The Blood Drop Overused
By Roger LAFAGETTE

Have you been decorated with the Legion of Honor? No? You are a clumsy person, because I know that it would please you. Why? Ah! That, for example, I wonder!
But that is your business. So I will tell you the ways to obtain the red ribbon. And, note well that I tell you them for free. Not everyone, it seems, can say the same.
These ways are very diverse. The least certain is to distinguish oneself by some merit, and, for example, to have been a hero during the war. It is better to have been an officer. Because all officers, automatically, have had the cross. As for the men of the army, if they have left, on the battlefield, an arm and a leg, they can seek the military medal. We must make a distinction between social classes, otherwise our democratic republic would no longer be able to recognize itself. It is therefore admitted, by unanimous consent, that, among combatants, the Legion of Honor is reserved for officers. It is therefore, in this respect, a caste decoration. Exceptions have been tolerated only for the war blind. That was the least we could do. So that if you meet two veterans in civilian clothes, one of whom has the Legion of Honor, the other the War Cross or nothing at all, simply conclude, not that one was more courageous than the other, but that the first was an officer, the second a simple soldier. That is a fact. Everyone finds that natural. Let us do as everyone else does. Besides, this is still nothing. Let us move on to the Legion of Honor granted to the civilian title.

Only one indispensable condition, you must have high connections in the world of politics. For that, believe me: try to acquire electoral influence. Start from this point of view, which is absolutely true and that basically no one doubts whether you are a civil servant, industrialist, mayor, lawyer, man of letters, your professional value is never more than a pretext. Never, by itself, will it get you decorated. It is even, if necessary, superfluous. It is a question, for the minister, of choosing, not between the candidates, but their protectors. Balance of influences. Decorations are never more than a means of government and are only obtained by political recommendations. This is also a fact, and I can do nothing about it. They therefore measure, only, the number and the value of your relations.
And that is, without doubt, what makes their prestige. To be decorated is to say to each passer-by that one meets: "You see, I am more powerful than you! I have friends in high places. I am from the ruling caste! »
Now, being from the ruling caste, that's all there is to a democracy, whose morals must react against the institutions to reestablish the balance!
And yet I am only talking about decorations honestly obtained. There are others, it is said.

From then on, these "distinctions" no longer correspond to anything avowable. We are truly surprised that serious citizens, who nevertheless know what the yardstick is worth, continue to give them a value. They only serve to affirm the arbitrariness of public power, and to corrupt men, by flattering their childishness and their vanity.
I know, deep in the province, old civil servants, magistrates, professors, directors of administration, high school principals, and also writers and scholars who are completing a long life of conscientious and useful work. They hoped that so much work and dedication to public affairs would earn them, late in life, some gratitude. They would have liked the red ribbon before they died. They worked, worked, used up their intelligence and their strength, and are finally retiring. They are still waiting for this decoration which would testify to a whole. laborious existence and would attract some consideration on their last days as an old beast put aside.
But a whole existence is not enough. It would really be too convenient! We do not cheapen the Legion of Honor like this! We need something else! What do we need? I will tell you:

You have to be attached, for eight days, to the office of a minister. It is enough to be a young elegant man, with access to the antechambers. You have to be the servant of an Excellency.
One day of course, I speak to you of a long time ago, it was noticed that one of the new ministers had a chief of staff whose buttonhole was blank. What a scandal! Dare dare, they made a special promotion for him. Before being chief of staff, he was a common gentleman, like you and me. Two days later, the chance of his relations having made him the cotton carrier of a minister, it did not take more to deserve national recognition. To him the cross of the brave! The old head of department will wait, in the depths of his province. He will wait until his death. Fifty years of a brilliantly fulfilled career do not count. But the cabinet attachés, the greenhorns of the central administration, display their ribbon in fashionable dance halls. And to think that during the war there were so many brave people who gave their blood, their limbs, their lives, who suffered death a thousand times, a little in the hope of winning this piece of bloody cloth! How do the poilus allow such a derisory assimilation and thus allow these dandies and their protectors to desecrate the memory of the comrades who have forever remained there, motionless and twisted?

Roger Lafagette.