Quote Originally Posted by gaelic cowboy View Post
We dont mark it at all except for a couple of small scale services held by various NGO's or the various embassies of the countries. I fact I dont think I have ever actually seen an actual Poppy on anyone ever except on telly
And that's very sad, although you will see places where the poppy is worn widely - my estate for example. 49,000 Irishmen lost their lives in the Great War - and it was very widely supported by the Irish population. Only through the re-invention of our history by nationalists has that contribution been forgotten.

Obviously, my attachment to the symbol of the poppy is rooted in my own military service. I wear it for the global symbolism of course, and for the remembrance of men and women who gave so much - both in folly and in greatness - whom I never knew save as etched names on endless white stones.

But I truly wear it for my friends, the smiling faces I recall that did not return from the Falklands. Perhaps strangely, I also remember those terrible, frozen young faces of the Argentinian conscripts who would never leave those bleak hills. And the bemused expressions of the two Irishmen I killed before they wreaked unknowable destruction on innocents, shaking as I saw the light I had extinguished fade from their wide eyes. And finally, for my daughter taken before her time.

It is only by seeing the faces of the lost, by contemplating each and every one of their possible futures, how they may have lived and made the world a better or worse place, that we can comprehend the utter horror of war - be it the War to End War or a minor police action. For us or against, every one of those killed had a mother, a future, a life. Every single one lost everything they could ever be, everything they would ever have. They lost the entire world.

We should remember them. Not because of a symbol, but because not to do so makes us less human.