Contumeliosa Est…
I’m not wearing a poppy this year.
In fact, I haven’t worn one for a couple of years, now, but this has gone from a kind of slipshod forgetting-but-intending, to a discomfort with the process, to an overt distaste for the poppy and what it has come to represent.
At the centenary of the close of the Great War that initiated the poppy as a symbol, my failure to pin a paper flower to my lapel will see me accused by the self-righteous of failing to remember. I don’t remember, according to prevailing wisdom, the sacrifices made by the brave soldiers of the first world war.
First, the obvious: of course I don’t remember. We’re talking about events that took place before my grandfather was born. But if the accusation is that I’m oblivious to history, I beg to differ.
I’m acutely aware, for example, that British sentiment in 1914 was very much against joining the war. Wars are expensive and becoming part of one would, according to the prevailing logic, be bad for business. The Empire was turning a handsome profit, why waste it on conflict?
Then the Germans invaded Belgium, and Britain was obligated by treaty to intervene.
This is the same Belgium that is now the headquarters of the European Union, an entity which the old people and red-top tabloids who admonish non-poppy-wearers are frothingly hostile to. How dare people not respect the history of a war we joined to protect Anglo-Belgian relations?! Also, how dare people be in favour of Anglo-Belgian relations at any other point in time?!
Still, the reasons WHY Britain entered the war (to join Belgium in solidarity and try to promote European unity) shouldn’t matter — people sacrificed their lives.
Except, of course, they didn’t. Here’s a fun fact: Nobody in the history of war has joined the armed forces in an attempt to lay down their life. The British army at the start of the war, although small (we have traditionally been a naval power) had enormous experience with slaughtering people all over the world, usually in one-sided “machine gun vs. spear” battles in theatres that frequently served as combination tanning salons and shooting galleries. Britain was supremely confident in her army.
The French, meanwhile, were an historically formidable power who had proved enormously capable in the last major European conflicts under Napolean, a hundred years beforehand. France was supremely confident in her army.
The Germans had spent decades building up and arming what was then the most modern — and largest — land force in the world. Germany was supremely confident in her army.
Russia was such a vast nation with such enormous resources — mineral and human — that nobody would dream of attempting to stand against her. Russia was supremely confident in her army.
Belgium wasn’t expected to fight at all, and the Americans, when they finally arrived, assumed that the Europeans just hadn’t been throwing enough men at the enemy guns and proceeded to do so with supreme confidence.
All of these elements mean that young men rushed to recruiting stations to play a part in a war that their side couldn’t possibly lose, regardless of which side it was. Not a single one of them went out in an attempt to “sacrifice” anything. Everybody involved was lied to, reassured that they would be involved in a fun adventure and be home for Christmas with some exciting stories and a couple of medals.
If you’d told any of the young men at recruiting stations that they would die horribly, but that one day that screaming, agonised death would be used as an excuse for people to argue with one another under the banner of free speech, then it’s insulting to conclude that they wouldn’t have had the common sense to drop out of the recruiting line and go home.
If I know my history and I don’t believe anybody “laid down their life”, then I must surely, at least, respect the troops who died. And I do. I respect them too much to join in any of the patriotic whitewashing that increases every year.
You literally cannot imagine the horror of a first world war trench. We are taught in schools that the trenches were unpleasant, but aside from being told that they were wet and uncomfortable, the details are left out so as not to frighten the kids, when what we should really do is scare the kids shitless so that the concept of war begins to have some weight again.
Trenches at the front were dug hurriedly in the middle of the kind of mechanised slaughter the world had never experienced before. This means that the trenches were full of bodies. Not just that there were bodies in the trenches, but that the trenches were made of bodies. People who died and fell back into the trench had to be buried in the floor. If the trench had to be made deeper at a later date, this meant digging through them. Corpses were strewn at the top edge of trenches, as sticking your head above the lip to retrieve a body was a good way of getting shot. This meant that if shells exploded near the trench, it would rain pieces of rotting body. Between the thousands of decaying corpses and the lack of sanitation, the front line could be smelled from miles away.
It could be heard even further. Imagine a loud explosion of the kind a bomb would make, and then imagine it raining bombs, ceaselessly, day after day, until the air became what Ernst Junger described as a “storm of steel,” poking your head into which would see you killed and buried in the trench along with the others.
The shells themselves didn’t leave the craters you imagine — shallow, tea-saucer shaped indentations perhaps ten feet across — but enormous depressions in the earth, some of them twenty feet deep, which would then fill with rain and more corpses and chemicals from poison gas. Falling into these craters meant drowning in an acid soup of offal and human waste.
These days, World War One memorials are sober and dignified affairs, with perhaps the silhouette of a lone soldier leaning pensively on a rifle, or the ubiquitous poppy flower. These are no fitting monument to the horror and madness of a war which in which to serve, psychologists now agree, would have meant the shattering of any human mind in enough time. Symbols of the war are sanitised political points now.
Perhaps most galling, remembrance campaigns seem to want us to mourn the war dead as victims of unfortunate circumstance. To treat the war as something that just happened. No blame is ever apportioned. No mention is made of the fact that the whole terrible ordeal was ultimately the result of a family spat between the ruling classes — that one of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren was picked on by the others and that, because each grew to inherit a country, this resentment festered until it took the lives of millions. Millions who died having been duped into their position by government propaganda, and who were lauded once they were in their caskets — or simply obliterated and lost forever — for having “done their duty.”
Even today, Prime Minister Theresa May praised the war dead for being “staunch until the end,” which is an insulting idea when the failure to be “staunch” would see a soldier executed by his own commanders. The choice to risk death on the battlefield or guarantee it by refusing to fight isn’t about being “staunch”; it’s a desperate attempt to survive — to, again, not “sacrifice” one’s life.
The ruling classes, who led Britain into the war through deceit, who continued it through obstinacy and who now offer up platitudes to the memory of its victims are the same people who encourage the wearing of poppies, so that we the people “never forget.” The British army, often led by the same aristocracy which led it a hundred years ago, pay lip service to their dead but noticeably don’t stop recruiting young men and women, nor do they refuse to fight other pointless conflicts at the behest of government.
The poppy itself can even be read as an insulting metaphor. Poppies grew on the battlefields of World War One, but today the symbolism seems to be that there can come beauty from such horror. “See? It’s alright! It was awful and millions died but there are flowers now…”
The poppy isn’t a symbol of remembrance. It’s a symbol of a very convenient form of forgetting — of forgetting how terrible war is and forgetting who was to blame for such horrors.
A better image to wear on your lapel would be a soldier with his legs blown off, slowly drowning, terrified, in his own blood as mustard gas strips the lining from his lungs and a member of the aristocracy watches approvingly from a safe distance before signing up another teenager to the same fate.
But it is, I admit, hard to fit all that on the one badge.