Litopia After Dark

On this day in 1918 – the eleventh day of the eleventh month, at the 11th hour – the hostilities of the First World war formally ended. This is Remembrance Day, aka Poppy Day. But why poppies? Well, contrary to popular belief, poppies have been associated with war since at least Napoleonic times, when a writer first noted how poppies grew over the graves of soldiers. It is theorized that the damage done to the landscape in Flanders during WW1 greatly increased the lime content in the soil, leaving the poppy as one of the few plants able to survive. At the war’s conclusion, it was an American professor who first suggested that wearing a red poppy year-round would fittingly honour the war’s fallen. Soon, the red silk poppy had been adopted as an official symbol of remembrance by the American Legion. And then the idea spread to Britain, where Field Marshal Douglas Haig – the "Butcher of the Somme” – used the motif to promote The Royal British Legion, which he co-founded. And yet, the poppy symbol remains an eni