“The civilities of war forbid it.”īut Ndiaye has seen these so-called civilities for what they truly are. “You will content yourself with killing them, not mutilating them,” Armand orders without a hint of irony. For the French officer under whom he serves, Captain Armand, “…a small man with matching black eyes drowning in continuous rage,” these nightly raids into the German trenches fairly quickly begin to tip beyond the acceptable madness that is sanctioned warfare. From each soldier he murders-and much to the alarm of his comrades-Ndiaye collects a gruesome memento: a human hand, which he keeps as a kind of souvenir or talisman to his own growing insanity. Driven to madness not only by the gruesome, agonized death of Mademba Diop, but also by the daily slaughter in which he takes part, Ndiaye has become what he calls “a true friend of death, its accomplice, its more-than-brother.” At night, under cover of darkness, he sneaks through no-man’s-land to kidnap blue-eyed German soldiers, whom he meticulously butchers in a ritual meant to reenact his friend’s last dreadful moments.

It is Ndiaye’s voice-resonate, ruthlessly matter-of-fact, deeply wounded-which will be our light in this blood-soaked landscape of rusting barbed wire and whizzing shrapnel. Alfa Ndiaye, a young Senegalese soldier who along with his childhood friend, Mademba Diop, has volunteered to fight for the French, finds himself trapped in the nightmare that was trench life during World War One.

Here story and storyteller are one and the same. Homer’s Iliad, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Pat Barker’s miraculous, mammoth Regeneration Trilogy, and now, David Diop’s remarkable (and yes, fair warning, very disturbing) novel At Night All Blood is Black (translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis, FSG). But he could have also been talking about the countless books that war has sired, those literary masterpieces of blood and iron and colossal suffering over which war-that great annihilator of psyche and civilization alike-has long held sway. In Heraclitus’ telling, it is we poor mortals who are war’s unhappy children, and its subjects. War, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus of Ephesus once said, is the father of all and the king of all.

At night all blood is black analysis