, compositor. He writes the address on an envelope with Duval's own pencil. Yet as soon as he is safely back in his own trench, the resolve fades. He tells Kat and Albert what happened, but he does not mention the dead printer. When they try to calm him—"You can't do anything about it. What else could you have done? That is what you are here for"—Paul listens and feels comforted. He concludes, "After all, war is war." The promise he made in the shell-hole is never kept.
Thematic Significance
Duval's death is the novel's most concentrated dramatization of the ethical crisis at the heart of the war. Paul kills not an enemy but a man whose face, name, and family he discovers only afterward. The encounter stages what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas calls the ethical demand of the other's face: Duval's eyes, which Paul describes as crying out with "a look of utter terror," issue a silent command not to kill, a command that Paul cannot obey because the logic of war has already overridden it. The killing is not a moment of glory or even of conscious choice; it is a reflex, an accident of proximity. Yet Paul's subsequent attempt to bargain with the dead—to promise help, to swear he will fight against the forces that struck them both down—reveals a desperate need to restore meaning to an act that has none. That the promise is broken as soon as Paul is safe suggests that the moral wound of killing cannot be healed by good intentions. Duval remains a nail hammered into Paul's memory, a name that will "always come back and stand before me." He is the proof that the war has destroyed not only bodies but the very possibility of ethical relation between men.
