THE annual Poppy Appeal was launched yesterday to help the Royal British Legion raise funds for members of our armed forces past and present.

Nationally, the target for this year’s appeal is £40 million and if Jersey lives up to its usual standards of generosity, it will make a contribution to the total that is not only significant, but also of impressive proportions given the Island’s limited size and population.

The red Flanders poppy is, of course, a familiar symbol of the sacrifices made by British serviceman and women in theatres of war around the world. Most people will be aware that the symbol was chosen because, amid the chaos left by trench warfare on the Western Front during and after the First World War, poppies were the first flowers to bloom among the shell-holes, churned mud and barbed wire.

The symbol was chosen some nine decades ago and the generation of soldiers, sailors and airmen that it first honoured has disappeared. Sadly, the ‘war to end all wars’ in which they took part failed to achieve that end, and since the Armistice in 1918 there have been numerous other conflicts, great and small.

The Second World War, Korea, the Malaya emergency, the Falklands, Iraq and now Afghanistan have played their malign parts in killing and maiming those bearing arms for monarch and country.

This means that far from being a commemoration of a single struggle that is now very much the stuff of history, the Poppy Appeal remains active in helping veterans old and young who have suffered as a consequence of service.

At £5 million higher than last year’s target – which was reached – the sum being sought this year is clearly a hefty one. It is also an ambitious objective given the state of the national economy and its effect on the pound in people’s pockets.

Although Jersey may have been less affected by recessionary pressures than the UK, it has been far from immune from them, so our appeal organisers may well be anxious about Islanders’ willingness to contribute.

It is, however, likely that receipts will remain impressive in spite of the present circumstances. Jersey folk of all sorts and from all sorts of backgrounds can be counted on to make their donations and, as always, wear their poppies with pride.