If the symbol is worn for too long it loses its effect: wearing it from the start of the month until Armistice Day, a period of 11 days, was deemed about right. For some religious people November 2, All Souls’ Day, was deemed a suitable time to start wearing it. The generation that fought in the war, or lost husbands, fathers, sons or brothers in it, never wore theirs before 1 November, and this was the practice in much of our Army.
These days there is some virtue signalling about wearing poppies, with some public figures keen to be seen sporting them from mid-October. Later, the poppies were made from paper and wire and then plastic, in workshops populated by disabled ex-servicemen. Also, the money raised by the sale of poppies went to the British Legion, which was supporting badly wounded veterans and also helping the able bodied who were struggling, during the deep economic depression of 1921-22, to reap the rewards the Lloyd George government had promised would follow on from the victory they had secured. From 1921 the practice of wearing a cotton and silk poppy, manufactured in France under Guérin’s direction, was established in Britain, and caught on quickly: the simplicity of the symbolism was perfect. However, each nation used the poppy to help its own casualties of war.
But a French woman, Mme Anna Guérin, had a similar idea that the widows and orphans of French soldiers should make poppies to be sold in the former allied nations for the benefit of these women and children. This led to silk versions being made and sold to raise money for veterans, and the American Auxiliary Legion formally adopted the poppy as a symbol of their lost soldiers in 1920. A professor at a university in Georgia, Moina Belle Michael, vowed just before the Armistice that she would wear one as an act of remembrance, inspired by having read McCrae’s poem. The idea of taking the Flanders poppy as a symbol of remembrance seems to have originated in America, after that country entered the war in April 1917. And that May, the first spring of the war, the poppies proliferated in the rough and ready cemeteries as across the battlefields and to the men under arms in the trenches, daily risking their lives, they became one of the most potent symbols of their war. Before the standard Imperial war grave was designed the temporary cemeteries were filled with the white wooden crosses mentioned in the poem some of those that survived the war were brought back to England when the Portland stone gravestones had replaced them, and put up in the porches of village churches. One of McCrae’s closest friends and comrades, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, had been killed in the second battle of Ypres in May 1915, and he reputedly wrote the poem the day after Helmer’s funeral. McCrae did not survive the war, dying of pneumonia in the British hospital at Boulogne in January 1918 by then his poem, published in Punch in December 1915, had entered the public consciousness. It was a staggering sight, and confirmed once and for all the potency of the symbolism of this simple wildflower. No wonder, on the centenary of the Armistice in 2018, the moat of the Tower of London was filled with 888,000 ceramic poppies, one for every man from Britain and her empire who died in the Great War. ‘We are the dead,’ the next stanza begins, and the third and final one ends: ‘If ye break faith with us who die/We shall not sleep, though poppies grow/In Flanders fields.’ This phenomenon prompted Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, a Canadian doctor, to write one of the war’s most resonant poems: Yet the soldiers noticed in the springs and summers of the war that one proof of life struggled through the scorched earth: the poppy. What had been a patchwork of arable fields and woodlands became a swamp of mud and shattered tree stumps, littered with the bodies of the dead and of horses, and with the wreckage of machines and shrapnel. It is almost impossible to imagine the landscape of the Western Front in the midst of the battles of 1914-18.