I think all British children of my generation know that retrospective explanation, Andrew. I believe otherwise, basing my opinion on some of the "trench" literature of the time. This, for instance, by Isaac Rosenberg:
‘Break of Day in the Trenches’
The darkness crumbles away
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies,
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver -what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in men’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe,
Just a little white with the dust.
The poppy is a weed of cornfields that were commandeered, destroyed, lay fallow and were gradually brought back to their original purpose by those who survived. It is known in botanical circles for its persistence.
Some people believe that the above poem (not my botanical tangent) was responsible for the choice of the poppy as a symbol, making it specific to that particular conflict which was, at the time, referred to as "the war to end all wars".
The poppy I wear, notionally, is the one the son of a Latvian Jew carried behind his ear for a while before he died on the Somme at the age of 27. It is not red with blood; it is white with the dust of his last line.
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