Red Poppies
Visiting family, we happened to be in London during the one-hundred-year anniversary of the start of the First World War. There were a number of commemorations going on and the one that sticks in my memory was the dry moat that surrounds the Tower of London being filled with thousands of red poppies. ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red.’ They were ceramic poppies and at the time we visited the Tower, people were still installing the last of them.
The poppies ‘flowed’ from a ‘weeping window’ in the Tower to represent the flow of blood from 888 264 British lives lost during the conflict. Each day during the commemoration, within the moat at sunset, surrounded by the poppies, people of note read out the names of 180 Commonwealth troops killed during the war as part of a Roll of Honour, followed by a bugler playing the Last Post. The poppies were made by a team of people with links to the British Military Services. Five million people from around the world travelled to witness the commemoration… but when thinking of numbers, over eight and a half million Soviet Union military personnel died during the Second World War… Russia may no longer be an ally, but they were at the time, which says something about politics rather than people.
The greyness of the Tower walls and the green grass contrasted the brilliance of the shining red poppies, and while I don’t know the spacing, the massed 888 264 poppies covered a large area. If they were pine trees, I’d plant them at 1600 per hectare, so they would make a forest of 555 hectares (1 371 acres), which is how I equate numbers.
Inside the Tower were WWI displays and role plays going on with Beefeaters making conversation with the crowds. There’s the Tower green where Lady Jane Grey was beheaded, not for anything she did, but because of the plotting that went on around her… poor girl was just seventeen years old. Eighteen years earlier the same place is where Anne Boleyn was beheaded by sword; an apparently more ‘merciful’ death, she was probably just as innocent. In the White tower is a beheading axe, (often spelled ax), an unwieldy looking thing to me, so no wonder there were mishaps! The axe leans against a block.
I recall that the ‘trigger’ of World War One being the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serbian nationalists in June 1914… he was heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, so Austria-Hungary declared war against Serbia. That was the tipping point, but the scramble for Africa, the arms race (building Dreadnought battleships) were all contributing factors, plus the Russian civil war and social Darwinism… natural selection of the fittest or race elitism; the excuse for imperialism. Meaning, if your gun is bigger than mine, you are somehow better than me.
April 25 is ANZAC Day when we wear a red poppy to honour our war dead… yet we have learned little… it’s just that we have more sophisticated weaponry… and more Lady Jane Greys.
