Poppies

The bother about poppies, it seems, comes around every year. Like the “war on Christmas”, it’s one of the things our era’s regrettable wave of faux-conservative, authoritarian-as-long-as-it’s-them-in-charge, anti-Deep-State whenever it’s not, grifting charlatan-populists like to stoke up. A search of my Twitter would have shown that it irritated me enough to post on it once or twice; the exchange that prompted me to do so last year went thus:

Tweeter #1:
Wear your poppy with pride. It’s a symbol of ‘the pity of war’. Don’t let the flagsh**ging empty vessels of hate grunting ‘ugh ug ug’ while pointing at dinghies hi-jack it.

Tweeter #2:
“But that isn’t what wearing the poppy is for. “Poppies are worn as a show of support for the Armed Forces community,” according to the RBL which runs the poppy appeal. The notion that it about WW1/WW2 or the pity of war is a myth.”
(For clarity, “dinghies”: inflatables being used by asylum seekers to cross from France to England.)

That’s a fairly typical exchange between people in the UK. In ‘Irish Twitter’, and apparently in public discourse in Ireland, poppy wearing as a topic seems to have had a strange new awakening in recent years, with some public personalities making a show of wearing them, some not, and the usual gang of ostensible Sinn Féin supporters on Twitter going “West Brits!” “Free Staters!” “Tans!” and the like. All of which seems new to me.

And since the most natural human response to indignation is to become indignant oneself, inevitably I feel I have to say something about this. But the itch that I want to scratch is the feeling that my particular biography has put me at an odd angle to all of the above-mentioned tendencies.

I don’t wear a poppy, but I come from a family where people used to wear poppies in Ireland. By dint of being in my mid-50s now, and the youngest child of youngest children, my two grandads both served in the First World War. My great-grandparents and grandparents were Irish Unionists from Dublin and Waterford. This meant that the grandads came home from the war to a country busy taking a turn they hadn’t wanted it to take. But they settled down in it again to carry on ordinary lives. Outwardly getting along with people to the extent their respective milieus required – the village pharmacist may have been a little bit more circumspect than the railway clerk – and in private, exchanging knowing nods, winks and grumbles about How The Other Lot Are Ruining the Country (as I now know, a probably universal human enjoyment).

Though I didn’t know the grandads terribly well – they died when I was seven and eight – I think I do have a memory, an impression of how Remembrance was with them around, and of what I was told it was about. This was in the early 1970s in a village outside Dublin, in a middle-class family. Poppy wreaths were laid on graves, and it was one of the Sundays when the whole family would go to church. I can’t remember whether I had a poppy attached to me. What I do remember is the grandads being grim. And the rector, whose face, to me as a young kid, was a bit gaunt at the best of times, looked even more so. I don’t remember the grandads wearing medals; I have a vague idea of the rector wearing something in addition to his poppy, but I may be deceiving myself. Anyway. It was a sombre business, and apart from us all being turned out in our best clothes, it didn’t look like they were having a lot of fun.

(I digress with an incident that must have happened the year after my maternal grandad had passed away. I would have been 7 or 8. My granny gave me the poppy wreath to put on his grave on my way home – the church was in between our two houses, all within about 100 yards on the same road. What she didn’t reckon with was that the scariness of the graveyard for me was still such that it suspended my ability to implement the fact that gravestones usually said who they belonged to. I put it on the wrong grave. Ah, I remember now – the gravestone was still away getting engraved, or waiting for the soil to settle, I think. But I still should have known not to plonk it on someone else’s. It was discovered days later. There was an embarrassed fuss. To be fair to young me, the old rectory next to the church had been like something out of a horror movie: a Victorian house sitting set back under dark trees behind massive black wrought-iron gates. Whether the big people realized or not, if it was dark I was still tending to do that bit at a trot and if possible on the other side of the road. I was much relieved when it was bulldozed and replaced by a new cul-de-sac of ordinary semi-detached houses.)

If the personal emotion of the older people that was in the air was something I could feel but, as a primary-school kid, obviously not understand, the media available to little boys on the subject didn’t really do much to educate us on the horrors of war. There was the almost universal hobby of Airfix planes, little plastic models of warplanes to stick together and paint with paint from tiny little pots. And then there were the war comics. Not that I got a lot of them. I think my mum didn’t approve. But on expeditions into town with my dad, for haircuts or whatever, I’d get one from the little newsstand just before the platform entrance to get the train home. This series would have been typical. Dreadful stuff! A more literary equivalent – and I was an avid reader – were of course the Biggles books. Thinking of the kind of attitude to all this that was considered normal and harmless for children back then gives me the shudders now.

The other part of Remembrance that I remember is having explained to me why it wasn’t fun and games. Having pointed out to me, probably by my mum, that the grandads were remembering people they knew who’d been killed, and that war was really pretty awful – and, that the point of Remembrance had something to do with the idea of trying not to have more wars. I suppose it was towards the end of primary school, as a kid who liked going to the library, that I would have read one or two library books about the history of the wars, and I remember the one on WW1 emphasizing how terrible the stalemate of the Western Front had been.

Just how terrible the grandads’ war had been was something we didn’t hear or know much about, one of the characteristics of the grandads being that they didn’t talk about it. We have found out more recently from various records that they were each involved in particularly notorious battles. There’s a lot we don’t know, but what we do know is more than enough to explain why they didn’t want to talk about it. My brother remembers one of the grandads deflecting a question about what he’d done in the war with “Oh, I didn’t really do much fighting. I had too many bloomin’ chevals to look after.” Though his cavalry regiment had their chevals taken off them, and became a battalion of another regiment, and when they were caught up in the Big Event that more or less ended their existence as a unit, they were in the line as ordinary infantry.

We can be pretty sure their war had been bad enough to more than do anyone for a lifetime. Pride? Glorious dead? I suppose they were proud of doing what they’d thought was the right thing. To what extent they still thought it was a good thing after it was over: that may be the sort of thing it’s unrealistic to expect all but a few veterans to articulate. Trauma, survivor’s guilt and the experience of “comradeship” do their thing. (On the comradeship topic, see also the common identity of the Frontsoldaten, well described, for example, by Erich Maria Remarque; a much-invoked thing in post-1918 German politics, mostly to no good end). Would it not feel like a betrayal of the dead to admit the whole thing was pointless, or worse? Even if, on some level, and between old mates, one knew it was indeed a pile of shit.

That’s about as far as my actual memories get me. But I was also curious to see how far this “pity of war” element was part of the original Remembrance ceremonies. And it’s interesting. The first ceremony in 1919 included the silence, which was to be observed, as far as possible, by stopping everything. Buses and trains and cars were supposed to stop where they were; factory workers were supposed to stop what they were doing, as far as possible, etc. And you can see this as part of a relentlessly Imperial pathos, or you can also see it as even the Empire realizing it needed to give people space for something more ambiguous, more complex than just speeches and bands playing.

“The King’s Pilgrimage” in May 1922 also struck this sort of note. In the speech he gave at Terlincthun, written by Rudyard Kipling, he said that “in the course of my pilgrimage, I have many times asked myself whether there can be more potent advocates of peace upon earth through the years to come than this massed multitude of silent witnesses to the desolation of war”, and hoped “that the existence of these visible memorials will eventually, serve to draw all peoples together in sanity and self-control”. There’s a touch of crisis management in the King’s messaging in 1922, not just there but also in respect of Ireland, with his speech to the parliament of Northern Ireland (which pointedly diverged from what the Northern Unionists had wanted him to say), and the ceremony to receive the colours of the disbanded Irish regiments in Windsor. There’s a seed of the realization here that the Empire is turning a corner towards its eventual winding-down. You could see these gestures as highly cynical exercises in framing; that winding-down would not be all as gracious as the King was trying to appear, in fact, it wouldn’t go over without shameful and vicious rearguard actions against what the Empire had called its own peoples. Dastardly royal message control? Anyone who thinks Harry and Meghan invented royal brand management may be overlooking that faking it till they make it has been a major activity of kings and queens for as long as there have been kings and queens (see, for example, the Privilegium Maius).

Remembrance was popular in Ireland, too, even after Independence; people turned out in large numbers for commemorative events in the 1920s. See the crowds here at the event for the 16th Irish division. If you search the Pathé website for “remembrance Ireland” you can see the scale of the Armistice Day gatherings. There’s some more description of how this developed over the years here (and the comments illustrate well how the present-day discussion goes). The commemorations were not undisputed: In the Pathé film from 1925, there is trouble in the form of somebody setting off smoke bombs and firing a revolver. One of my grandads had the job of laying a wreath at the war memorial in Dundalk and I seem to remember my Dad saying how he used to get stones thrown at him while doing it. My aunt, who grew up there, and left Ireland around 1950, told me how things became more polarized in the town over the years; when my grandad retired, he and my granny moved back to Dublin, where they were from, and one imagines they may have been relieved to do so.

As a little boy in the 1970s I suppose I wouldn’t have heard of any public bother over Remembrance or poppy-wearing, but I don’t think there really was any, despite it being a time of political tension. (Does anyone know otherwise?) It was a time when almost everybody, of every political persuasion, still had living relatives who’d been in the wars, and also: why bother old men who weren’t to be around much longer. In our neck of the woods, people were polite. Official Ireland is also polite, and the last few presidents have taken to attending the Remembrance Sunday service at St. Patrick’s cathedral. Where, as a footnote, old regimental colours from the pre-independence period hang and are allowed to gradually fade away. I’m sure people had such opinions when I was a child, but they weren’t articulated loudly, were they?

What about now? What’s changed is that the living memory of the world wars has now almost finally passed, so that whatever discourse there is has become unmoored from it. On the UK side, the British Legion has carried on the poppy appeal in the name of all servicemen and women, and of course that covers more recent and much more controversial wars such as the Falklands and Iraq. Personally I think both of those wars were wrong. The time of my grandads has passed, and the intensity of the poppy business, unfortunately mixed up with the Brexit-related surge in English nationalism, is foreign to me. I don’t know what to make of certain Irish politicians such as Leo Varadkar reviving a certain kind of poppy-wearing; whatever that’s about, it seems new, too. But it wasn’t always so, and poppies, at least the actual ones blooming in Flanders, and in the poems, were once a symbol of the desolation of war before they were anything else. That’s what I want to remember.

All of that, I suppose, sounds as though I had always had an elaborated set of thoughts about Remembrance in my mind, but in reality I barely thought about it for a long time, and it is something else than my Irish upbringing that has made me reflect on it. That is the experience of moving to first Germany and then Austria, where I have now (added together) lived for more than half my life. We have it easy in Ireland in that we can pick and choose what we think of the war(s). If we want to, we can feel vaguely that our lot were sort of on the right side, but it’s equally easy for us to go “Bah! Imperialist struggles that were not ours” or “All war is just organized murder” and we can normally skate past the uncomfortable questions of whether we would have actually liked the other side to win either of the world wars in Europe. Germans and Austrians don’t have such luxury. Their side of the First World War is hard to describe as anything but indefensible and the Second World War was criminal beyond words, and they have to face it. But it’s a big ask for people to live with the idea that pretty much their whole* country and civilization, involving their own family members, perpetrated such a huge episode of barbarity, especially when the trauma and loss and dislocation is still reverberating through very many families at a personal and psychological level. In the nature of that challenge, the reckoning – the Aufarbeitung, the Vergangenheitsbewältigung – has been slow, uneven, and incomplete, and had quite different histories in the three states that succeeded the Nazi state (West Germany, East Germany and the Austrian “Second Republic”). And it’s an ongoing struggle, with reactionary elements trying to revive various kind of warmed-up versions of “German” nationalism for current political purposes.

(*When I say “whole country” I’m using the rather sloppy way we tend to talk about it in everyday English. That doesn’t really do the thorny issue of collective guilt and/or collective responsibility justice, and in the German-speaking context we need to be more exact.)

Travelling around Austria, and particularly on a bike, which brings me into little villages in such a way that I notice the details, I come across many local war memorials that are well-kept and look just like the ones in Ireland or the UK, and have equally simple inscriptions to the effect of “to our fallen heroes“ without any qualification and lists of names under the headings “1914–1918” and “1939–1945”, and now and then fresh wreaths from the Kameradschaftsbund, too. It’s an interesting thing to encounter when you’ve been brought up to think these were the bad guys. Food for thought, and my thoughts are not uncritical about the style of many of these monuments, but it’s good to come face to face with the element that these were somebody’s sons and parents and brothers and uncles and granddads.

There’s much more to be said about that and I’m not an expert on it. But what I learned when I came here is that while Armistice Day, the 11th day of the 11th month, is absent from popular consciousness in the German-speaking countries, some other other historic anniversaries are close to it. Especially the 9th of November has been a date of multiple major events. The two most salient ones nowadays are the November pogroms of 1938 (the name “(Reichs-)Kristallnacht” is now out of favour in German, and for good reasons, I think) and the fall of the Berlin Wall; others include the declaration of the republic in 1918 and the Hitler-Ludendorff Putsch of 1923. All of these demand reflection on how Europe descended into totalitarianism and genocide, and how we deal with the aftermath (for example the different experiences of the “new member states” of the EU who had been through either the USSR-dominated or Yugoslav versions of communism). There’s a week, then, in November, where Remembrance is happening over there, and people are tending to Stolpersteine over here. It’s the same season, but with cultures of remembrance that don’t seem aware of each other.

Is there a pan-European consciousness of the darkness of the mid 20th century, and the need to avoid anything like that happening again? Is there something of a reconciliation of the injuries that nation did unto nation? Is that a pipedream? Is it a necessity in order for Europe to have a tolerable future, in which our societies remain free and peaceful and democratic – and even respectful of minority rights, even inclusive, even respecting human rights of people arriving from other places? All of these ideals seem pretty battered in 2022; we’re not even living up to them now. Have we ever? Will we ever?

For what it‘s worth, I think we will have to find a new European identity, one that’s strong enough among ordinary people for the countries of the EU to act in more coordinated and cooperative ways, or, to put it frankly, we’re all screwed. We won’t handle climate change or migration or economic turbulence and transformation well if we don’t have a sense of European solidarity. But also, from my limited experience of migrating from that bit of Europe to this bit, I can see that the issues we have with identities, with conflicts, with ghosts of the past, are much more similar than we often think, stuck in our particular corners of the continent. Something massively missing from my education (admittedly, school history classes ended for me when I was 14) was the extent to which Irish history was European history.

In 1950, Robert Schuman said:
“L’Europe ne se fera pas d’un coup, ni dans une construction d’ensemble: elle se fera par des réalisations concrètes créant d’abord une solidarité de fait.”

I think he was right. We can see the solidarité de fait working on the UK, where public opinion seems to be inexorably swinging towards seeing Brexit as a mistake, and where any reasonable observer must expect the next government to undo parts of it. It’s a hard job, psychologically, for a whole nation to admit a clusterfuck of this scale to itself, and a sad spectacle, but I think it’s happening. Schuman’s réalisations concrètes have made shared interests, at least economic ones, inescapable. The other parties across the EU whom we refer to politely as “right-wing populists” have shut up about leaving the union.

On the symbolic front …

In 1970, Willy Brandt did this.

In 1984, Kohl and Mitterrand did this.

And in 1989, Alois Mock and Gyula Horn did this.

And if we think all of these acts of commemoration I’ve mentioned are a bit dodgy – if you think George V is too imperial or the Armistice Day rituals in Dublin in the 1920s were just an excuse for (ex-)unionists to wave a few union jacks at the Free State, or Helmut Kohl was an arse, or all of them are too white and too male; all plausible enough things to think, though I’d say sometimes even arses do something that’s a bit right – then let’s hurry up and do something better.