Charles Nodier: Fruitless is the glory of battles

====

Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts

French writers on war and peace

Charles Nodier: Painful to the eyes and the heart of he who cherishes liberty

====

Charles Nodier
From Promenade from Dieppe to the Mountains of Scotland (1821)
Translated unknown

The church of St. Paul is the Pantheon of the illustrious men of the last generation, beginning with Johnson and Reynolds, of whom there are statues. Around them are monuments of a number of officers, who were killed during the last thirty years, fighting against France. Fruitless is the glory of battles, which plants a palm wherever it sinks a grave!

***

The armoury of the Tower of London is of very little importance to the traveller who has seen the arsenal of Venice, or any other great collection of instruments invented for the destruction of man. It is always, more or less, nothing but an armourer’s shop…

***

In a very industrious and very intelligent nation, the docks are the most extraordinary monument of the industry, and perhaps of the intelligence of man. They are certainly the most useful. They have this incontestible advantage over columns and pyramids which bear above the clouds the parade of our impotence and vanity. The statue of the founder of the docks is not erected at the expense of the sweat, the tears, and the blood of his countrymen…