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

Remembering

There has been a fuss over the failure of the French administration to invite a member of the British Royal Family to the commemoration of the 65th anniversary of the D Day landings. If French commentators are to be believed Mr Sarkozy was so keen on a love-in with his new best friend, US President Oabama, that he forgot about asking along the only head of state who took a part in WW2. Mr Obabama’s intervention has meant that Prince Charles will now be attending the event. We will at least be spared the prospect of the Queen’s outfits being compared with those of the elegant clothes horse that is Madame Sarkozy. The true stars of the show are, as ever, being overlooked.

I’m not sure why the memory of a particular D Day veteran makes me well up. We were in the art gallery of the Imperial War Museum in 2004, standing in front of a painting of Arromanches, liberated on the 6th June 1944. A pensioner was standing next to us wearing his beret and medals. He had a huge smile on his face. “I was there,” he said, “Arrowmancheese!” He couldn’t pronounce the name of the place where he might have been killed but in the tradition of Tommies from Wipers to The Sandpit he had made it sound more interesting. He didn’t tell us anything else about himself and we have no idea what he did there but the thought of that encounter still moves me to tears.

I wonder whether most people understand the hurt felt over that delayed invitation by many of those marking the 65th anniversary today. The 60th anniversary of the D Day landings in Normandy was a big occasion. Everyone from the BBC to the Royal Family turned out for events in the UK and France. There seemed to be a sense that this was the last time that so many survivors of the Allied landings would be able to gather at one time, as age and ill health would now begin to take their toll. There were special events, exhibitions, television programmes, in particular there was an attempt to explain to a much younger generation the significance of the event and the role played by their grandfathers and great-grandfathers.

There must have been a time when the Second World War was something that most wanted to forget, especially those on the home front. Victory in Europe meant the removal of tape from windows because there were no more air raids, no more blackouts and nights spent in shelters. Today we make do and mend because we choose to recycle. It is hard to imagine what it was like to long for new clothes. Goodbye Utility, hello Dior. For those who had been away for years, so long in fact that their children did not recognise them, there were different things to forget. The sight of good friends blown to pieces. The fear and hunger of those who were prisoners of war. The terrible recurring memories to be endured in silence. All that misery, anger and pain buried in the work and play of “normal” life.

My great uncle, whose part in “The Great War” ended in a shell hole where he was found with a broken leg by the opposition, rarely talked about what had happened to him. He became a clergyman in the years between the wars and returned to France In 1944 as a chaplain in the Territorial Army. My limited understanding of what he went through comes from Sunday afternoons watching “The World At War” as a child. I remember craning my neck to look at the memorial to the Royal Artillery at Hyde Park Corner when we passed it on the bus because there was something sad and beautiful about those caped figures. I got to know the mock up of a WWI trench at the Imperial War Museum quite well although I have to be honest - this little girl didn’t really get it. Someone I knew loved black and white war films because they reminded her of the exciting and liberated days when she drove an ambulance during air raids. Looking back I realise that references were made constantly to those wars because they had such a profound effect on those who had lived through them but I had no real understanding of that at the time.




Living with someone who spends quite a lot of his time making models of planes, tanks and ships has left me a little more informed about WW2 but it was Northern Ireland and the Falklands that had the most impact on me. I grew up in a city that was under threat from IRA bombs so I couldn’t help but understand some of the fear. I watched the news reports from the Falklands but it took years for me to develop a real understanding of what war can do to those who engage in it. The odd thing is that it was my encounter with someone who didn’t go to the Falklands that stays in my mind.

In 1990 I got talking to an exceptionally tall man who used to hang out in the subway at South Kensington Underground Station. He clearly wasn’t a rough sleeper but he usually had a can in his hand. Eventually he told me that he had been persuaded to join the Welsh Guards by his father, which he could deal with until the Falklands came along. He had not been on the boat when it left and in the course of avoiding the MPs who had come to find him he had jumped from a window causing irreparable damage to his back. The irony was that he had to live with the guilt of avoiding the tragedy of the Sir Galahad and the Sir Tristram because he deserted whilst being on a pension for his disability. In a home of his own but marginalised by society, he felt that he had more in common with homeless alcoholics than the men he had trained with.

He isn’t the only one I have come across who had been talked into a career in the armed forces (usually by a civilian parent) at a time when becoming involved in an something other than a tour of Northern Ireland was unlikely. It was a bit of shock suddenly to find yourself being sent to war. I don’t judge them as I do not know whether I would have the courage to fight if I was told to. It means that I am all the more impressed by those who are joining up now, with a clearer knowledge of the risks they face. They can hardly have escaped the news reports and videos posted on the internet make it difficult to hide the truth. They have something that isn’t often mentioned these days, a sense of duty. I heard that word, duty, used by a member of the Royal British Legion when I stopped by at the local branch to take a photograph. It is that sense of duty that makes someone organise the sale of the poppies that fund the Legion’s work, and keep on doing it for thirty years. I hope that a sense of duty is behind the attendance by Prince Charles at the commemoration in France and any future invitations from Mr. Sarkozy.

“Their lives have ended, but dreams are not yet lost
if you remember in your laugh and song
these boys who do not sing and laughed not long.”

from “The Lost” by Herbert Corby




http://www.britishlegion.org.uk/
http://www.remembering.org.uk/ra_memorial.htm