Red for a reason

We are a few days away from Remembrance Sunday and Armistice Day. On Saturday we got our poppies from a Royal British Legion collector in Ealing and slotted them in where we could. I have seen them on people I would not have expected to have been wearing them. I have worn one every year since childhood, my mother expected it of me and as I grew older if I hadn’t already bought one myself she would provide it. When the words “Haig Fund” disappeared from the centre I noticed it. If I ended up with one that had a leaf as well as a flower I felt a little smug. For years I’ve wondered why they didn’t make ones with pins.

Papaver rhoeas, the cornfield poppy, grows easily in the disturbed ground of battlefields and it was a common sight to those who took part in the First World War. A Canadian surgeon called John McRae immortalised the image of silky blood red flowers amongst the crosses that, in 1915, were already marking the first of millions of graves in his poem “In Flanders Fields“. Many still lie where they fell, waiting to be discovered by the turn of the plough.

Red poppies were eventually sold as fundraisers by the British Legion which was founded within three years of the end of the Great War to act as a voice for ex-servicemen (it became the Royal British Legion in 1971 following the granting of a Royal Charter). White poppies were first sold in 1933 by the Co-operative Women’s Guild who wanted to support the many disabled veterans and prevent further wars. They are now provided by the Peace Pledge Union.

Over the years I have seen a few white poppies worn by old soldiers in the parade past the Cenotaph in Whitehall but the vast majority wear red ones. I haven’t taken much notice of white poppies or those who wear them until now but they were brought to my attention by someone on Facebook who was encouraging members to join the White Poppy group that has been set up on the site. I followed the link to the official website and ended up feeling quite angry as a consequence. It wasn’t just that they had used the image and story of Harry Patch, the last remaining WW1 veteran, to promote their cause.

I object to the assumption that seems to have been made by some white poppy wearers that those who wear a red one are absolutely in favour of war. If a similar, negative generalisation was made about those who promote the white one there would be an outcry from the media savvy anti-war movement. Old soldiers are usually the first to tell you that war is a terrible thing. They don’t need lessons from a generation saved from conscription by a standing army made up of volunteers.

These volunteers sometimes do what they are ordered to even though they do not have much faith in the politicians who send them to war. They go back into the theatre of operations in spite of a lack of adequate equipment and their own fears. It is the efforts of people like this that has made it possible for others to talk about and live in peace. They don’t just go to kill - they build essential bridges, repair schools and hospitals, train police forces and armies. Sometimes they do it in their free time because they want to help, encouraging their friends and families back home to fundraise for that cause. The five British soldiers whose deaths were announced today died alongside two of the Afghan policemen they were mentoring. They were doing something positive.

On its Facebook page the White Poppy group states that “The White Poppy symbolises the belief that there are better ways to resolve conflicts than killing strangers.” The Peace Pledge Union believes that the solution to situations such as Afghanistan is a UN force. Try telling that to the British soldiers who, under the auspices of the UN, tried and failed to protect people on all sides of the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. Hamstrung by their mandate, they and forces from other countries were obliged to stand back and watch while men, women and children were herded away to their deaths in places whose names have become as familiar to us as the battlefields of the Somme and Ypres were to those fighting in World War One. I’d love to see how those who regard the UN as the cure for all ills would cope with the nightmares that these people still get because they were not allowed to use force.

To make those blue helmets as effective as they should be you first have to sort out the lumbering apparatus that is the UN and that will take some doing. In the meantime are we expected to stand back and watch as another Rwanda, another Bosnia, another Somalia starts up because conflict is a terrible thing? It makes me wonder if those who are against war at any cost have a genuine understanding of the sort of people our forces are up against. How do you reason with those prepared to cut off the purple stained fingers of voters in Afghanistan? How do you talk to men who behead foreign workers because they wanted to feed their families?

Apart from that, I don’t think the efforts of “peacemakers” are always welcomed by those they are trying to help. Live rolling news allowed millions of viewers to see a crude banner made from a painted sheet held up by Iraqis following the fall of Baghdad to US forces. The hotel they were standing in had been a temporary home to foreign peace activists who were hoping to put off air raids. Judging by what it said on the banner the Iraqis they were standing shoulder to shoulder with were pleased to see them go and the cavalry arrive. One of the words rhymed with “bankers”. In 2005 four men, including Norman Kember were kidnapped in Iraq. One of them was shot dead but the rest were eventually rescued by British special forces who had spent weeks looking for them. All those resources used up on peacemakers who should not have put themselves in danger.

I accept that in a democracy we have the right to express an opinion as long as it does not deliberately inspire hate and violence. If a veteran chooses to wear a white poppy I have even more respect for him because he has made his choice based on genuine experience. However those who wear red ones have the right to take pride in their achievements and if that means parading with brass bands then so be it. The guns carried in these parades are for the defence of our country as much as they are for war abroad and I take pride in the men and women who carry them. If it ever became necessary for me to pick up one of those guns myself I hope that I would be able acquit myself as well as they do.

What many of my contemporaries forget or have never learned, cushioned as they are from reality by the freedom made for them from war, is that the true soldier loves peace but it isn’t always an option.

http://www.poppy.org.uk
http://www.poppyscotland.org.uk/
http://www.whitepoppy.org.uk/
http://www.greatwar.co.uk/poems/john-mccrae-in-flanders-fields.htm/
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/ceriradford/3641401/Stop_the_crusades/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4844800.stm