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Corpses wererblRBLLGBT RBL SASYour browser does not support the element. the cause. If you have ever looked at a lapel in November and wondered why the poppy is the flower pinned to it, then the answer is corpses, and chemistry. Today, the poppy is associated with Flanders fields. It shouldn’t be: the soil is too poor for them.But, from 1914 onwards, there was in the corner of that foreign field a richer dust concealed. Or, to be more precise, there were corpses: rotting, festering, fly-blown corpses, decomposing and covering the mud in a “plastering slime” as Siegfried Sassoon, a poet, wrote. The soldiers were repelled; the poppies flourished. “In Flanders fields the poppies blow,” wrote one soldier in 1915, “Between the crosses, row on row”.They still do flourish: that poem became a sensation and the poppy became a symbol of remembrance. From the end of October, poppies—sold by the Royal British Legion () to raise money for veterans and serving soldiers—start to appear. They were there in serried rows on the budget-day breasts of politicians in Parliament; they are there on the lapels of newsreaders; they are sewn into the shirts of footballers. They are on street corners and lorries and cars and coats: 30m poppies in Britain alone, in paper and plastic and metal, raising around £50m each year for the . And above all, they will be there, in cenotaphs and cemeteries on Remembrance Sunday: between the crosses, row on row of poppies.Between the crossness, too. Because this symbol of peace has become surprisingly vexed: poppies no longer just raise money but hackles. Sir Keir Starmer was criticised last month for not wearing one during a video about Islamophobia. Others have been criticised for wearing them too much (it is, say critics, ostentatious); too little (callous); or not at all (worse). There have been rows over red poppies (too bloodthirsty); pacifist white poppies (too sappy); rainbow poppies (too woke); black poppy roses (ditto). Poppy row on row. The attempts magnanimity: wearing a poppy is a “personal choice”.Nonetheless it has started to feel discomfitingly unclear what you commemorate when you pin on a poppy: the first world war? The second? The culture ones?It wasn’t always so complicated. The rise of the poppy’s symbolic status was organic and almost entirely uncontested. In the trenches, soldiers had picked poppies, painted them, pressed them. Then, in 1915, a Canadian soldier called John McCrae wrote a poem about them. His friend had just been killed; so badly blown up by a shell that he was less buried as a body than poured into sandbags. McCrae took a page from his dispatch book and started to write. “We are the dead,” he wrote. And, more marketably: “In Flanders fields the poppies blow…”. The poem was published in in 1915; a poppy fundraising campaign followed. By the 1920s, millions of poppies were being sold.The story of the poppy would seem, then, to be one of continuity. Modern remembrance services follow the same format as those a century ago; modern poppies are almost identical to the first (once they were silk-sewn; now they are made in factories, punched from paper like jam tarts from pastry). ButBritish remembrance has also changed markedly because Britain has. By the time of the 1919 service, 6m men—a third of all British males—had served in the first world war; 5.5m men served in the second. But the last veteran of the trenches, Harry Patch, died in 2009. The last Spitfire ace died in 2020; the last original member in January.If you have a remembrance day service at which no one actually remembers the wars that service chiefly commemorates then that “must change things”, says Sir Max Hastings, a historian. (The services and poppies commemorate all wars since 1914, but the two world wars hold centre stage.) To see veterans march past, silver-haired and bronze-medalled, was, says Sir Max, “a very moving sight”. It caused emotion—but also curbed it since veterans’ own response to the wars was often brisk. War, Mr Patch said, is “legalised mass murder”. A 1944 cartoon was similarly curt: it showed women queuing for rations above a caption that read: “In about 30 years’ time, people will insist on describing this as the good old days”.As indeed they do. We are in the middle of a “commemoration boom”, says Anthony King, a professor of war studies at Exeter University. Our increasingly “doctrinaire” attitude to policing poppy-wearing, he says, reflects this. Nostalgia—proud, and often pernicious—is flourishing in British politics. “This is Magna Carta,” said Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, an old-fashioned Tory, of Brexit. “It’s Waterloo! It’s Agincourt! It’s Crécy!” Boris Johnson cast himself as “a Churchillian hero, standing alone on this plucky underdog island,” says Hannah Woods, author of “Rule, Nostalgia”.That the poppy has been co-opted into this is not surprising. The past lies in the hands of the present; all history is “contemporary history” as the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce said. All historical symbols are, too. “The precise meaning of a symbol can change over time,” says Steven Pinker, a psycholinguist at Harvard University, leaving people “uncertain”.The world wars are not pure history yet; some veterans still survive. But when they go that link will be broken. Like Waterloo or Trafalgar the conflicts of the 20th century will become the pure past. And the meaning of the poppy will change once again. “We are the dead,” McCrae wrote. Now they almost all are.
