Why We Wear the Poppy

Sunday marks the ninety-fourth anniversary of the Armistice which ended the First World War.

The guns on the Western Front finally fell silent at eleven o’clock on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918 after four years of fighting which had claimed the lives of sixteen million and maimed a further twenty million.  This litany of digits—eleven-eleven-eleven—resonates powerfully in Britain, much as the contemporary shorthand of 9/11 does here in the United States.

And this war, like the US Civil War, profoundly changed British society, shaping what it is today perhaps more than any other event. In the 1930s the writer Arthur Mee coined the term ‘thankful village’ to describe the communities which suffered no military fatalities in the Great War; they numbered just fifty-two out of over sixteen thousand villages in the United Kingdom.

Yet just twenty-one years later, the world was again embroiled in war – one which claimed over sixty million more lives, over two and a half per cent of all mankind at the time. By the time it was over in 1945, Mee’s list of thankful villages was reduced to fourteen.

Today, some sixty nations are enmeshed in conflict.  For my own country, the poppy which grows in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, supplying ninety per cent of the world’s illicit heroin, has become a dark leitmotif of this generation’s war; an unwelcome counterpoint to the paper poppies, symbolic of those that grew between the graves in Flanders’ fields, which we in Britain wear in our button holes at this time of year in recognition of all who die as a consequence of war—men, women and children of all nations—as an emblem of sacrifice, grief and reconciliation.

On Sunday at eleven o’clock, the traffic on Trafalgar Square will stop and the old churches up and down the United Kingdom, some dating back to the Norman Conquest, will echo to services of remembrance.  In each parish across the country, the names of those men and women who have fallen over the past century in the service of the Crown will be read aloud.  We hope that the families of the 435 men and women who have died on operations in Afghanistan, whose comparatively recent anguish will be raw on this day, will nevertheless draw strength from these gatherings.

Soldiers and Marines, Airmen and Sailors will stand in solemn silence for two minutes just as the guns were hushed and will reflect on friends and comrades they have lost and the brutal consequences of man’s inhumanity to man.

Cecil Denholm-Young, an English officer fighting in 1942 at El Alamein, wrote the following lines, entitled Dead German Youth.  Their sentiment speaks eloquently for all of us who have personal experience of killing.

‘He lay there, mutilated and forlorn,

Save that his face was woundless, and his hair

Drooped forward and caressed his boyish brow.

He looked so tired, as if his life had been

Too full of pain and anguish to endure,

And like a weary child who tires of play

He lay there, waiting for decay,

I feel no anger towards you, German boy,

Whom war has driven down the path of pain.

Would God we could have met in peace

And laughed and talked with tankards full of beer,

For I would rather hear your youthful mirth

At stories which I often loved to tell

Than stand here looking down at you

So terrible, so quiet and so still.’