On November 11th, in commemoration of the end of World War I and of those who have died in combat, many British and Commonwealth citizens will observe a minute of silence. This remembrance is accompanied by a visual prop of plastic poppies pinned to people’s chests for the weeks prior to the moment of silence at 11am on the 11th day of the 11th month.

As a Canadian, thinking about the war is culturally inseparable from the poppy. In addition to using blunt scissors to cut red construction paper shapes, there is a poem that Canadian students are all obligated to recite:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

My memories remain strong of our red paper flowers hanging from the walls and how with rousing vigor we recited John McCrae’s heavy rhymed lines

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

The poem has a strange mix of pastoral memorializing of the dead and the reinvigorating call to continue the fight. Of course, it is fair to say that whatever the poem was meant to convey, it was lost on all of us in grade school. We learned simply to mouth the words of Vimy Ridge and to know that we, as Canadians, had done something really important to help win the war in Europe. Despite the poem’s own mixture of remembrance and war-making, the poppy endures for us as part of our own mythology as a nation of peacekeepers.

In my newly adopted home of the United Kingdom, poetry also has a closely knit relationship to the remembrance of war, particularly the Great War. In his introduction to an anthology of war poetry, the poet Andrew Motion notes that the work of poets such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Isaac Rosenberg are ‘dripped into the bloodstream’ of the nation each year and ushered in ‘as state furniture’ each November. On a day of remembering the sacrifice of soldiers, the diverse poetry and experiences of these figures are nearly in dissonance with the purported purpose of commemorating the dead. Their work is seen, for the most part, as protest poetry and poetry that embodied the experience of warfare - most particularly the futility, madness and pity of war. Although there was a much more voluminous body of poetry produced by civilians (particularly women) alongside the pro-war poetry from soldiers and non-combatants, these particular poets’ works have an enormous resonance for the British public and have come to be synonymous with the act of memorializing World War I.

These poets have helped establish the understanding of the war as a tragedy and an outrage; the image of lion-like soldiers led by inept donkey Generals. Dan Todman has lamented the way that these writers’ poems are taught as history, particularly through their appearance on school history syllabi. Some historians such as Gary Sheffield have asked that the British people shrug off the mentality of the war as futile and instead embrace the war as a ‘forgotten victory’. These ideas are easily reconcilable, seemingly. We solemnize the contribution of soldiers, meanwhile looking to these individual poets as heroes with conscience. Their voices were strong enough and apparently beautiful enough to oppose the war and leave us with a sense of the tragedy of the war, alongside the possibility of understanding the conflict as necessary - as a war Britain wasn’t destined to win, but won as a result of the great sacrifice offered by its boys. Both opinions can be held at the same time within the mythology of the war. In a bizarre twist, we can now read that the poet Simon Armitage will be visiting Helmand province to find the new war poets. Anthologies of war poetry from American and British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are already printed. The poetry of war and the experience of soldier-poets are easily appropriated into the narrative of continued wars without pronouncing too explicitly the outrage with aggression and war.

This incorporation is made easier by a vast and nearly deafening silence in this country on the subject of Britain’s own colonial legacy. This history ranged from India to Ireland (wherein differing revolts and uprisings were savagely quashed), to the Commonwealth (protests in Australia, Quebec and South Africa) and to the Middle East, which was carved up, to be shared with France, in the wake of the war. What remains in the silence are crimes outside the ear and eye of European modernism, such as the American invasion and 19 year-occupation of Haiti beginning in 1915. When we commemorate our soldiers, we are told to remember their sacrifices, but we so rarely have the honesty to examine where our soldiers also acted as aggressors. To remember how we remain the aggressors.

Institutional and national commemoration helps generate the illusion of a collective memory. There is no such thing. Particular communities remember, and they remember in their different ways and towards their different ends. Moreover, these diverse and multiple acts of remembrance are not simply idle and unattached events. They are themselves intertwined in historical narratives that say as much about the present as they do about the past.

Certainly the greatest atrocities of World War I were perpetrated by the Ottomon Empire against the Armenians. Conservative estimates claim over a million Armenians were killed. Turkey does not acknowledge these figures and opposes them being described as genocide. Despite Britain’s own discussion of these atrocities in the past, and because of the modern geo-political importance of Turkey to British, American and Israeli interests, the leaders of these nations have colluded to refrain from censuring Turkey for their denial of the atrocities in Armenia and from employing the discourse of genocide in relation to Ottomon aggression during World War I. In a strange twist, Israel is reconsidering their position in light of Turkey’s criticism of Israel’s conduct in their assault on Gaza last year.

When we note these twisting attitudes and the selective memorializing of the past, we start to witness the way the memory of the war is simplified into symbols that fail to capture the struggle involved in remembering. Within the evocation of these symbols, contradictions are easily resolved. The poems of protesting soldiers are easily reified into the gross mystification of historical and political narratives that incorporate a conscious moral opposition to war alongside a narrative of the necessity and ultimate justness of British military conduct. This means the war poets provide an odd, though easily incorporated and acceptable counter-narrative to the memorializing of the war. This is not dissimilar to contemporary discussion of the enormous protests against the war in Iraq, in particular, as a sign of successful democracy, which nonetheless fails to deal with a word of what the protesters demand.

The pitied poetry of protest did not begin to address Britain’s wars, its occupation of nations or the vocal and sometimes militarized opposition to that occupation. Far from being moments to reflect on in the past, these wars of colonialism, particularly in the Middle East, continue - be they vestiges from Britain’s heyday or from the handing over of the reins of global dominance to America after World War II.

Much of the modern interest with World War I protest poetry emerged out of increased attention to student and soldier protest against the Vietnam war. Writing 25 years after the publication of his seminal The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), Paul Fussell explained that his hope was to persuade his readers that “even Gooks had feelings, that even they hated to die, and like us called for help or God or Mother when their agony became unbearable.” Ironically invoking racist language commonly used to refer to the Vietnamese, Fussell reveals his aspiration that the imaginative empathy he saw at work in some of the poetry of World War I might also aid readers to appreciate the inherent humanity of the Vietnamese (the enemy: in his study, the Germans; in his era, the Gooks).

Historicizing Fussell’s book and indeed taking his word for it, he hoped to parallel the suffering of British soldiers in France to the experience of American soldiers in Vietnam. Comparisons focusing on the suffering of soldiers flatten out how the American presence in Vietnam was not the result of chance or folly, but instead a result of planned response to anti-colonial struggle. However brutal the war seemed to the civilians unceremoniously drafted and the 58,000 American casualties that resulted from the conflict, focus on their suffering obfuscates the ecological and humanitarian tragedy that led to an estimated 3 - 4million Vietnamese deaths. (This kind of oversight is typical of Fussell, although rarely discussed. His sympathy for the misery of soldiers, and lack of consideration of Asian lives led him, elsewhere, into vociferous defence of the American nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki).

Anglo-American imperialism continues. What we remember and the way that we remember the past has important and immediate consequences on how we understand our present.

Many of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam understood the horrors they participated in and chose plain speech, not poetry, as the means to convey it. Speaking at the 1971 ‘Winter Soldier’ hearings, Scott Camile laid plain some of the realities of warfare in Vietnam:

SCOTT CAMILE: The way that we distinguished between civilians and VC [Viet-Cong], VC had weapons and civilians didn’t, and anybody that was dead was considered a VC. If you killed someone, they said, “How do you know he’s a VC?” The general reply would be, “He’s dead,” and that was sufficient.

The cutting off of heads—on Operation Stone, there was a lieutenant colonel there, and two people had their heads cut off and put on stakes and stuck in the middle of the field. And we were notified that there were press covering the operation and that we couldn’t do that anymore.

I saw one case where a woman was shot by a sniper, one of our snipers. And when we got up to her, she was asking for water. And the lieutenant said to kill her. So he ripped off her clothes, they stabbed her in both breasts, they spread her eagle and shoved an E- tool up her vagina—an entrenching tool—and she was still asking for water. And then they took that out, and they used a tree limb, and then she was shot.

MODERATOR: Did the men in the—in your outfit, did they seem to think that it was alright to do anything to the Vietnamese?

SCOTT CAMILE: It wasn’t like they were humans, like we were—you know, we were conditioned to believe that, you know, this was for the good of the nation, the good of our country, and anything we did was OK. And like, when you shot someone, you didn’t think you were shooting a human. They were a gook or a Commie, and it was OK.

Camile’s sparse wording and the lack of any lyric turn highlights the horribly commonplace violence of the war. It is not the recognition of common humanity (Fussel’s hoped-for result of reading World War I poetry), but instead the institutionalized definitions of the enemy as inhuman and animal that are worth noting here. Reading these accounts, the surrealism of war emerges in ways that the war poetry of World War I does not approximate. The boy’s youth becomes evident from his repetitions of ‘you know’. He struggles to keep the needle on the record. Indeed, in reading this account, I understand with greater precision why the aesthetic transformation of brutality and suffering is almost perverse (at worst) or utterly inadequate (at best).

In 2008, inspired by the Vietnam veterans’ example, American veterans of the current invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan conducted their own ‘Winter Soldier’ hearings. Almost entirely ignored by the mainstream media, the accounts of the systematic violence that results from occupation are instructive and moving insights into the contemporary experiences of soldiers and their diverse expressions of outrage and protest. Jason Hurd was deployed to central Baghdad with Tennessee’s 278th Regimental Combat Team in 2004:

I want to tell you a very personal story, and I want you all to bear with me, because this is always difficult for me to tell. One day, we were on another dismounted patrol through the Kindi Street area. We were walking past an area we called “the garden center,” because it was literally a fenced-off garden. As is policy, we are to keep all cars and individuals away from our formation. And so, a car was approaching us from the front. I was at the rear of the formation, because I was the medic and the medics hang out at the back with the platoon sergeant in case anything happens up front so you can respond. They waved the car off down a side street, so that it would not come near our formation.

As I made it up to that side street, the car had turned around and was coming back towards us, because the street was blocked off by a concrete T barrier at the other end. So I began doing my levels of aggression. I held up my hand, trying to get the car to stop. The car sped up. And I thought to myself, oh, my god, this is it. This is someone who is trying to hurt us. And so, instead of doing what I should have done according to policy and raising my weapon, instead, I did what you should never do, and I took my hands off of my weapon altogether and began jumping up and down, waving my hands back and forth, trying to get this car to stop and see me. The car kept coming. And so, I raised my weapon, and the car kept coming. I pulled my selector switch off of safe, and the car kept coming.

I was applying pressure to my trigger, getting ready to fire on the vehicle, and out of nowhere, a man came off of the side of the road, flagged the car down and got it to pull over. He walked around to the driver’s side door, opened it up, and out popped an eighty-year-old woman. Come to find out, this woman was a highly respected figure in the community, and I don’t have a clue what would have happened had I opened fire on this woman. I would imagine a riot.

Ladies and gentlemen, I hate guns. I spent ten years in the military, and I carried two of them on my side in Iraq, but I think they should be melted down and turned into jewelry. To this day, that is the worst thing that I have ever done in my life. I am a peaceful person, but yet in Iraq I drew down on an eighty-year-old geriatric woman who could not see me, because I was in front of a desert-colored vehicle—or, excuse me, desert-colored building wearing desert-colored camouflage.

In speaking with and actually experiencing the lives of those suffering occupation, Hurd’s impression of their lives and their behavior started to make more sense.

You know, conservative statistics say that the majority of Iraqis support attacks against coalition forces, the majority of Iraqis support us leaving immediately, and the majority of Iraqis see us as the main contributors to the violence in Iraq. This gives us a view at the prevailing sentiment in Iraq. And I’d like to explain it to everyone this way, especially in the South, because it rings with some semblance of truth to people down there. If a foreign occupying force came here to the United States, and regardless of what they told us, whether they told us they were here to free us, to liberate us and to give us democracy, do you not think that every person that owns a shotgun would not come out of the hills and fight for their right to self-determination?

It is commonplace to make fun of the American South, presuming that racism and cultural ignorance are their guiding lights. As a Southerner, Hurd presents another voice. His is a voice of dispossession, economic disenfranchisement and indeed honesty, gentility and decency. Hurd’s comments aren’t exhaustive by any means, but testimony from soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan are an important alternative narrative to the current justifications for the ongoing support for these wars. (As a side note, similar brave and momentous accounts are also emerging from Israeli soldiers through the ‘Breaking the Silence’ movement.)

Commenting on the contemporaneous New Yorker articles of John Hershey (later collected in his celebrated book Hiroshima (1946)), the journalist and critic Dwight MacDonald labelled the book an artistic failure and noted that this failure emerged from a moral deficiency: ‘the dead-pan, keyed-down approach is so detached from the persons Hershey is writing about that they become objects of clinical description; the author appears like a specialist lecturing on some disease, with ‘interesting’ cases on the platform.’ MacDonald was perplexed that others found the ‘antiseptic’ prose powerful enough to relate the experience of the Japanese and create empathy with their plight. He concluded that maybe ‘my feeling is simply that naturalism is no longer adequate, either esthetically or morally, to cope with the modern horrors.’ What, if anything, may we demand of poetry, of language lifted to the sound of music, in the light of the current wars?

Lyric protests to the war too easily carry us away from the harrowing reality that these conflicts perpetuate. Think of how some of Bob Dylan’s early music evokes the vaguest atmosphere of Vietnam without in any way engaging with or even informing us about the meaning of that invasion and occupation. Yes, British soldiers are dying. But we must see that Afghans and Iraqis are also dying. Real remembrance means pushing ourselves, to demand ourselves to ask why: why are soldiers and civilians dying and why are we, under the cover of NATO, waging these wars? Honest and rational engagement with memory means taking your finger and following it through the narrative of history to see how the past informs and collides with the present.

Why do our governments continue to engage in imperial wars of aggression?

What prevents them from them even being discussed as such?

Remembering this past changes our feelings of pride to feelings of shame. In the nudity of prose, our own responsibility in relation to these current wars is laid plain before us. These wars were not strategic mistakes; they weren’t examples of American hegemony pulling Britain along for the ride; they aren’t even strictly acts of revenge: they are open acts of aggression. For sixty-five years, Germany has had to carry out the work of looking into the past. When will we enact similar remembrance of own actions?

In reviewing the first volume of poems by the young T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster found Eliot’s poems a refreshing break from marches and parades; he found them innocent of any ‘public-spiritness.’ He lauded Eliot’s songs of private disgust and portraits of people ‘who seemed genuine because they were unattractive or weak.’ Forster praised Eliot’s feeble protests against tea parties as something that didn’t get swept into the spirit of the war, but instead ‘preserved a tiny drop of our self-respect, he carried on the human heritage’. Perhaps here art has the greatest potential: for preserving and expanding what it means for us to be human. Even as Eliot’s Prufrock anxiously stirs his coffee or Virginia Woolf politely contains the war between two small brackets in To the Lighthouse, the world of war is present. Art, in its frivolity and freedom, can be its own form of protest—of no use or utility to anyone. The abstract and unregimented art of some of the era’s greatest poets remains defiant, and to many ears, deviant.

We may scream and scream with Cassandra and no one will listen. We may sing and a few might feel comfort. But we have greater responsibilities. We have time and access to information. We must at least try to remember carefully and urge others to remember with the same care. We have language and a responsibility to connect to people and to find a way of digging our boots into the ground and declaring that we have had enough. We have the responsibility to lurch toward the silence—be it a minute of silence, or a generations’ worth. This prodding in the silence means discovering other voices and other traditions. People not meant to be remembered may come to haunt us, be they ghosts from the past or the ‘unpeople’ of the present (in the words of British diplomatic historian Mark Curtis).

I no longer wish that slim monument of silence on November 11th to be an isolated and appropriated moment of remembrance. Remembrance must always be multiple, cacophonous and ever present. It can be a radical act: an opportunity to envision a much larger set of possibilities in the world.

As for language—‘poetry’—it will always be here and its infinite possibilities may always prove me wrong. Perhaps the poet will emerge, who, influenced by McCrae’s words, creates a new masterpiece. As Eliot’s later ‘Note on War Poetry’ (1942) states ‘War is not life’ and, we may further infer, war is not poetry or poetry war; every experience has the potential of being transformed into verse.

Our emotions
Are only ‘incidents’

In the effort to keep day and night together.
It seems just possible that a poem might happen
To a very young man: but a poem is not poetry—
That is a life.

War is not life: it is a situation,
One which may neither be ignored nor accepted,
A problem to be met with ambush and stratagem,
Enveloped or scattered.

The enduring is not a substitute for the transient,
Neither one for the other. But the abstract conception
Of private experience at its greatest intensity
Becoming universal, which we call ‘poetry’,
May be affirmed in verse.

Equally, poetry cannot offer enough food for us to shutter ourselves up for winter in our towers. In our own lives it might be worthwhile to let drop our tea cups and saucers, spoons and journals - to rip the hinges from their jambs and run into the streets, into life and launch ourselves daily into the silence so that we may begin the work of remembering.