PROS AND CONS

Now it's hot, it's even very hot, and the meteorologists are coldly announcing to us (so to speak) that tomorrow's heat could be even stronger than today's.

It must be said that in such a season we should have expected a slight increase in the thermometer. In our regions, the month of July has always been a summer month. Summer has always been considered to be the hottest of the four seasons.

As it is hot today, as it is the weather that it should normally be in mid-July, we will suddenly be afraid that the soldiers will be too hot tomorrow at the parade on July 14... We will suddenly thinking that they might find themselves very uncomfortable in full sun, dressed in wool, loaded with all the military equipment. We will pity them and we will, in high places, “fear” sunstroke. We will perhaps even deliberate, discuss and reflect. We will perhaps even, now that we have brought in certain troops from outside who are to take part in the Parisian parade, now that we have incurred certain expenses, we will perhaps have the idea of ​​suppressing the review. (I am considering all the hypotheses…)

In any case, there will be mistakes. Our troops will be unnecessarily exposed to heavy fatigue if the review takes place. If the review does not take place, there will be unnecessary oddities, annoying counter-orders, unnecessary inconveniences and lost money...

The military and civil authorities should agree to one day benefit from the lesson that each year July 14 brings them... Every year it is hot on July 14. Every year we realize that it is a very poorly chosen time to conduct a review and to plant the entire French army in full sunlight... It is quite certain that it was on July 14 that our ancestors took the Bastille... But that's no reason to make all the French people get sunburned every July 14, until the end of the world...

Should we therefore delete the July 14 review?.... Yes! In my opinion, it makes sense that on July 14, the magazine must be suppressed... But for this reason, the magazine must not be suppressed. We must not deprive Parisians, nor provincials, nor even soldiers, of this national and moving spectacle...

We must decide, quite simply, that from now on our great annual review will take place on a date which is, like July 14, a historic and glorious date: November 11...

Everyone will then be happy and our soldiers will not risk falling, exhausted and scarlet, under the furious blows of Phoebus... Phoebus only gets angry, among us, in the summer...

Maurice PRAX.