Samuel Johnson – a hero of mine – said that every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier. There is something about wearing a uniform and putting your life on the line that appeals to men – and women – on a very fundamental level, even if we are intellectually and morally peace-loving types. So many of us, myself included, wear a poppy to honour those who have risked or given their lives, even if we disapprove of some of the wars they have fought in.
Is it right to do this? I know it is a little late to ask the question, as poppy month is passing, but I was thinking about this when I wore mine and stood for two minutes in memory of those who gave their lives in the First World War and subsequent conflicts. Prior to 1914, soldiers were a romantic but not a respectable lot and you might have admired them from afar but did not want them anywhere near your daughters (or wives). As is often pointed out, wearing a military uniform involves long periods of boredom followed by short periods of terror. When the fighting was over and the old soldiers were not much use they were often ignored and became destitute. Even today the homeless are disproportionately made up for former servicemen who could not cope once they took off the uniform and lost the routine of a life wearing it.
The money you spend on your poppy - around £50 million pounds a year in Britain - goes to service charities to help people cope with life after they can no longer fight. There are emotional scars as well as wounds and few people can begrudge a pound or two to help those who have fought even if they did so in wars that were unnecessary and even immoral. The first rule of the armed services is that you obey orders and war would be impossible if every soldier was allowed to debate the ethics of the conflicts they were involved in and the actions they were told to take.
In the First World War, after which the whole idea of poppy wearing started, millions of men did just what they were told and went over the top into the face of machine gun fire which cut them down to die in agony in the mud, many without having got near to or fired a shot at the faceless enemy. German machine gunners, incidentally, had a virtually zero chance of survival if their positions were breached – even if they put up their hands in surrender.
Field Marshall Douglas Haig is often cast as the villain of the piece, sending thousands of men to their deaths in a battlefield where obedience, class distinction and the fear of disgrace combined with an industrialised form of killing (those machine guns) combined to leave the bodies of around a million British men behind in the killing fields. Yet it is unlikely that, had Haig been replaced by AN Other general, the casualties would have been significantly different. He was simply a product of his time and regarded casualties as a necessary cost of victory. He expected his generals to produce long lists of fatalities as a sign of their commitment to achieving this victory.
Certainly Haig had little tolerance for those who might now be identified as suffering from shell shock, a concept he would not have recognised or distinguished from cowardice. Those who refused to fight or turned around in the face of almost certain death could expect little mercy from either their officers or fellow soldiers and only recently have they too been acknowledged in the war commemorations. There is still a feeling that a soft attitude to those who failed to do their duty would have made victory impossible and, what in the end is the difference between shellshock and cowardice? Fo those who overcame their fears and doubts they were essentially the same.
These are all discussions worth having but not ones you can indulge in with a poppy seller. They just want your pound (or more) in exchange for the symbol of sacrifice. Virtually everyone who has worn a uniform buys and wears a poppy in honour of their comrades and many of those, like myself, who have never come near to fighting in a war (thank God) will do so out of respect for those who have done so, partly out of a lingering Johnsonian guilt at not having been called up.
For public figures poppy wearing is virtually compulsory, so all politicians, television presenters and even footballers have them pinned to their clothing for weeks in advance of Remembrance Sunday. In order to show that I am not going to be browbeaten into wearing one, I usually leave it late and put mine on the day before Remembrance Sunday. For public figures failure - or outright refusal - to wear one risks the sort of pressure to conform which is right next door to bullying and which is itself next door to the kind of totalitarianism which we were supposed to be fighting against in the World Wars. This seems to be getting stronger the farther we are away from the actual fighting. It is a century since the First World War ended and none of the fighters are around to remember what is was like, but that does not make it easy for anyone to go poppyless in public.
Or almost anyone. The footballer Nemanja Matic, who grew up in Serbia, remembered the bombs falling near his childhood home and, knowing that it was British and American airmen who were dropping them, without putting themselves in significant danger, he chose not to have a poppy sewn into his Manchester United shirt. He explained his decision with dignity and restraint, which was very brave in its own non-violent way. I chose to wear the poppy and stand in silence in memory of those who had fought and fallen, even though I may have had reservations about what they were fighting for. Matic chose not to and was perfectly free to do so. That freedom to choose is what those soldiers were fighting and often sacrificing their lives for after all.
Edwin Lerner
My other blog is diaryofatourisguide.blogspot.com
