To post this for the anti Poppy brigade?

[Jakebullet]

Just posted on Facebook by a poet friend of mine

The whistles could be heard
Along the trenches below
The young men weren't ready
But they had to go
Some held photos
Of loved ones back home
They charged together
Yet died alone
The bulkets n bombs
rang loud in their heads
Yet forward they ran
Running over the dead
A war against tyranny and for freedom they fought
A price was to be paid
Yet could never be bought
But their actions
Should be remembered
Even tho with regret
By wearing The Poppy
LEST WE FORGET

By Billy Isherwood

Love this poem......it's been in his head several days and this morning was finally written down.

I have found that the people who make the biggest fuss about other people not wearing poppies tend to be thick racists who make snide remarks about muslims and how christians are 'persecuted' in the UK and 'political correctness gone mad.'

It's going to be interesting next year, isn't it? Now the First World War has just about passed from living memory (the small number of people who were born between 1913-1918 and are still alive wouldn't really remember anything about the war going on when they were babies and toddlers).

And the OP's poem is absolute shit. I think is much better.

people like me

who are they i wonder.

you have no clue what i know, what i am basing my choices on, and what my experiences of the british military are

whatever.

The poem is indeed sentimental.
The WWI poems which have been quoted on this threadare not representative of what the generality of the great war soldiers experienced or thought.
A couple of posters have said that WWI was not a war against tyranny - and I think an entire thread could be debated on the complex question of why we fought that war - but German Expansionist aggression was undoubtedly one of the chief reasons.
Another poster said that "lots" of great war veterans didn't like the poppy - true - but lots more did like it - the majority did. Haig was given a hero's funeral.

Todays understanding of the great war has been woefully warped by Blackadder, poets and Oh what a lovely war. But those works of art/entertainment are not acurate history.

Normal, I was just looking that poem up to post it.

In my experience, the (mostly) men who fought and survived ww2 (I never had a real connection with anyone from ww1) didn't talk about it - my Grandfather was 15 years dead before my Gran told me of his time in the RAF, for example.

I have noticed significantly LESS people wearing poppies this year
the court martial case will not have helped
nor will the shutting of Portsmouth shipbuilding
nor will the growing realisation that both Iraq and Afghanistan have been utter folly.

I stopped wearing one after Iraq was invaded.

op I hope you are reading some of the thought provoking responses on here

I do wear a poppy for those in the wwars.

But the need to hero worship every soldier is imho wrong. There are good and bad, choosing a military lifedoesnt suddenly Ibue someone with angel like goodness and I hate that this us now happening.

Two stostories just today about marines refusing to condem their colleague who shot an injured Afghan dead while calling him a cunt.

The soldier given bail until sentencing after being convicted of killing his 19 month old daughter. It took her from 7 weeks old when he attacked her until now to die, yet he got bail and only may get a custodial sentence because he lost an eye for "us" in Afghanistan.

Wow so many typos!

YABU. As others have pointed out, WWI was not a war "against tyranny" or "for freedom." Your friend might want to spend more time reading a few books about the causes of that senseless war. And a bit less time penning hackneyed drivel.

I am troubled by the way the poppy has been co-opted in recent years. It is now often used as a way to assert one's support for current and recent wars, with people falling all over themselves to compete in the "who is more patriotic" stakes. It's quite similar to the co-opting of the US flag by cynical politicians. Hero-worshipping the armed forces and uncritically believing that they are fighting for our freedom have led us down a very dangerous path.

a family feud writ large over europe and beyond more like

The men in the trenches weren't fighting for freedom or against tyranny. They were there as a result of political grandstanding. Even apart from that, it's not a very good poem, is it?

Still, up to you if you want to put shit poems on your facebook page I suppose.

I was about to post Sassoon's Suicide in the Trenches but see ANormalOne has already beaten me to it. That poem reflects the truth of WWI OP not that misinformed, sentimental nonsense you have quoted.

Don't presume to know why people choose not to wear a poppy, there are lots of reasons, many of them reached after much reflection, just as I'm sure there is many a poppy pinned on a lapel without so much as a second thought as to why.

having googled, that poem is the best offering by that poet

The poem is terrible.

I don't wear a poppy for the simple fact I absolutely hate the pointless, useless green plastic thing thing you are supposed to attach it to clothing with. Ever since health and safety took the decent pin away I've lost then within hours so I don't bother now. But I do still donate!

I agree with Bubbles' excellent post near the top of the thread.

I would also add I work in the kind of school that, if it wasn't in London, would be amongst those targeted by Army recruitment offices determined to gather up young, unemployable (for many, many complicated reasons) boys to die abroad. I think it is disgusting.

I also feel incredibly ashamed that an organisation like the RBL even needs to exist to take care of war veterans and their families. If the Government is happy to conscript/enlist them they should take care of them.

MTM - that's rather my sentiment as well, the things are physcially annoying. You run the pin into your finger or your neck, they fall off, they crumple... We all wore them as kids, not least because (I am almost 50) quite a few of the kids around me had grandfathers or uncles who had served - or died - in WW1 or WW2. Pretty much everyone knew someone who had a family connection with one war or other and yet, to us kids, the wars were something of the past.

I think the rot set in (in terms of transforming the poppies and Remembrance Day into something disturbingly pro-military and xenphobic) around the time of the Falklands. Even though I consider that to have been a 'just war' or at least a lot more so than the current shitstorms.

YABVU, what a terrible poem.

"I also feel incredibly ashamed that an organisation like the RBL even needs to exist to take care of war veterans and their families. If the Government is happy to conscript/enlist them they should take care of them."

Absolutely.

We shouldn't need charities like Help for Heroes or the RBL. We should have a welfare state which cares for the men our state sent to war.

The government, through our taxes, should support people coming out of the services. Not least because there is a legacy of MH, PTSD, violence and trauma that costs the men and women that serve in the armed forces but also costs us as a society. I have worked with ex-service personnel in rehab, coming out of prison and their partners fleeing DV. I didn't see any poppy money at the time.

I don't wear a poppy. I hate the forced, jingoistic flavour to it. The opposite of what my GFs (Army and RAF) and GM (WAAF) would have wanted.

My GM spoke of counting the planes out every night, then counting less back in. Her then BF (my DM's DF) died in one of those planes over Europe. Never think that people wearing poppies don't care.

I agree with the posters above who say that the RBL and help for heroes shouldn't exist, they should get and should always have got the help they need from the government but that isn't going to happen anytime soon.
However I do wear a poppy because:
A member of my family is commemorated on the Shot at Dawn memorial at Kew.
Several members of my family served in both war and peacetime.
Not that long ago I went to the military funeral of a lad I used to babysit. I saw the grief and exhaustion of his fellow soldiers written all over their faces. They may have voluntarily signed up but that does not lessen their work. In my opinion at least.
I wear my poppy for them and I really couldn't care less if anybody else wears or doesn't wear them. It's a choice everybody gets to make.
That poem really isn't good btw.

not big on that poem.

no-one has to wear a poppy. That is one of the freedoms that so many fought and died for - and still do. Think about it.