What does it mean to wear a poppy today?

corps were the cause. If you’ve ever looked at a lapel in November and wondered why the poppy is the flower attached to it, the answer is corpses and chemistry. Nowadays the poppy is associated with the Flemish fields. That shouldn’t be the case: the soil is too poor for them. But from 1914 onwards a richer substance was hidden in the corner of that strange field. Or, to be more precise, there were corpses: rotting, festering, fly-blown corpses, decomposing and covering the mud with a “plastering slime” as Siegfried Sassoon, a poet, wrote. The soldiers were repelled; the poppies were blooming. “The poppies are blowing in the Flemish fields,” wrote a soldier in 1915, “Between the crosses, row after row.”