The Poppies Still Grow
Why I Love Armistice Day
This is a summary of a bonus episode of the Reversing Climate Change podcast. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you enjoy your shows.
🔹 Quick Takeaways
Armistice vs. Veterans Day: Originally a day of mourning and reflection, Armistice Day marked the end of World War I at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, before it was renamed and reframed as a celebration of veterans.
The forgotten war: World War I lacks the moral clarity of World War II: no clear villains, only tragedy, confusion, and sleepwalkers stumbling into catastrophe.
The death of idealism: The “lost generation” emerged from the trenches disillusioned, breaking with the old world’s faith in civilization, order, and meaning.
The art of disillusionment: Hemingway, Picasso, and modernism all bear the mark of World War I’s psychic rupture; beauty shattered, faith gone, language insufficient.
The human cost: Millions died in muddy trenches for territorial inches, caught in a machine of honor, nationalism, and industrial slaughter.
The peace that poisoned peace: The Treaty of Versailles was so punitive it guaranteed the next war, birthing both fascism and disillusionment in its wake.
Why Armistice Day matters: It was never about victory; it was about grief. A shared pause for the living and the dead. Not to glorify war, but to ask what it was all for.
The poppy’s quiet wisdom: A symbol of both beauty and narcotic sleep, the poppy reminds us of fragility, forgiveness, and the hope that the dead might one day rise again.
Mercy as remembrance: To honor the fallen is not to glorify the fight, but to vow never to send others to die needlessly again.
“In Flanders Fields”: Ross closes by reading John McCrae’s famous poem, tying the narcotic calm of the poppy to resurrection, remembrance, and reconciliation.
📝 Remembering the Lost, Not the Victors
At the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, 1918, the guns fell silent.
For a brief moment, humanity stopped killing itself — not because it had solved anything, but because it could no longer bear the cost.
⚰️ The War Without Heroes
World War I defies the comforting binaries that make World War II so narratively clean. There’s no Hitler, no easy moral axis. Only alliances gone mad, national pride metastasized, and an entire generation slaughtered in the mud.
🔥 The Industrialization of Death
Ross lingers on the mechanics of slaughter:
Trenches, gas, bayonets, artillery shells that buried men alive. Static lines that barely shifted for years. Generals sending boys “over the top” to die for yards of mud.
He notes how Germany’s later invention of Blitzkrieg—fast, mechanized warfare—was born from trying to avoid that stalemate. The “lightning war” of 1940 was, in its own way, the ghost of 1914 learning how to move again.
🎨 The Death of Meaning
The real legacy of World War I, Ross argues, wasn’t geopolitical: it was spiritual.
The West’s illusion of civilization collapsed in Flanders’ mud. The belief that Europe was the world’s moral center, the pinnacle of progress and refinement, died amid bayonets and chlorine gas.
“It’s hard to claim you’re the most civilized people on Earth,” Ross says, “after Passchendaele.”
The aftermath birthed the Lost Generation — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Picasso, Eliot—artists who could no longer represent reality straight. Cubism fractured vision. Modernism broke language.
It was the aesthetic of a shattered world.
🕊️ The Meaning of Armistice
Unlike V-E Day or V-J Day, Armistice Day wasn’t a victory party. It was a requiem.
The dead outnumbered the living who understood why they’d gone.
The Treaty of Versailles, meant to secure peace, instead humiliated Germany and sowed the seeds for the next catastrophe. Ross notes the bitter irony: “It was such a bad deal that far-right and far-left movements were inevitable.”
And yet, amid ruin, something humane survived. Armistice Day became a day to remember; not to boast, but to grieve.
A momentary truce with our worst instincts.
🌺 The Poppy’s Symbolism
Ross reflects on the poppy as both a flower of remembrance and a narcotic, a paradox of beauty and oblivion. The poem In Flanders Fields ties both meanings together:
The dead asleep beneath the flowers, whispering to the living to “take up our quarrel with the foe.”
But Ross hears another message: not the call to arms, but the mercy embedded in remembrance. To honor the fallen, we must learn to stop making more of them.
“Flowers are a reminder of mortality,” he says.
“They bloom, they die, and they remind us how brief and fragile life is.”
💭 Mercy as the Final Word
Ross closes by reading John McCrae’s In Flanders Fields, lingering on its mix of duty, sleep, and resurrection. He calls it “a beautiful, comforting thought”, that the dead might only be sleeping, awaiting reconciliation.
“It makes me hope there’s an afterlife where they can be reconciled to one another.”
For him, Armistice Day is not just about history. It’s a meditation on mercy — on what it means to forgive, to remember, and to resist the urge to glorify what should only make us weep.
🌅 Final Reflection
Armistice Day asks a simple question:
Can we honor the dead not by repeating their wars, but by refusing to send others into them?
Ross’s answer is as tender as it is hard-won:
“The default option should be toward peace.”
Great post, & episode.
We re-watched 1917 at the weekend.
Keep on keeping on.