Hastings, Wednesday 10: For many, it is again a time to wear velour poppies; white or red; as symbols of Remembrance of the wartime dead.
In its early years, Remembrance Day was restricted to honouring those who laid down their lives in the First World War, but this has since been extended into remembering the servicemen who lost their lives during wars since then.
However, for the everyman at least, that First World War, both in terms of its human cost and through its exemplary brute purposelessness, arguably remains as the most horrific war in the whole of History.
And, through the involvement of European colonial power, that war was indeed the first global war of History.
As, hopefully, the final war of overt imperialism, its cause involved petty, personal grievances of unelected leadership.
Perhaps it was also a war involving a desperate cull - in a world that was overcrowded in relation to its provision for life.
So it might be interpreted that it was a war of panic in the face of seemingly insoluble problems from overpopulation in relation to then-utilisable resources.
It was the first war of History in which ‘modern’ levels of technology and mechanization were on trial, yet in which sheer numbers of infantry; anachronistically supported by cavalry; remained a determining factor.
Thus, newly-designed, efficient killing-machines (such as big guns, machine guns, tanks, mustard gas, and even aircraft), gratuitously consumed life and limb from huge reserves of vulnerable, enlisted, human fodder.
The ensuing horror resulted in an immortalisation of the battlefield through two poems: one was written by Lt-Col. John McCrae
(“In Flanders Fields”; Punch magazine; May 1915); and the other; from the other side of the Atlantic; by Professor Moina Michael (“We Shall Keep the Faith”; November 1918).
Those literary landmarks affirmed the role of the red poppy as a humanly-accepted, marker of battlegrounds – and they became natural, floral tributes upon ‘real’, military mass-graveyards.
By World War 1, the red poppy had already been loosely recognized as a war-time icon during the Napoleonic wars, but at that time it was not as directly defined as it later was by those poets.
During the tortuous struggle in Northern Europe from 1914 to 1918, a new pinnacle of war-time horror was reached in stalemates of trench warfare, when a few meters of gain sometimes cost thousands of lives.
Then, in seeking advance, ground infantry, led by brave - almost suicidal – officers, would leave the only-relative safety and comfort of a laboriously-excavated, cold, wet, insanitary, rat-infected, disease-ridden, earthen burrow - to face the deadly dangers of the war-scarred landscape of mud and blood around them - by going ‘over the top’ – perhaps never to return.
In that ‘no-man’s land’, they faced hails of shells and bullets thrown at them by an invisible enemy in the opposing trench.
Thus, as a generalized event, going ‘over-the-top’ has earned its own iconic status as a memorial to entrapped bravery, and in-so-doing it also highlights the wasteful futility and brutality of war and killing as means of solving human problems.
The Southeast Asian Times