Poppies, And The Flower of England

Photograph credit: Robert Garbisch, June 2006

It was June of 2006. We Roman re-enactors of Legio X Fretensis, quite ludicrous yet profoundly natural and sublime in our gear, came across a field of English poppies. We were re-enacting history. We loved that we were doomed to repeat it, through our costuming and our roleplay.

Yet today it is not so humorous how we seemed doomed to synthesize the troubles of our history, and repeat the follies of the past.

Sting, who lived in the environs of Hadrian’s Wall, sang these lyrics in his song Children’s Crusade:

“The children of England would never be slaves
They’re trapped on the wire and dying in waves
The flower of England face down in the mud
And stained in the blood of a whole generation”

Sting at the time was comparing the lives lost to the folly of World War One to the folly of those being lost to the drug trade then blossoming rampant in Europe:

“Midnight in Soho Nineteen Eighty Four
Fixing in doorways, opium slaves
Poppies for young men, such bitter trade
All of those young lives betrayed
All for a children’s crusade”

Twenty four years after Sting’s lament of the waste of life, and now nearly 90 years after the end of the First World War, Armistice Day, we can reflect back upon the lyrics of Children’s Crusade with more perspective.

For the drug trade in opium is more fierce than ever, globally, driven by the war in Afghanistan.

Between now and this Armistice Day, which will occur on November 11, 2008, at precisely 11:11 AM GMT, consider and reflect how we can solve both the problems of young men dying in needless wars around the world, driven by profit and the desires of powerful rulers, and also how we can help solve the self-dissolution of damaging drug addiction.

The vision of poppies transfixed me that day. Being so close to Newcastle, I could see with my own eyes the same sort of poppies that would have sparked Sting’s creative vision. Almost as if I walked the fields of his own boyhood. I felt a deep bittersweet nostalgia that day. Respect and sorrow for lives lost to war, and to the dissolution of drug addiction. It was all the same for Sting. Someone profited, and others paid with their lives.

What runs through his mind these days, decades later, seeing how both zealotry-driven war and the profits of drugs are synthesized now, combined into a conflagration of crisis, fueling an even greater tragedy across Europe and Asia today? How would the peoples of ancient Europe have reflected on the “progress” we have made after nearly two millennia since the formation of Roman Britain? How are the wars we fight these days any more or less “civilized” than the ancient wars of domination and control fought at the foundation of the Wall we walked along?

I can only imagine.

• Children’s Crusade (Lyrics)
• Sting, October 13, 1990, “Children’s Crusade” (YouTube video)