The madness of war is finally fully reflected in the madness of a man.
His mind finds correlations where they do not exist while it keeps getting less rational, all the way to the end of the novel where his mind simply breaks (even if some people may read these last chapters differently). People start to be afraid of him, even if he does not understand why (or is not ready to admit it). While he narrates the story in the trenches, he also gives us the backstory - the small Senegalese village, the easy life before the war. Alfa narrates the story and as the novel progresses, he is less and less believable, we can see his mind unraveling from grief and guilt. So he decides to pay for it, redeeming his humanity - by killing people from the other side and taking their hands. The reason for refusal was humanity - he cannot kill a friend but as soon as Mademba is dead, Alfa's brain flips over and he realizes that his ideas of humanity had been flawed. Alfa is haunted by that death - he found his friend still alive friend and refused to kill him, to spare him the suffering from dying in pain. He does not join alone - his best friend, Mademba Diop, is there with him - until the day when Mademba dies. Alfa Ndiaye is from a small village in Senegal and does not speak a word of French but still decided to join the war - because then he can come back and be an important man in a nearby town. What people may not always remember is that the big colonial empires are still out there and the men in those trenches were not just the youngsters of Europe. When talking about WWI, most people think of the trenches and all the lives lost in the years of the conflict.
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