For the common citizen, the poppy represents an unbearable loss. You’ll find a memorial in every parish up and down the country, some huge and some simple plaques. They’re markers of a collective grief, all the more unspeakable because it is so universal.
One family in Britain lost every man to the First World War. Their names are memorialized on stone, which reminds us of the terrible consequences that state schemes can have on ordinary families.
Today, however, the memory of those who have fallen is almost gone. So what is the loss we’re left to remember?
Most clearly, the loss that we feel no longer able to cherish is perhaps the greatest.
Today’s fallen rememberers are nearly all gone. So what is the loss we’re left to remember?
Because of the Great War, the faith in European culture’s foundations was wiped out.
George V was the head of a debt-ridden, broken empire by the 1918 end. The revolutionaries killed Tsar Nicholas and Kaiser Wilhelm was forced to flee.
It was the war that spawned the Communist state and damaged Western civilization. The war weakened Patriotism and perhaps even more, institutional Christianity.
Indeed, most Christian denominations on both sides supported the conflict, with many at the time viewing it as a ‘holy war’.
Notoriously, in 1915, the Bishop of London declared it the duty of ‘everyone that puts principle above ease’ to ‘kill Germans… not for the sake of killing, but to save the world’.
The aftermath of the First World War saw a backlash by society’s elite – not just against nationalism, but also against traditional religious faith and cultural forms.
Historian Anna Neima shows how many among the world’s avant-garde sought to create new, ideal communities. These people wanted to reinvent human society so that something as horrible could never happen again. They did this by crossing borders of religion and nation.
These visionaries thought that humankind might be encouraged to form links between what was considered to only be national identities in favor of something better. This elite was shaped by the contact with others around the world, as they tried to form humanity above the rubble of imperialist 19th Century. Many went on the found their visionary communities at Dartington Hall (Devon), by Dorothy Elmhirst. This centre became an international hub for writers, artists, musicians and philosophers from all walks of the creative spectrum.
It was at Dartington that the Labour politician Michael Young wrote the party’s post-war manifesto. At Dartington, and other communities like it, traditional practices and values were deemed worthy only for the scrap-heap – classical music, realist painting, traditional architecture. Everything should be completely new. It must not have the same old-fashioned loyalties which led to millions being slaughtered and Europe falling apart.
Today, Remembrance Sunday is a day when very few of the original reasons for mourning those who lost their lives in the Great War are still valid.
Cultural war became a tradition with the poppy. Some people see the poppy as a symbol for those who have died fighting in war. Others view it more as a sign of patriotism or jingoism.
But we go on remembering every year, because even if there’s no longer anyone alive who feels the real-world loss of those ten million who lost their lives, we still feel the shock of the catastrophe that ended Europe as the heart of world civilisation.
Everybody blamed this catastrophe on nationalisms, religions and realpolitik. All of these things were tried by elites to be eradicated for the good. To the benefit of all humanity.
Significant in this was the high American ideal – inspired by President Woodrow Wilson – of nations shaping their own destinies.
With hindsight, even this now looks like realpolitik: a high ideal designed to end the empires of America’s European political rivals.
We go on remembering every year, because even if there’s no longer anyone alive who feels the real-world loss of those ten million who lost their lives, we still feel the shock of the catastrophe that ended Europe as the heart of world civilisation
Now, however, Wilson’s liberal internationalism has been set adrift by another crop of poppy plants: Afghanistan. American Civilisation is under severe economic and cultural pressure.
The poppy has also been a symbol of cultural war.
This symbol is used to honor those who have died fighting in war. Some see it as patriotism, while others view it as being a sign of jingoism. So we get the annual rows over which TV presenters are, and are not, wearing a poppy – or stories about some zealot setting fire to poppies to signify their contempt for those who hew to a sense of national identity.
We drift further and further into the digital world, making Remembrance Sunday seem more improbable. This year, for example, you can commemorate 100 years of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance with a unique digital artwork – known as a non-fungible token – in memory of 118,000 fallen Canadians.
But perhaps we go on remembering, ritually, every year, as a means of acknowledging that the West did, in fact, once have an astonishing, vivid, remarkable culture – and that we blew it all, along with millions of lives, over the brutal years of wartime destruction between 1914 and 1945.
Last week I’ve watched my small Bedfordshire town putting up the wrought-iron soldier silhouettes that mark Remembrance Sunday here every year. Metal outlines round empty air, they’re perfect emblems for how Europe reacted to the shock of having shattered the 19th Century’s certainties on the killing fields of the 20th Century.
These are markers of the ghostly persistence that was Europe’s old Europe, which saw its spirit extinguished by the First World War. And they’re perfect metaphors for the collective decision that was made in its aftermath, to evacuate our civilisation of everything suspected of having caused that cataclysm.
As it turned out, this required the evacuation of our civilisation from, well everything. And, having completed the emptying out process more or less completely, it is difficult to know what to believe anymore.
But if history suggests anything, something will eventually come along that’s capable of mobilising people at scale, for another round of grand historical events.
As ever, when that happens, it’ll be statesmen who shape the bigger story. This will, no doubt be made up of many small ones.
We can only hope these don’t end up told in empty seats around dining tables in ordinary homes.
This edited version is from an article published on UnHerd. Mary Harrington was a contributor editor.