It is this time of year I start to see the shock of red poppies. What does the red poppy represent? What does Remembrance represent? As a kid growing up I was very aware of this particular day, the living room wall would be festooned with bright red poppies combined with the other military regalia. And pride of place was the medal my brother received for ‘bravery’ for service in the north of Ireland. Remembrance Day was a big deal in my house, and when I was a kid I wore my red poppy with pride.
But as time went on and I grew up, my political consciousness kicked in and I started to question Remembrance Day and the symbolism of the red poppy. I used to become transfixed by my brother’s war medal hanging on the wall where the in-laws and relatives would gawp at with national pride. Eventually I exclaimed, ‘How much blood is on that medal’? I think my mother thought I was being literal in that statement but once she understood what I meant it culminated in her shouting and lecturing me about the importance of what my brother did. I refused to wear the red poppy as it symbolised imperialism and colonialism; past, present and future wars. Selective remembrance based on the establishment’s terms. Elected war criminals standing at the Cenotaph representing jingoism and “our boys” mentality.
During those years living at home I started to wear a white poppy but I became dissatisfied with that. At this time of year I don’t wear any poppy of any kind. As I wrote last year around this time:
The glorification of war symbolic with the red poppy. Who are we remembering? Working class young people sent off to do the bidding of imperialism and ending up as canon fodder? War can shape political ideas, WW1 certainly shaped the political consciousness of my grandfather who realised he had been sold a lie and had been fighting a futile war where thousands died on the battlefields.
What about the victims of imperialism and colonialism? From Aden, Mau-Mau uprising, Korea, Vietnam, Ireland, Malvinas, Chile, East Timor, Afghanistan and Iraq…. and so on and so on? What about the war crimes committed in Fallujah, Haditha, Bloody Sunday…and so on and so on?
And with Remembrance we have the bourgeois acceptable and sentimental poetry of Lawrence Binyen and Rupert Brooke with their heroic glorification of the soldier. While Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen saw the brutal realities of war and the battlefield, they tried to counteract the pro-war propaganda being churned out at the time. Somehow, I can’t imagine Anthem for a Doomed Youth being read out.
WWI psychologically damaged my grandfather, one of a generation of people scarred by that futile and barbaric war. He suffered from ‘shell-shock’ which in 21st century terms means post-traumatic stress disorder. He would turn to alcohol as a way of dealing with the trauma that continued to dog him throughout his life. He never spoke about his experiences instead he would stare into the fire and silently cry. My mother as a kid caught him crying, she asked him what was wrong he replied that she wouldn’t want to know. Again, this reflects a time when the ‘done thing’ was to keep trauma and pain bottled up tightly and to search for a remedy and that remedy was booze, an instant way to ‘forget’ the horrors of warfare. On a positive side my grandfather, who before the war had no interest in politics, became an organised trade unionist, the subject of war politicised him. My grandfather objected to my brother signing up to join the army in the early 70s. Why he asked, ‘it is not as if you are being conscripted’. My grandfather died in 1972, I was 2 years old, never consciously met him though my mother used to say he would sing to me as a baby…the standing joke was that he sang ‘The Red Flag’ to me and that became ingrained in my psyche. My brother made a political choice to sign – up, one which damaged him by turning him into a violent and screwed-up man. The five years he spent turned into something I rarely like to think about as I experienced the full throttle of his misery and anger. Yet he was a foot soldier for imperialism, firing plastic bullets into crowds on the streets of Belfast. My brother wallowed in his own self-pity and never once recognised his role as a soldier propping up imperialism by being part of an occupying force. Even after all these years I have great difficulty in coming to terms with what my brother did on a personal level to me as there is a residue of anger. On a political level it is far easier to reject what my brother did. I loathed what he did and still do.
I apologise if this seems deeply personal but after so many years I still find it hard to grapple with my conflicting emotions and deal with the anger and pain. And this time of year brings those jarring emotions to the surface along with bringing into focus the whole brutality, violence, hypocrisy and vileness of warfare.
So here’s Dulce et Decorum est by Wilfred Owen:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!-An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
