The Book of the Poppy Read online

  CONTENTS

  Title

  Foreword

  Introduction

  1. Nation at War

  2. An Act of Remembrance

  3. Not Forgotten

  4. They Shall Not Grow Old

  5. A Symbol of Hope

  Conclusion

  Appendix

  Copyright

  Vice Admiral Peter Wilkinson, CB CVO National President, The Royal British Legion

  FOREWORD

  In Flanders fields the poppies blow

  Between the crosses, row on row …

  John McCrae

  POPPIES, WHICH GROW abundantly in northern France and which were commented upon by many of the soldiers fighting there, were suggested as a symbol of Remembrance to mark the enormous human cost of the First World War following the publication of John McCrae’s poem ‘In Flanders Fields’. They were adopted by the American Legion in 1920 and a year later by the newly formed British Legion, as the emblem for its first fundraising campaign, now known everywhere as the Poppy Appeal.

  The 4th of August 2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the day Britain entered the First World War – one of the costliest conflicts in history. This book will provide you with an understanding of the history of the poppy and its significance as a unique and enduring symbol that represents the Legion’s vital work for the Armed Forces community.

  Nearly a century on, that work is more important than ever. The problems faced by serving personnel, veterans and their dependents today are very similar to those that faced soldiers returning from the First World War; whether living with bereavement or disability, finding employment, or coping with financial stress. The Legion is currently spending £1.6 million each week to provide vital care and support to the Armed Forces community and we intend to be here for the next 100 years to ensure that the needs of all our beneficiaries continue to be met.

  Thank you for purchasing The Book of the Poppy. It is with great pleasure, respect and gratitude that I, as National President of The Royal British Legion, invite you to join me in reflecting on what the poppy has meant to past generations and what it still means to us today.

  Vice Admiral Peter Wilkinson, CB CVO

  National President, The Royal British Legion

  INTRODUCTION

  WAR HAS UNDENIABLY shaped Britain, historically and socially. For there have been relatively few prolonged periods in British history when the nation has not been embroiled in domestic or foreign conflict. These conflicts have cost the lives of millions of soldiers and thousands of civilians, blood being spilt in every corner of the globe across the centuries. Yet this constant immersion in conflict does not seem to have stripped the nation of its humanity. Indeed, it is a somewhat warming truth that in many ways we have become more, not less, reflective on the nature of conflict and its human cost.

  Every year in the United Kingdom, in October and running into November, a distinctive accessory is attached to the clothing of millions of people. This accessory is unusual in that it isn’t about fashion, nor is it purely about fundraising (although this is a major part of the rationale behind its distribution). Instead, it is a very visible national act of commemoration. It is the Remembrance Poppy.

  In its typical form, the Remembrance Poppy is not an item of material worth. It is basically a poppy rendered in paper and plastic, the vivid red paper petals standing out clearly and attractively atop a green plastic stem. And yet, there are few items worn with more reflection and pride. It represents a collective act of remembrance for generations of British war dead, especially the nation’s military personnel. At the same time it also compels us to think about all those who have died in conflict, including Britain’s former enemies, and those who continue to suffer the effects of war, whether veterans of previous conflicts or victims of present ones. In many ways, therefore, each poppy represents not just loss, but the continuing desire to care for those affected by war.

  This short book is published to coincide with the centenary of the beginning of the First World War (1914–18). A hundred years ago, a shot rang out on the streets of Sarajevo, the assassin’s bullet inflicting mortal wounds on the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Four years later, through a scarcely conceivable chain reaction of events, 20 million people lay dead and large parts of Europe, Africa and the Middle East were in ruin. The magnitude and human cost of this conflict still reverberate today, even in light of the subsequent world war between 1939 and 1945, which killed more than 50 million. Furthermore, the end of the Second World War did not see an end to global conflict – sadly there has not been a single year since 1945 in which war has not been fought somewhere around the globe. British soldiers have continued to fight, die and endure to the present day. The Remembrance Poppy, therefore, has never been more relevant.

  Chris McNab, 2014

  1. NATION AT WAR

  IT IS UNDENIABLE that Britain has a particularly distinguished military history and martial tradition. What is often remarkable about this history is that is has generally been achieved with a comparatively small armed forces. Looking back to the medieval age, the martial burden of the nation was taken by a militia – a non-professional citizen army. Various royal statutes placed obligations for male citizens to serve in the militia at times of crisis, led by the noble knights who owed feudal service to the king or queen. There were very few of what we would know as ‘standing forces’ (full-time professional soldiers) – isolated examples include the Yeoman of the Guard, essentially a professional royal bodyguard force created by Henry VII in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth Field. It should also be noted that the medieval monarchs drew heavily upon foreign mercenaries to patch the gaps in military capability – Britain’s armies have frequently been international bodies.

  The soldiers of the medieval militias were kept busy through an endless sequence of destructive wars, from bitter civil conflicts such as the War of the Roses (1455–1487) to distant expeditionary adventures like the Crusades in the Middle East. Hundreds of thousands of British citizens served and died for causes truly remote from their daily lives and concerns, although the ferocity with which they fought gave the British renown as a warrior race.

  The nature of Britain’s armed forces changed considerably during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not least in terms of maritime power. By the sixteenth century, the nation had already established a ‘Navy Royal’, a force of State-owned warships and naval facilities. The size and power of the force waxed and waned, the British fleet often supplemented by private vessels to fight its wars. Crises were averted, such as the repulsion of the Spanish Armada in 1588 (as much by virtue of the resistant British weather as its navy), but as an island nation Britain needed a more formidable fleet. This ambition was realised in the seventeenth century, as the Navy Royal expanded under both Charles I (r. 1625–49) and II (r. 1660–85) and the rule of Oliver Cromwell/the Commonwealth that separated the kings’ rule. Through major programmes of shipbuilding, fuelled by conflicts such as the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672–74) and the War of the Grand Alliance (1688–97), Britain acquired a ‘Royal Navy’ and became the most powerful naval force on the planet for the next 200 years.

  The army was also changing. Queen Elizabeth’s long-running war against the Spanish in the Netherlands from 1595 demanded huge amounts of manpower. Although still using the militia system, Elizabeth oversaw a degree of professionalisation of the army, particularly in terms of command and administration, but it still didn’t give Britain a stable force. Ironically, it took revolution to transform Britain’s land forces. Following the overthrow and execution of Charles I, Oliver Cromwell’s ‘New Model Army’ became Britain’s first professional standing army. It was well-trained, liable for service in
any destination (previously many militias had just been bound to service in a single local area) and had a professional officer class. Although the Commonwealth collapsed in 1660, with the restoration of Charles II, the new monarch saw the clear value of a standing army, and began to build up his own. This army swelled rapidly – it reached about 40,000 men strong under James II (1685–88) – and was structured around a regimental system that still exists today. This system, which first emerged in the sixteenth century, created formations of soldiers with a fierce sense of local identity and geographical connection. (The practice of creating county, as opposed to numbered, regiments was actually implemented by Richard Haldane, the British Secretary of State for War between 1905 and 1912.)

  By the time Britain had a standing army, the nature of warfare had changed almost beyond recognition compared to the medieval period. Gunpowder was now a force on the battlefield. Crude cannon and ‘hand-gonnes’ (effectively the first small-arms) had been introduced into Europe in the fourteenth century. As the weapons developed in power and dependability, they had a fundamental impact on the social and political fabric of the nation. The castle, the traditional seat of noble power, could now be cracked open by gunpowder artillery (although this process still required some thunderous persistence) and humble infantry armed with musket firearms could kill the most esteemed knight, despite having just days training as opposed to the years required to create a professional archer. By the seventeenth century, the muskets were using flintlock mechanisms that gave faster and consistent volley fire, while the artillery was more mobile and devastating, wheeled into position on the battlefield to deliver terrible hails of solid ball and grape shot. Although much killing was still done at close quarters with bayonet and blade, now the bulk of the slaughter was performed at a distance by gunpowder weaponry.

  Britain’s professional military units were certainly kept busy during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Following the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland, the land forces were a truly ‘British Army’, and under leaders such as Marlborough and Wellington it became (and remains) a globally respected force. It was ever more international in its involvements, participating in coalition conflicts such as the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), the Seven Years’ War (1754–63) and the Napoleonic Wars (1803–15). At the same time, the British established the largest empire the world had ever seen, so thousands of men found themselves deployed to truly remote corners of the world, effectively as imperial police forces.

  Britain, however, still relied heavily on private soldiers and militias to fulfil its military obligations. For many years India was governed with the assistance of the private armies of the East India Company (EIC), and even during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars the British forces were heavily reliant upon various volunteer, yeomanry (volunteer cavalry) and militia defence forces. Only in the early twentieth century was the situation given a greater degree of order through Haldane’s Territorial and Reserve Forces Act of 1907, which organised non-State units into the Territorial Force. The Territorial Force eventually became what we know today as the Territorial Army, and this critical reserve force has served with distinction in most major British conflicts from the First World War to the present day.

  Britain entered the twentieth century with a historically battle-proven army, one that really did ‘punch above its weight’ on the world stage. It was disciplined, professional and experienced, although there were cracks in the veneer. The Crimean War (1853–56), Anglo-Zulu War (1879) and Boer Wars (1880–81, 1899–1902) had shown that while the British could still win wars, they could also suffer disastrous localised defeats if they underestimated their enemies, were led badly or miscalculated their logistical requirements. In Afghanistan in 1842, the British suffered a catastrophe when Afghan tribesmen massacred 4,500 soldiers and 12,000 camp followers, as the vast column attempted to make its escape from Kabul to Jalalabad. At the Battle of Isandlwana in South Africa on 22 January 1879, a Zulu army of 20,000 warriors destroyed an entire British force – 1,300 British soldiers died, despite having modern rifles and artillery pieces at their disposal. During the Boer War, on 23–24 January 1900, a force of Boer warriors trapped hundreds of British troops atop Spion Kop, a hill 24 miles (38km) west-south-west of Ladysmith. Over the course of a horrifying day, 243 soldiers were killed and 1,250 wounded, the hapless British trying to claw their way into solid rock to escape the merciless rifle fire. Such battles, although long distant from our present age, and fought for causes largely alien to our modern politics, still deserve to be remembered for the young men who lost their lives, on days too awful to imagine.

  MAJOR BATTLES IN BRITISH HISTORY, 1066–1900

  THE ‘GREAT WAR’

  As this book is published, the world is preparing to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the First World War. Despite its increasing historical distance, the war has a special resonance in the collective memory. Why is this so? Britain, as we have seen, has a martial tradition stretching back to ancient times, and has fought numerous consuming conflicts on foreign and domestic soils. Yet our reflections upon, say, British participation in the Seven Years’ War or even the Napoleonic Wars are now far more to do with historical interest than national remembrance. The obvious reason for our ongoing connection with the First World War is its proximity. A hundred years is a long time, but there is still a generation of people alive whose parents and grandparents fought in the ‘Great War’. The First World War was also the first recognisably ‘modern’ conflict, a clash wrought across the full spectrum of environments – air, land and sea – and with the same fundamental types of weaponry that dominate conflict today. There is also a political factor – debates over whether the First World War was a ‘justified’ conflict continue to rage, especially as the political repercussions and imperial engineering of the war are still felt around the globe today, particularly in the Middle East and the Balkans. Yet above all these reasons, and the true focus of the centennial commemorations, is the daunting human cost of the war, not only for the British, but also for all those nations who fought.

  We start with some basic statistics to gain perspective. During the First World War, the United Kingdom had a population of just over 46 million people. Of this number, a total of 5.7 million men served in the armed forces, and within this figure around 700,000 were killed. Add to that grim total an estimated 1.6 million wounded, and some 2.3 million men – nearly half of all those who served in the war – became casualties. Yet this is not including the men and women of the British colonies and dominions (primarily Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and India), without whom Britain would have been unable to sustain many campaigns. If we add their contribution, the total figure for dead, missing and wounded amongst ‘British’ troops climbs to nearly 3 million.

  These figures are stunning enough, but they represent the fallen of just a few of the combatant countries. Looking on the Entente side, France suffered a generational disaster in the form of nearly 1.4 million war dead, plus 4.3 million wounded. Russia’s losses, to our best estimate, were 1.8 million dead and nearly 5 million wounded. It also experienced some 2 million civilian dead. (The civilian death tolls for Britain and France were 1,386 and 40,000 respectively.) Italy took 1.4 million casualties, of whom 462,000 were fatalities.

  Figures for the Central Powers are just as dizzying and depressing. Germany lost at least 2 million of its soldiers in fighting on two fronts, plus 5.7 million military wounded and 700,000 civilian deaths. Austria-Hungary suffered nearly 3 million dead and wounded; 478,000 POWs also died in captivity. Turkey’s casualty lists are grossly skewed towards civilian deaths – around 2 million, mainly Armenians caught by the genocide unleashed upon them from c. 1915, but also took a million military dead and wounded. When such figures and the rolls of honour of all other combatant nations are added together, the First World War cost the lives of at least 16 million people, with another 20 million wounded.

&nb
sp; Few engagements represent the catastrophe of the First World War better than the Battle of the Somme, the British offensive fought between 1 July and 13 November 1916. On the first day of the attack alone, the British suffered 60,000 casualties, including 19,240 dead, despite the confidence that a week-long, 1.6-million-shell bombardment of the German lines would have rendered all the defenders either dead, wounded or insensible. The British soldiers, stretched along a 14-mile (23km) front, went ‘over the top’ under fine weather at 7.30 a.m., many of them advancing at a walking pace in expectation of limited resistance. (Moving at a steady uniform pace also allowed units and individuals to maintain effective communication links, rather than become strung out over the battlefield.) Instead, they walked into blistering hails of machine-gun fire and German artillery. Entire battalions of young men were hewn to pieces in minutes, their bodies lying out in blasted fields and amongst contorted wraps of barbed wire. Almost no significant territorial gains were made that day, and in many cases the units ended up back at their start lines, their ranks thinned down considerably compared to when they set out a few hours previously.

  FIRST WORLD WAR CASUALTIES (DEAD, WOUNDED AND MISSING)

  FRONTLINE VOICES: BATTLE OF THE SOMME

  War reporter Philip Gibbs wrote about what he saw on the first day of the Somme, 1 July 1916:

  Before dawn there was a great silence. We spoke to each other in whispers, if we spoke. Then suddenly our guns opened out in a barrage of fire of colossal intensity. Never before, and I think never since, even in the Second World War, had so many guns been massed behind any battle front. It was a rolling thunder of shell fire, and the earth vomited flame, and the sky was alight with bursting shells. It seemed as though nothing could live, not an ant, under that stupendous artillery storm. But Germans in their deep dugouts lived, and when our waves of men went over they were met by deadly machine-gun and mortar fire.