I WON’T be wearing a poppy today, but I will be remembering the fallen in two world wars and those who survived and carried the brutal consequences to their graves. People like my grandfather, who was apparently a happy and hopeful young man when he signed up for the Highland Light Infantry and went to the Somme and other battlegrounds of the First World War but came back maimed, and not just physically.

He talked little about it. He talked little about anything, only when he had a drink, which was infrequently. What I can piece together comes from scraps of conversation, chats with the few colleagues who came back and with whom he occasionally met up for reunions, and the bound, khaki-coloured annals of the regiment he kept.

He didn’t speak about poppies and Flanders, but of mud and rats and gas and blood and friends dying beside him. At the Somme – or was it Ypres? Or Passchendaele? – he recalled arriving with his unit to relieve a Highland regiment, perhaps the Black Watch, in the trenches, who were still wearing kilts, sodden and caked with filth, hitched up around their waists, their legs bare and blackened.

He was wounded once, then sent back, and then wounded again. Caught by shrapnel, lying in a shell hole, he watched a young German around his own age and in rather worse condition bleed out. He was no socialist but he would have nodded at John Maclean’s observation that a bayonet is a weapon with a working man at either end.

What seemed to have the greatest effect on him – which I couldn’t believe until I checked it was true – was watching the Bengal Lancers, on horseback and carrying swords and sticks, charge across open ground at the barbed wire and fortifications of the German frontline and be mowed down by machine guns and artillery.

He blamed the British commander Douglas Haig, of the whisky family – “Butcher Haig” he called him – for the callous disregard of his men, for the two million casualties under him. The statistics are unimaginable – this is no Blackadder. In the 141-day bloodlet of the Somme alone there were more than one million casualties, 310,000 of whom were killed.

After the war, Haig was made an Earl – Viscount Dawick and Baron Haig, of Bemersyde in the County of Berwick – and in 1919, when disturbances broke out among British troops in Calais aching for demob, he wanted to shoot the ringleaders and was only dissuaded by war secretary Winston Churchill. His military career ended in January 1920, with a government grant of £100,000, “to enable him to live in the style appropriate to a senior peer”.

He retired to golf and charitable works, set up the Haig Fund, the British Legion and the poppy appeal. The poppy came from the poem In Flanders Fields, written in April 1915 by John McCrae, a Canadian army doctor, at Ypres, the day after his close friend had been killed in action and buried in a makeshift grave, just one of many.

“In Flanders fields the poppies blow, Between the crosses, row on row.”

But it wasn’t exactly a plea for peace and reconciliation, more about revenge. “Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw, The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die, We shall not sleep, though poppies grow, In Flanders fields.”

On a day in 1917, in what was a prophetic statement, one probably echoed throughout the country, the head teacher of Bournemouth High School for girls told her sixth-formers a “terrible fact”. She explained: “Only one out of 10 of you girls can ever hope to marry. This is not a guess of mine. It is a statistical fact.” Two million men were missing from the available pool, either dead or terminally incapacitated.

I suppose, then, my gran was lucky, because her husband came back, although it didn’t seem like that to me, or probably her. She brought me up, and my grandfather was a cold, remote man who never cuddled or displayed any affection although he did go on to some success. He was an orphan, brought up by an austere and religious aunt in the Highlands, and became a piano tuner, teaching himself how to play. He ended up managing Paterson’s music shop in Glasgow.

The wearing of a poppy has gone from being one of choice to a political diktat, as if not wearing one was traitorous behaviour. Almost unbelievably there have been protests about the local Richmond council painting poppies on the road, because it would be dishonouring the dead to drive over them and people have vowed to swerve around them or drive on the pavement. It also seems to be a command that anyone appearing on TV must wear one. Even the Cookie Monster, on The One Show recently, had one pinned to its wool.

But even that’s not enough. The North Antrim MP Ian Paisley complained to the BBC that two breakfast TV presenters had worn, and then apparently discarded, their poppies. Or perhaps they just forgot? Like the MP himself who was suspended from Parliament for 30 days two years ago for apparently forgetting to disclose that he had enjoyed a free holiday in Sri Lanka worth around £100,000.

The Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow, who hasn’t worn one onscreen, has called this pursuit of the dissenters poppy fascism, saying “I’m not going to wear it or any other symbol on air”, which was meant to be the new BBC directive, but there is clearly an exemption for the poppy.

This can go to absurd lengths. The Stoke City footballer James McClean, an Irish republican from the Creggan estate in Derry, is an annual tabloid target because of his refusal to wear one on his shirt, and has even had death threats. His line of refusal is over the British Army’s behaviour in his home town as he was growing up and, if it were just about commemorating the dead of two world wars, he says he would pin on the poppy.

In 1981, the then Labour leader Michael Foot was pilloried in the tabloids for wearing a “donkey jacket” at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. Jeremy Corbyn, after being criticised for wearing an anorak at an Armistice service at the Cenotaph, turned up for last year’s Remembrance Sunday ceremony in dark suit and coat, carrying the de-rigueur poppy, and was criticised for not bowing his head low enough.

This year the public will be banned from the service because of Covid, with only royals, political and military leaders, bowing from the weight of medals, and veterans allowed to be present. So, presumably no military bands, march-pasts, or Red Arrows in formation overhead. The tabloids will find it difficult to scorn the sartorial turn out of Keir Starmer, but no doubt they’ll find some other alleged misdemeanour to splash on.

In the First World War, millions died in a futile, grisly and essentially imperialist conflict; the Second World War saved us from subjugation and real fascism. British wars and military excursions since have never been glorious or, some would say, worthy of the poppy – not Aden, Palestine, Suez, Iraq or the numerous other military actions – and in none of those did the fallen die for our freedom.