Poppy

It's an awful paradox: the poppy, commemorating lives lost to war, flourished on the Western Front only after it became a battlefield.

The silence is a tradition established, at least in part, through the vision of a Melbourne-born journalist, Edward George Honey. The “bleuet” refers to both the cornflowers that grew alongside poppies on the shattered battlegrounds, and an affectionate name for French recruits thrown into the war wearing blue uniforms. The Returned Sailors and Soldiers Imperial League of Australia (precursor of the Returned Services League), along with other veterans’ groups in the Commonwealth and allied nations, passed resolutions that year “to recognise the poppy of Flanders Fields as the international memorial flower to be worn on the anniversary of Armistice Day”. Today, some communities across Australia devote weeks to knitting poppies ahead of both Remembrance Day and Anzac Day, when they are handed out at memorials or placed on the graves of veterans. The women presented him with poppies they had made by hand in France, suggesting they be sold to raise money to aid those incapacitated by their war service. World War I was supposed to be the war to end all wars. Poppies appeared and grew in such numbers that a long gulch just south of Anzac Cove was given the name Poppy Valley. Vastly greater numbers of Turkish soldiers and those of Britain and other batons lie beneath the ground there, too. And as the death toll of soldiers and civilians rose into the millions, along with horses and other beasts of burden, the dirt was soaked with the oldest of fertilisers, blood and bone. For Australians, the origin of poppies as remembrance is not entirely limited to the Western Front, where 46,000 Australian lives were lost during World War I. And as Remembrance Day approaches, members of the Returned Services League sell little red poppies in cities and towns throughout the nation. And why, at the stroke of 11am on November 11, do we observe a minute’s silence?