Unveiling silent heroes of Great War

Every November, across the United Kingdom, poppy flowers catch my eye. Their deep scarlet-red petals and black centers are everywhere — not real blooms, which appear from June to September, but brooches pinned to black coats, tags on bags, and stickers on windshields.

Because poppies could flourish in soil churned up by firing and shelling, they became a natural symbol for fallen soldiers on the battlefields. In Britain, they are particularly associated with those who died on active service during World War I.

Each year, the British people mark the First World War's Armistice Day — also called Remembrance Day — on Nov 11 by laying wreaths of poppies at war monuments and memorials across the country.

In London, a wreath-laying ceremony is held at the Cenotaph — Greek for "empty tomb" — near Downing Street. As one of Britain's main national war memorials, the cubic stone pylon bears no individual names, only the inscription "The Glorious Dead".

I first met Peng Wenlan, Caroline Chu and Clive Harvey two years ago at the ceremony. They were laying the wreath to remember the Chinese Labour Corps, or CLC — the more than 140,000 Chinese workers who served the Allies during WWI, providing construction, logistics and recovery support.

These workers, mostly from Shandong province, were recruited by the UK and France and shipped to the Western Front. From 1916 to 1919, they dug trenches, built roads and railways, transported ammunition in northern France and Belgium, and many stayed after the war to clear mines and bury the dead.

Their sacrifices put China among the victors of WWI. While official records suggest that around 2,000 workers died, some believe the number was much higher.

Despite being the largest foreign labor corps to serve the Allies, the CLC remains little known in Britain and France.

Peng, co-founder of The Meridian Society, has spent almost a decade raising awareness of the CLC in the UK and produced an oral-history documentary, Forgotten Faces of the Great War: The Chinese Labour Corps, released in 2017.

"When we talk about war, we tend to think only of those who take up arms and fight at the front, but we forget those who work behind the lines," she told me.

At the time we met, Chu and Harvey were collaborating on a novel to bring the story of the CLC to a broader readership.

"When I was in school, the World War I was taught with no mention of China, not even a line," said Harvey, a British musician and author.

This month, I met the two again before the service, and they handed me an advance copy of their novel, For Whom the Temple Waits, scheduled for publication early next year.

Over the years, Chinese communities in Britain have also discussed ideas of a permanent recognition of the CLC. Mark Nam, a British-born Chinese priest, has recently launched a campaign to create and install a memorial plaque in the crypt of St. Paul's Cathedral — the resting place of some of Britain's most famous military heroes.

"Across the UK, there are more than 50,000 memorials to the glorious dead, yet none that bear the name of the Chinese Labor Corps. This memorial seeks to change that," Nam said.

When I reflected on this year's Remembrance Day, the Cenotaph, poppies, books, documentaries and memorials made me think that life can be remembered in different ways, a story can be shared via many forms, and the understanding of history in a society is not fixed but evolving, shaped by the commitment of individuals determined to remind the public of the forgotten.

And I tend to believe that the future generation will take a fuller view of the history that the scarlet-red poppies acknowledge not only the heroism of those on the battlefields, but also those who labored behind them.

The author is a correspondent at China Daily Europe based in London.