The unnamed lieutenant, the story’s protagonist, begins the story focused on a very un-war-like task: divvying up the company’s coffee supply. The care with which he does this, almost achieving a “triumph of mathematics” before the bullet interrupts him, indicates a sense of fair-mindedness: the lieutenant is invested in doing a good job, and in being sure that the coffee ration is divided evenly (paragraph 2, sentence 3). This sense of fairness and its interruption help foreshadow the lack of fairness of fate, once he loses his arm by the end of the story.

As the story develops and the lieutenant is wounded, his character serves symbolically as a memento mori—a reminder of human mortality. The other characters around him react in varying ways, including fear (the orderly sergeant pulling away from him in paragraph 7) and with contempt (the surgeon in paragraph 18). The lieutenant himself feels a sense of awe and shame by his own status as a man wounded in war. During his interaction with the officer, who initially bandages his arm, he “[hangs] his head, feeling, in this presence, that he did not know how to be correctly wounded” (paragraph 16, sentence 8).