The original note, as written at the time
A Red Cross parallel organisation that extols the most valiant and honourable feats among men.
Ongoing development
The medal is not the point. I want that understood before anybody thinks this is a story about a ceremony.
The point is that somebody, somewhere, has decided to keep a register of the most honourable thing a man has ever done, and to do it properly, without sentiment, the way an actuary keeps a register of the dead. It is called the Cross because the first case in the ledger was a stretcher-bearer under fire, and the name held.
We are not a charity. We are an assessment. A man writes in, or his unit writes in, or his widow writes in, and the case goes to a panel that meets in a room with no windows on the ground floor of a building that used to be a customs house. We read everything. We check everything. And then we decide whether what he did belongs in the register, and if it does, we rank it against everything else that has ever been entered.
That is the part that people find difficult. They can accept being turned down. What they cannot accept is that their husband’s act was judged and found to be the forty-first most valiant thing that year. Because ranking honour implies an arithmetic, and an arithmetic implies that somebody has worked out what honour is worth, and once that is written down, the whole idea stops being a matter of the heart and becomes a matter of the file.
But it was always a matter of the file. That is what nobody wants to admit. Every army that has ever given a medal has had a book, and every book is a ranking, and every ranking is a decision about whose death was expensive enough to be memorable.
What we did was make the book honest. We published the criteria. We published the refusals. We published the case of the man who was turned down three times and won on the fourth, and the case of the man whose act was unquestionably brave and unquestionably stupid, and who was refused — and that refusal took more argument than any award we have ever made.
The register is open to inspection. Anybody can come to the room with no windows and read it. Very few do. That is the other thing I have learned about honour: everyone wants to be in the book, and almost nobody wants to read the book.