I DON’T wear a poppy. I used to – perhaps in honour of the grandfather I never knew, or my mother’s uncle’s two sons who didn’t come home. Just like in every other family in Scotland.

But I have been driven away by the complete lack of any objective judgment of the abomination of World War One that has in recent years accompanied the almost glorification of it.

There was no glory in the First World War. To see gathering in flamboyant ceremony in Westminster Abbey the great and the good, the high and the mighty, today’s inheritors of the pride and the power that sent hundreds and thousands of unwitting, unwilling often and latterly very often terrified young men into certain oblivion distresses me. What exactly is it the poppy does? Does it say sorry?

Who reminds us that it was Britain that declared war, not Germany – which had suggested a negotiation. Who reminds us that young men with virtually no training were sent over the top and killed in their thousands within weeks – and sometimes days – of volunteering? Who reminds us that, as the young volunteers ran out, men right up to their forties, some with large families, were conscripted to provide the cannon fodder? There is plenty of graphic material showing the absolute horror of mankind’s wickedest folly. Who is showing this to all our children? Why are we dressing some of them up in uniforms?

Who understands that World War One finished off the work of Clearances in huge areas of Highland Scotland, leaving communities all across it with virtually no men at all?

I have a photograph in my head that will never leave me. It is of a leg with a bit of a kilt. Yes. That’s all – a leg with a bit of a kilt in the mud. That is World War One.

Perhaps I will wear one day a red, black and green Biafran poppy, in honour of the two million Biafrans starved to death by the UK and the US (who stopped the mercy flights carrying food into the newly declared republic). Because Biafra had all that oil and we had a cozy relationship with federal Nigeria.

Or what colour would my poppy be to say sorry to the four million – or is it five or six million? – relatives of the hundreds and thousands of civilians we have obliterated in Iraq and Libya and Syria – and all the rest. Or maybe they don’t matter. They’re black and brown.

But none of that was a hundred years ago. In historic terms that was just a short time ago.

There is a new Scotland emerging. Or maybe the old Scotland that was always there. It is a Scotland that wants no part in imperialist bullying and armed grandstanding. And I want to be a part of that kind of Scotland. But only if it has a constitution that says that any weaponry or armament we may manufacture for use in our own defence will never be sold to anyone else and our men and women will never ever be dressed up in uniforms and armed and sent off to engage in aggression, warfare or theft in other people’s countries. Never ever.

And maybe then I will wear our poppy again.

David McEwan Hill
Argyll

I WENT to the war memorial at Straiton Village to remember my Great Uncle Alexander Hunter of the Royal Canadians. He had emigrated to the USA before 1914 and went to Canada to join up. He was killed in 1917 at the battle of Vimy Ridge. He was 24.

I was at Straiton with my daughter, her partner and her little six-week-old son Aaron, my grandson. I know in my heart they will carry the family remembrance for Alexander when I can no longer do so. I had a sad but lovely day.

I then sat at home later to watch the ceremony from the cenotaph in London and shook my head. All those politicians, past and present, representing the country they would drag (and have dragged) into a war at the drop of a hat, the country they spend millions on “defending” with an apocalyptic weapon, a country that sells arms to Saudi Arabia to murder innocents in Yemen. It’s wrong, so wrong.

They should not be there!!

The real heroes were the ordinary people who walked past the cenotaph, without limbs or sight or with mental issues, caused by war. Those are the ones who should be laying the main wreaths on behalf of the country and not just playing a bit part. I will remember THEM, not the clowns who put on one of their two faces and wear black for a day!!

Iain McEwan
Troon

ON Sunday I paid my respects to the fallen of all conflicts that England and her colonies have involved themselves in.

As an ex-serviceman myself, I can certainly understand the euphoria of daft wee laddies (and daft big laddies too!) when the siren call of the recruiting sergeant seems to offer a life of adventure.

Saying that, my own two grandfathers had different experiences in the “Great War”.

My grandfather on my dad’s side was what came to be known as a “Lord Derby’s man”. Forget the “conscription” story. My grandfather was press-ganged at the side of the road in 1916. He was 31 years old. Married with two children. His wife had no idea what had happened to him. They thought he had been murdered, until they received a letter from the Western Front telling them he had been “conscripted”, and was in the Gordon’s. He saw action and was badly wounded, but made it home.

My maternal grandfather enlisted at 14, in 1914 along with 11 of his cousins. Fortunately for him his mother stood outside Castlehill Barracks in Aberdeen and demanded that the War Office return her youngest son as he was underage. The commandant of the barracks denied all knowledge of her son at the gate! Until, that was, he came marching past in an oversized kilt, shouting to his mither that he wanted to come home!

He was told to fall out and get ready for his discharge. His cousins called to their aunt to go get their mothers to come for them.

I’m told that my grandfather shouted to his cousins that they were off to war, and likely to be killed. Of the 11, only six made it back.

As Socrates is supposed to have said: “Only the dead see an end to wars”.

Sandy Allan
Newburgh, Ellon