In Flanders Fields

A Pacifist’s Defence of the Poppy

“But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,

That they should be as stones.

Wretched are they, and mean

With paucity that never was simplicity.

By choice they made themselves immune

To pity and whatever moans in man

Before the last sea and the hapless stars;

Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;

Whatever shares

The eternal reciprocity of tears.”

- Wilfred Owen, Insensibility

At age five my grandfather saw me playing soldiers. I’d picked up an old piece of appropriately-shaped wood and was going around machine-gunning imaginary foes and taking cover behind bushes, pretending I was in the army.

He took me inside, sat me down in his lap, and reached up to pull off the bookshelf above us an official-looking, red-bound history of the First World War. The pages were dense with text I was too young to read but there was a central section with photos. I’d never seen bodies on barbed wire before. Men — barely more than boys, really, for the most part — in torn uniforms with their limbs splayed, hanging by bits of flesh, and what you could make out of their ruined faces locked in a rictus of pleading agony. You couldn’t have said which side they’d fought for by looking and I couldn’t understand the annotation below informing the reader. All I knew was that that was what I’d been playing at. What battle truly looked like. And what the cost of treating war as a game, of seeing it as a glorious adventure, could be.

I’ve never forgotten those old photos. I can’t remember what he said; I’m not sure he needed to say anything. A picture can be worth a thousand words, or twenty million corpses.

I stopped playing soldiers after that.

Later, I learned the full extent of the madness. Of mud and blood and mustard gas and melted lungs and rats. Of the tragedy of the generals who didn’t give a damn. And of those who did. The senseless slaughter and stupidity — at the Somme, at Passchendaele, at Ypres and Mons and the Marne and eighteen battles of the Isonzo River. Of white feathers and Kitchener and “the Red Pantaloons are France” (the French began the war sporting nearly Napoleonic uniforms with bright red pantaloons, marching in columns straight towards machine guns). How no one who fought had the faintest idea of how bad it could or would get, to start with, or what would be lost.

After a century of comparatively small-scale warfare within Europe, using war as a means to both redraw borders and define national identities, it was seen as honorable, glorious. Plus all your mates were signing up and all the news said the enemy were nun-murdering monsters. What kind of friend, what kind of coward, would you be if you didn’t join them for King (or Kaiser) and country? There’d be medals and camaraderie, and all the girls loved a man in uniform! Anyway, it’d be a lark, and the posters and recruiting Sergeant promised it’d be over by Christmas. There and back again in a few months.

Four years later, the world which told those old lies was gone. The war touched everyone and everything; places where not a shot had been fired were never the same. Over half of all combatants were wounded or killed, and those who survived the horrific injuries novel weaponry like machine guns, gas, flamethrowers, tanks, or mills-bombs could inflict often required entirely new medical technologies, treatments, and whole fields of medicine (modern plastic surgery was born during World War One). Everyone talks about the gas but the biggest killer in the war was artillery. It killed and maimed with huge chunks of metal from the casings that could do terrible damage to anyone unlucky enough to be caught in the blast. Men came back from the front with half their faces gone. They had to wear masks with their old ones on. Artists did heroic work making prosthetics just so they could leave the house.

Then there were the injuries no one could see. Shellshock was the term the British gave the reaction many soldiers had to the experience of trench warfare. The modern equivalent would be PTSD. But I’m not sure the acronym quite covers it. Because almost everyone who saw combat in that war (and many who didn’t, too, because millions of civilians died or were displaced by the events unfolding around them) came away with trauma we’d call by that name. Shellshock was the term for when it got so bad you couldn’t fight anymore and broke down entirely — when you started screaming and couldn’t stop. Under the stress of a days- or weeks-long artillery barrage, or seeing friends and comrades blown and hacked to bits in some pointless trench-raid to “keep morale up”, or some other hell no human should ever have to live through. All while sitting in a cold, wet hole in the ground with the rats and the stench of rotting dead, waiting for the shell or rifle round which would send you down to join them.

Soldiers on all sides were reduced to paralysed, gibbering wrecks. No one had seen the like before, certainly not on this scale. The most experience humanity had had with this kind of injury was the trauma caused by mass-casualty railway accidents, and that was still relatively new even in 1914. Every army reacted differently, but most didn’t do particularly well, certainly not to begin with. The French simply shot you “pour encourager les autres”. The British and Germans did alright, for the time, eventually. As it became clear that it was more than a simple morale issue. But throughout the war, no one in command really understood the nature or full extent of the problem. Even the soldiers who didn’t end up in hospital with officially-diagnosed shellshock never came home whole. How could they have?

By 1918, most of the empires which had started the war were in ruins. As was most of Europe and large swathes of Africa, the Middle and Near-East, Asia, and the entire global economy. The Great Powers which survived found themselves over-extended and grappling with the ending of a world they’d helped destroy. Genocide and ethnic cleansing had become not only a tacitly accepted way to “deal” with peoples their rulers — usually in the colonies, so those at the centre of the empires didn’t have to get their hands dirty or hear about it — wanted removed, but a key tool of nationalism and part of international law as of 1920 (at the Treaty of Lausanne, ending the Greco-Turkish War).

The conflict didn’t quite end with the Armistice in 1918. In many parts of the world it continued, especially in Eastern and Central Europe, where anyone having to deal with the Russian Civil War or the various border- and civil-wars newborn nations and shortlived city-states were engaged in was in for years more of misery. But the sound of constant thunder on the Western Front stilled and the Great Powers laid down their arms, at least.

Soldiers who’d made it through shot and shell started coming home, looking for a measure of peace. And out of the churned charnel of the blasted landscape where so many of them had fought and bled sprang flowers — poppies, whole beds waving row on row, as if to mark the places their brothers, friends, and comrades fell.

Poppies are hardy flowers. Survivors. Blood-red, they grow best in soil that’s been disturbed and overturned, and can flourish where other plants won’t. After four years of bodies and barbed wire ugliness in sand and chalk and rain, the daily gore and hatred, fear and dread, the sudden outpouring of beauty right where it all happened must have seemed a miracle. A way for nature to mourn the lost; and a reminder of just how much the tentative calm in which they bloomed had cost. So the ones who’d survived made paper copies and pinned them to their chests to remember the day the guns went silent in the West rather than silencing their best friend. They were and remain a symbol of peace, of new life and hope from beneath the earth to mark the end of suffering. And the world needed that very badly in 1918.

For even before the conflict ended there came the ‘flu. The pandemic which dovetailed that disaster not only resulted directly from and was worsened by the World War (mustard gas is a potent mutagen), it killed as many if not more people than the war itself. Another twenty million between 1918 and 1920 atop the lives the previous four years had taken. By the time 1921 rolled around, over forty million people had perished in five years. There was practically no one on earth who hadn’t lost someone to one or the other. Nowhere was safe. The pandemic wiped out isolated Indigenous communities who’d barely heard there was a war on.

My grandfather was born into that world. He grew up with an army of widows still in their twenties and thirties that never stopped mourning the loves of their lives who hadn’t come home. Beside men by the millions who carried the weight of having seen and done things no human being should ever have to, with no idea of how to cope, finding solace any way they could. And very often failing tragically. A world which had been undone.

Then he witnessed what valiant attempts they’d made to repair and rebuild fail as tragically as any of the poor souls who couldn’t find peace after the trenches — a World War even more staggering in its barbarity and the scale of horror unleashed upon humanity by the rolling echoes of the last. You can still hear them, faintly, if you turn on the news. In Syria, Yemen, in Israel, in North Korea, and in many other places across the world, the legacy of the First World War is still very much with us. We live in its shadow a century later. Hence my being shown those pictures at age five.

For my part, I’ve felt it all my life. In every school I ever attended, every train station, every town down to the smallest village there sit plaques and stand stone memorials with lists of names of the dead. It’s everywhere, and you can’t help but read them when you walk by. My old prep school (close to Sandhurst, the British Army’s officer training academy) had photos up of the boys who’d graduated, and until just after the First World War they were all in uniform. I knew at age 11 that the ones with shining brass buttons had died pointlessly and awfully, in shellholes crying for their mothers. And had I been born a century earlier, I’d have likely joined them face-down in the mud. British officers wore distinctive trousers too, and were prime targets for snipers. (And I’m 6’5”, and clumsy. Not exactly cut out for trench warfare. So.)

There were only a few villages which didn’t lose anyone to the First World War. And only the two that didn’t in the Second. 5% of the island’s total population became battle casualties in the former. Even the tiny hamlet of 114 people where I was mostly raised had a memorial with a dozen or so names. It hits home wherever you live, and you can’t escape it no matter how hard you try.

It is a quiet ache, a grief felt in the bones, in the landscape. Not only for the needless murder in the trenches of Europe and across the globe, but the world that generation might have made if so many hadn’t died. Because the ones who survived tried their damndest anyway, though they didn’t stand a chance. There’d been too much damage. Too much trauma. Too much death. Too much destruction and hatred and propaganda for there not to be another war, or several. For the cycle of neighbour turning on neighbour after centuries of coexistence not to continue, which it has to this day in some places. But they did their best.

“Lest we forget” is a promise. Not of some nationalistic revenge fantasy or a “never forget 9/11”-style method of retraumatizing people into compliance with authority. But as a vow never to forget the lessons of the First World War — none of which include jingoistic flag-waving. To find a way to build a world worth losing all but one of your friends, as men like JRR Tolkein did. That what they’d been through wouldn’t happen to the next generation. And although those who originally made it could never keep it, it’s symbolised by a red scrap of paper worn on the chest.

That little piece of paper on a pin has been in the middle of a tug of war ever since it was first adopted as a symbol of remembrance in 1919. Militarists and nationalists, as they do with every single attempt at remembering the dead, immediately tried to appropriate it to their own ends with much the same tactics their modern inheritors are using.

As a pacifist for whom it represents the antithesis of those poisonous ideologies, this is infuriating, to say the least. By insisting others not only wear it but cater to their own, warped, wounded, shallow sense of national pride and post-imperialist pique, those doing so demean and dishonour the memory of every single person listed on every war memorial in Britain, and everywhere else anyone died to move some general’s drinks cabinet six inches closer to Berlin. Every civilian killed, every soldier known and unknown whose death left a hole in the world, in someone’s heart that was never filled.

There are few things which make me see red faster. Not only misappropriation of important symbols and history like this, but others who should be fighting back simply lying down and accepting it now. Or playing into it by assuming anyone wearing a poppy is doing so to espouse the very opposite of what they truly represent.

Because that vow so many made a century ago mattered. And still does. Deeply. I wear the poppy as a talisman of grief keenly felt, and a sign of the same promise to strive for a world without war even if you know it’s not possible. To the next generation, and the next, and every one after. Nor will I ever forget the lessons my grandfather taught me, or stop fighting tooth and nail for a kinder tomorrow. But at the end of the day, my feelings on this don’t matter.

Nothing anyone says or does can change the power of what happened in the mud after the guns went quiet. Whatever the fascist talking heads bleat, or the brutes and bullies in the street, the poppies which blossomed in that blood-soaked soil from the bones of the unknown dead will stand silently as a symbol of peace — of remembrance and hope — for as long as there are flowers.