Remembrance Day looms large in my family. Two generations of my mum’s family were conscripted: my great-grandfather in the first world war; my grandfather, still a teenager at the time, in the second.
He survived the fighting but never entirely recovered. Mum still cries when she thinks about what he experienced. His regiment was sent to liberate the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where he helped bury hundreds upon hundreds of the Nazis’ victims. “He never spoke about it,” she told me, “but he would wake up screaming.”
I didn’t get to know Grandad – he died of a heart attack shortly after I was born. But it is partly because of him that I wear a white poppy at this time of year, rather than a red one. I deeply respect those who find the red poppy a useful way to reflect on the destruction of war. But for me, the less-widespread white poppy has become the stronger symbol of the spirit of Remembrance Day.
I believe remembrance should dwell on the tragedy of conscription, and the many who, like Grandad, were forced to fight. I fear some modern red-poppy messaging blurs the stories of coerced and professional military service in a way that minimises this specific horror, contributing to a collective amnesia that sanitises history and disrespects the memory of conscripts. There is simply no equivalence between freely choosing a career in the army and being torn from your community........