Yesterday was Remembrance Sunday, tomorrow is Armistice Day, and I am currently undergoing my yearly ritual of politely declining to buy poppies. I have nothing against Remembrance Sunday as a day, and I am more than happy to say prayers for soldiers on both sides of the conflict. I am actually very interested in the First World War especially, and go through periods of addiction to the literature of that time. But there is no way on this earth that you are ever going to persuade me to buy a poppy.

This is not an attempt to insult the Royal British Legion, whom I’m sure do a lot of work which is good and charitable. It simply isn’t work which my conscience will allow me to support. I take pacifism quite seriously, and whereas they see veterans as ‘heros’, I see veterans as ‘murderers’. That’s not to take away from the bravery which I have no doubt that soldiers have shown and will continue to show in conflicts around the world. Even were I to have a conscience-amputation, it’s not a job I personally would ever be any good at, so I don’t mean to knock people who are clearly courageous. The difference perhaps is just that for me, there is nothing ‘heroic’ about killing people.

This is going to make me sound very hard and unChristian, but I struggle to have legitimate sympathy for women whose husbands have been killed in Iraq, in Afghanistan wherever. I have sympathy for women whose husbands have been run over by buses, or contracted cancer, or randomly murdered, and depending on what sort of mood I was in and how much small change I had in my pocket, I may or may not donate money if someone was selling a poppy in order to assist them. But to assist women whose husbands made a living out of killing other women’s husbands? It just doesn’t appeal. Oh course, it’s sad for people to be widowed, whatever the circumstances. But do war widows deserve national charity? Not in my opinion. If you marry someone who is in the armed forces, you do so with the knowledge that there’s a real risk that person is going to end up dead. Yes, it’s a shame if you had ten children with him, but perhaps you should have given more thought to that risk before you conceived the said ten children.

For me there are only a handful of things which would automatically cause me to leave Babel without even a moment’s consideration. There are many situations where it is too difficult to generalise; I might leave him if he had an affair, or I might not, depending on whether he apologised. I might leave him if he murdered someone, or then again I might not, depending on the circumstances of who and why and how. But were he to join the army, for me that would be it. Whilst it might be possible to forgive a person you love committing one murder, it would be impossible for me to forgive someone who was permanently making a profit out of facilitating death.

Happily, Babel’s physique is such that I am not at all worried either about him joining the army, or about him having an affair

Of course, not everyone who is in the army is physically shooting people. But in my view at least, even if you are an engineer who repairs the refridgerators on a Navy warship, you are facilitating death. If there were no refridgerator engineers, after all, the ships wouldn’t be able to go to sea because they wouldn’t be able to store enough food. If the ships weren’t at sea, the planes couldn’t launch off them, the bombs couldn’t be dropped, the people wouldn’t be killed.

You always have a choice in life. Even those who were conscripted in the First World War had a choice. The one person I probably respect most in the whole sorry mess is Sassoon, who was one of the few intelligent enough to realise he had made the wrong choice, and brave enough to publicly declare it. If you haven’t read the book ‘Regeneration’ by Pat Barker, then you definitely should, though I’d bin off the rest of the trilogy unless you like reading about gay sex. The bits on Sassoon are very good though, and it offers an interesting insight into conscientious objection during the Great War.

Sigh. The sad thing about this is that poppies are actually my second favourite flower, and so ever since I was a small child I have longed to walk around wearing one at this time of year. I wasn’t allowed to buy one as a child because my mother is Irish, but that’s another story altogether…