350. Lest We Forget

Remembrance Poppy

My maternal grandfather was a proud man who refused to wear a tie or to bow to anybody or anything. But Mum said that he made one exception, at 11:11 am every Armistice Day, when he stood stiffly to attention—as did everyone else in the room, or woe betide them—during the minute of silence on the radio in honour of all who lost their lives in the First World War.

My uncle Ted told me that Granddad signed up with his younger brother at the start of the War. The pressure to enlist was enormous, and there was no work for them in England, so off they went to France. Granddad made it through with only a knee injury that sent him to a hospital in Wales for a short period of recovery and then back to the front, where he was transferred from the King’s Royal Rifle Corps Regiment to a “cushy” job in the Royal Army Medical Corps, retrieving the wounded and the dead from the field of battle. He served to the very end and came home in one piece, but his brother wasn’t so lucky. He was killed in the very last month of the war, and the family has never found his grave.

The demobilized soldiers were promised “a land fit for heroes,” but the reality back home was very different. During the four years of the war our grandmother had given birth to three children and buried two of them. Life was bleak for the young couple, with more children being born and no work to be found. Granddad faced a Catch-22 whereby he couldn’t receive unemployment because he had not lost a job; apparently the war didn’t count. As a small boy, Uncle Ted remembers queuing up with his father for food relief and coming away with a single loaf of bread to feed the whole family.

Although Granddad himself remained staunchly patriotic and proud of his military service, Uncle Ted is sad and bitter on his behalf. He blames the diplomats who failed to secure a negotiated peace, the generals who sent soldiers to certain slaughter, and the politicians who allowed the war to drag on for years, long after anyone remembered what it was all in aid of—if they ever had.

It was in my childhood that I first wore a poppy on Remembrance Day in remembrance of the dead of the “Great War”—the war in which there was hardly a family in Britain who didn’t lose someone. But this year the controversy surrounding that simple emblem has left a bad taste in my mouth. Right-wing anti-immigrant parties have attempted to appropriate the remembrance poppy and its meaning. It was always sold by the Royal British Legion in aid of the WWI veterans; now, however, there are hardly any of them left and apparently groups like Britain First have been selling the poppy as well; I wonder what they do with the money.

I am not living in Britain, but the controversy reaches me over Facebook, where I have been seeing aggressive posts telling those who disrespect the poppy to Go Home. After a little research into the subject, I find that the so-called disrespecters are straw men: that is, no one has shown disrespect to the poppy and what it stands for; these groups are creating a false enemy in order to fan the flames of hate. It would be well for these haters to remember that among the many men who fought and died in the First World War were nearly two million British colonial subjects, Indians and Africans who were aggressively recruited, with promises of land and freedom upon their return. For those who did return, the promises were not kept, fueling the movements for independence from colonial rule.

An Indian soldier wounded in WWI

So on Remembrance Day, once but no longer Poppy Day in my mind, I remember the hard lives of my grandparents and the ordinary British working people, as well as the men who gave their lives for their colonial rulers. That war was not fought for any of them. If the poppy means anything to me, it is as an emblem of the fragility and preciousness of human life and a reminder of all those who have been sacrificed to the insatiably hungry war machine.

Lest we forget.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

Chronological Table of Contents