War & Peace Quote by Louis-Ferdinand Celine

Celine drags “heroism” out of the mud of lived experience and pins it to the wall as a sales pitch. Calling it “poetry” is the tell: he’s not praising elevated language, he’s indicting it. Heroism, in this framing, is less an ethical category than an aesthetic one - a set of pleasing images and rhythms that make slaughter feel noble, coherent, even beautiful. The line lands because it flips the usual moral ladder. The “irresistible” audience isn’t the soldier; it’s the spectator.

Then he sharpens the target: those “who don’t go to a war” are already susceptible to the romance, but the real connoisseurs are the profiteers, the ones “the war is making enormously wealthy.” Celine’s cynicism isn’t just anti-patriotic; it’s anti-sentimental. The subtext is that heroic rhetoric is a laundering mechanism: it sanitizes violence so the home front can keep applauding and the well-connected can keep billing. The beauty of the phrase “poetry of heroism” is that it captures how propaganda works at the level of taste, not argument - you don’t debate it, you swoon.

Context matters. Celine was a World War I veteran who wrote with a wounded, corrosive mistrust of institutions and pieties; his work often treats official language as a kind of weapon. “It’s always so” lands like a shrug and a verdict: not a discovery, a pattern. The line’s intent is to puncture the moral glamour around war by tracing its supply chain - from metaphor to money.