Paul and the Frenchman

The lips are dry. My water bottle is not there. I have not brought it with me. But there is water in the mud, down at the bottom of the crater. I climb down, take out my handkerchief, spread it out, push it under and scoop up the yellow water that strains through into the hollow of my hand. He gulps it down. I fetch some more. Then I unbutton his tunic in order to bandage him if it is possible. [Erich Maria, 219-220] It was that abstraction I stabbed. But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see you wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agonyforgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy? [Erich Maria, 223] I picked this scene mainly because it stuck out to me the most from the whole book. Paul has to sit with a man he has stabbed for almost a whole day, and that sticks with him for a little while especially because thats the first time hes killed a man face-to-face. I drew a few bombs exploding for the bombardment thats keeping Paul in the shell-hole, and a plane dropping bombs. I sort of scribbled over all of that to represent a haze of everything happening at the same time. I drew Paul and the Frenchman inside the shell-hole and Paul is feeding him water from the puddle. The Frenchman is bleeding, and next to his arm is his pocket book with his name and family photos. Lastly I added a sunset behind two graves, one of which is labeled P.A.B. while the other is labeled B.A.P. The reason why I did this is to represent when Paul is talking about how nobody told them that the French are just the same as they are. I was

trying to make them a reflection of one another, like they were looking in a mirror. The sun is setting behind them because theyre dead, and directly below them, the Frenchman is dying.