888,246

Have you noticed how numbers have become smaller? 
888,246 doesn't seem like a large number in today's terms.
The one-time price of a four bedroom family home is now the price of a one bed flat or - in London - a studio flat. Two pints will scant see change of a tenner. 
888,246 is a hard number to really ‘see’ in the mind’s eye today. It’s just small change to some broker. 
Small change. 
Too small, surely - too ‘few’ deaths for so long a war. 

Until you see the bodies laid out before you: or the poppies in this case, crowding for space around what the eye tells you is quite a large moat. Suddenly 888,246 is a huge number. It's always been a huge number of course, in cost of house terms, in salary terms, in number of lives lost - it's just sometimes hard to picture it's real size, perhaps the number has even lost it's meaning. 

If we get nothing else from the poppies at the tower, the size of the number is hard to miss. 

The other thing that is hard to miss is the face of the society that in some parts of the country buy four bed houses for £888,246, that live via social media, that document every single moment of the day for Facebook, Twitter, Instagram* etc. 
Etcetera - not a word that seems appropriate in a blog about dead bodies. 
No more so than the violent jostling for the perfect camera angle: "Look at that Tyre mark! That's cool! I gotta get a picture of that.**" 

It's like the scene in the History boys:-

Hector: They go on school trips nowadays, don't they? Auschwitz. Dachau. What has always concerned me is where do they eat their sandwiches? Drink their coke?

Crowther: The visitors' centre. It's like anywhere else.

Hector: Do they take pictures of each other? Are they smiling? Do they hold hands? Nothing is appropriate.

At Ground Zero in New York in April 2002 they were selling t-shirts saying "I've been to ground Zero" and people were smiling in front of the large site as workers still picked up the pieces. Smiling faces in front of camera's click, click, clicking to capture them at the site of one of the biggest peace time atrocities of a generation (at least). 
Less than a year before bodies had whistled through the sky and landed with a thud in that very spot. Bodies had burned. Lungs had been drowned with smoke. Bodies had been crushed. 
"Say cheese!" 

Is there anything left that can just be observed with the silence, stillness and sadness it deserves? Can we put our cameras away and live, here, now: look with our eyes and not our statuses? Can we do it anymore? Can we save our thoughts until we walk away? Can we save them until we are eating dinner or in the pub? 

One could argue that the Poppies have deserved every picture and every status, it's also why so many have seen it - it's grown with every status. But what is appropriate on the ground? 

Perhaps it was because I couldn't understand the words they were saying that I found the foreign tourists far better company than my countrymen as I tried to find some solitude and peace in the crowd. 
I could however understand one French couple who, when they found the words to express how they felt after a long silence, they found the appropriate words somehow. They described it as very moving and magnificent. Then they imagined their own countrymen and the fields in France. It was the only conversation I observed that was directly related to the display in front of them.

The Actress, Sheila Hancock says we should bulldoze the poppies to show the true horror of war, as if we cannot grasp it without visuals. Is one more image really what we need? Ugliness is everywhere, on our news channels everyday - does anyone need to see anything more horrific than the sheer number of poppies? Each one representing one dead man. Each one representing the lives of one of the estimated 4 million who have been to visit 'Blood swept lands and seas of red' - we owe our way of life to each of these men, if not our actual lives. Maybe 'the' man behind the poppy wouldn't have stood silently at a war memorial if he hadn't been shot by 'the enemy', an Officer of his own kind or a bomb. Maybe he would have wanted the picture that someone else didn't take, the tyre mark running alongside the poppy stalk. Maybe he would have been the 18 year old looking bored or the middle aged man arguing with his wife over which way to exit. Maybe he'd have had 1,235 friends on Facebook. Maybe he would see the poppies as a beautiful, yet horrible reminder of what it cost for us to have our lives today. Maybe he would think they are too beautiful, not ugly enough - not violent enough. Maybe he would live in a mansion. Maybe he would not have enough money to run his car. Maybe he would work such long hours he missed his children as they went from four to fourteen. 
Maybe. 

888,246 maybes. 



*I include myself 

**A quote from a man during my visit