THERE has been some discussion on this page over the correct way to wear a poppy. News to me, whose war memories include school gas-mask drill, is that women should wear the poppy on the left, and men on the right. Seemingly, this is important so that the leaf points to 11o’clock, signifying the Armistice at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.

But do you know what? I don’t believe the war dead would give a damn on which side the poppy is worn. I don’t believe they would give damn whether the poppy is red or white, another poppy-wearing issue. I don’t believe they could care less whether any of us wears a poppy at all. Thomas Hardy spoke up for the war dead when he imagined them awoken by gunnery practice. “The world is as it used to be”, reflects one. “All nations striving strong to make red war yet redder.” A companion ponders: “I wonder, will the world ever saner be?” Hardy’s war dead predated the First World War, and since then, of course, we’ve had another. The first was confidently dubbed “the war to end all wars.” Though no-one was rash enough to label the second the same, its concluding horror, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was nevertheless tacitly taken as an ultimate. Appropriately acronymed MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction would guarantee peace.

Despite all the solemnity of the annual Remembrance Day, hugely magnified on the centenary of the Armistice, who can doubt there will be a third world war? How can we be blind to it when our planet is wracked with wars? Okay, they are relatively small wars, though they are sending sad processions of refugees across the globe in World War Two numbers. Sooner or later, the big beasts seem bound to clash. And a new world war would be far less like its predecessor than the second was from the first. What he called “a deeply frightening” future of warfare was outlined recently by the commander of our latest warship, HMS Queen Elizabeth. Anticipating robots killing humans he also foresaw: “All sorts of vile methods – viral warfare, not just biological and chemical but genetic…attacks fundamentally against civilian populations through destroying infrastructure, power grids, cyber warfare.” With everything from banking to sewage disposal disabled, civilised life could vanish through several taps on a keyboard. It is in this context that someone sagely predicted: “The fourth world war will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Meanwhile the current Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has virtually taken up Thomas Hardy’s despairing but challenging pen. Respectful of the dead, her Armistice-centenary poem The Wound in Time nonetheless presents the war not as “the war to end all wars” but “death’s birthing place….What happened next?/ War. And after that? War. And now? War, War./…We learn nothing from your endless sacrifice.”

Amid all the Remembrance piety, this is what we need to hear. We, posterity, have let down the dead of two world wars. I’m not sure that a symbolic tearing off of our poppies, white or red, worn right or left, leaf aligned however it might be, and casting them into a black hole might not be seen by the war dead as entirely appropriate – and overdue.