Alphonse Karr: We worship military glory

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

French writers on war and peace

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Alphonse Karr
A Tour Round My Garden

We worship glory, particularly military glory, which consists in killing without hating, without a motive, the greatest possible number of men born under another sky, and that under such singular conditions, that if tomorrow this country yields, after having been sufficiently ravaged, it becomes a crime punishable by law, by honor and by universal contempt, to kill a single one of its inhabitants whom it was so glorious to massacre yesterday.

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…they kill one another without knowing why, as military men, and under the pretext of glory; they ruin one another, they imprison one another, they deprive one another of bread, air, liberty, &c. From these observations, and a thousand others that could be made, it appears that if they no longer eat each other, it is not from any feeling of charity or neighborly love, but simply because it is now acknowledged and established that man is a food, more than mediocre, hard to digest, and of a disagreeable flavor.

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The men are proud of one or two cloves which they are allowed to wear on account of their great actions. We laugh heartily at this, we Europeans do. Cloves! – to have their arms and their legs broken for two or three cloves! – Really, savages are droll creatures! Well now, we, when we expose ourselves to fire and sword, we know what we are about, we who are white, we who are enlightened and civilized. Well! let them offer us cloves, would they be well received! No, no, we are allowed to wear in a button-hole of our coat a little bit of red riband; at a later period, perhaps, we may tie it in a rosette, but everybody does not attain that honor.

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I am this day forty years old: I have seen two political revolutions; and I shall see at least another. After I have seen the third it is probable I shall say exactly as I said after the other two: “Abuses are not attacked for the purpose of removing them, but of conquering them. The more frequently things change, the more they continue to be the same things.”