Contrary to the idea of its critics that it will do no more than promote a blinkered patriotism, the approaching centenary of the first world war promises memorials to those who abstained from or opposed the fighting; anti-war memorials, if you like. Earlier in the summer, the Jimmy Reid Foundation asked Glasgow's council to erect a plaque that would "write back into history" the city's revolutionary socialists and pacifists whose opposition to what they saw as a capitalist and imperialist conflict earned them jail sentences, ill-health and opprobrium. This week in London that old pacifist warhorse, the Peace Pledge Union, announced that, rather to its surprise, it had received £95,800 from the Heritage Lottery Fund to help it celebrate the war's 16,000 conscientious objectors. The "No Glory" campaign, which includes Jude Law, Brian Eno and the poet laureate among its signatories, intends via concerts and books to remind us that the war was "a total disaster" that should never be repeated (though of course it has been).

Who can doubt that all of this is to the good? Certainly in Glasgow's case the surprise is that it has taken so long to recognise the anti-war stance of figures who later became almost mythical as the founders of Red Clydeside; so far as the Jimmy Reid Foundation can ascertain, not a single commemoration of those who opposed the war exists anywhere in Scotland. But when the supporters of these worthwhile projects go on to hope that they will challenge what they call "the official narrative", the wonder is that an official narrative still exists – if that phrase means military bands and winged victory. What most of us have grown up with since the early 1960s is another narrative, the popular narrative, which features mud, useless slaughter and poetry. It may be, as the historians' trade union is fond of complaining, that our knowledge of the war owes too much to imaginative literature, but that being the case and the pity of war being well established, how much of the counter-narrative on offer can be unexpected or revelatory?

Standing in front of two Scottish graves this month, I thought of how our popular perception of the first world war makes certain kinds of neglect easier to remedy than others. The graves were of two men who died in the 1920s, famous enough (hugely famous in the second case) to prompt genuine mourning among people who had never known them. The first grave held the remains of John Maclean, now perhaps the most prominent member of the group that the Reid Foundation want to restore to history, which also includes the swashbuckling Independent Labour MP Jimmy Maxton and the pacifist/suffragette Helen Crawfurd. The second grave belonged to Field Marshal Douglas Haig.

Maclean is to be found in Eastwood cemetery in Glasgow's southern suburbs, where he was taken in 1923 with a crowd of thousands following the cortege. The headstone is very plain; touchingly, his name is followed by the letters MA – evidence that his family took pride in his self-improvement – but there's nothing to suggest that before 1914 his classes in Marxism drew the largest audiences of their kind in Europe; or that the Bolsheviks appointed him the Soviet consul in Glasgow, which Maclean imagined as the revolution's starting point; a British Petrograd. Or that he twice went to jail for incitement and sedition, telling the court, "I come here not as the accused but as the accuser of capitalism dripping with blood from head to foot." According to Isobel Lindsay of the Reid Foundation, if Maclean and his fellow socialists had been heeded, "one of the darkest periods in Scottish and British history could have been avoided". On a wet afternoon in Eastwood cemetery how unlikely this hope seems: that a working-class movement, powerful for a time in Glasgow, could take on the nation states of Europe and defeat their crowned heads, bureaucracies, treaty obligations, propagandists and armies. Still, the feeling the grave evokes is fairly straightforward: Maclean's life shows that there was brave if limited political (rather than only moral) opposition to the war that ought to be better known and understood.

Haig's grave, on the other hand, presents the visitor – this visitor at any rate – with the difficulty of knowing what to feel. It lies among the beautiful ruins of Dryburgh Abbey in a loop of the Tweed, only a few feet away from Sir Walter Scott and a mile or so from Bemersyde, the Haig country seat that a grateful nation bought from his cousin and gave to the field marshal in 1921. The headstone is as humble as Maclean's – intentionally humble ("He trusted in God and tried to do the right") with a bronze plaque nearby advertising its humility by pointing out that it no way differs from the hundreds of thousands of other headstones "placed in many lands over his comrades who fell in the Great War". This is the equality of death, when a little more equality in life might have been welcome from the man who commanded the largest British army in history, whose blood-soaked strategy of "big pushes" and attrition succeeded (in the words of Blackadder) only in moving the general's drinks cabinet "six inches closer to Berlin".

How many people come here? Perhaps not many. There were a few paper flowers at Maclean's grave and here at the Haig family plot there are none. And yet, comparing British casualty rates with those of France, Germany and Italy, Haig's reputation looks to have been disproportionately blackened. His supporters among historians argue that his vilification began posthumously in the 1930s when his old enemy Lloyd George published his memoirs, in a climate already made receptive to hearing bad news about generals by the sudden burst of literature – All Quiet on the Western Front, Journey's End, Goodbye to All That – that appeared 10 years after the Armistice. The military theorist Basil Liddell Hart, who was gassed at the Somme and inimical to Haig, helped Lloyd George with his memoirs and then did the same for Alan Clark, whose 1961 book The Donkeys inspired the musical Oh What a Lovely War! which in turn inspired Blackadder.

In this way, the decline of Haig's reputation into a caricature of a stubborn, callous and unenlightened commander in chief can be attributed to a narrow cultural conspiracy. Any account of the Somme or Passchendaele will test this idea, but the fact is that until his death in 1928 Haig remained a remarkably popular figure. "We want Duggie … we want Duggie", the students at Edinburgh chanted when he got his honorary degree in 1919. "In the immediate aftermath of victory Haig was seen as the instrument of a wonderful deliverance," Gary Sheffield writes in the most recent pro-Haig biography, remembering that six months earlier the British army had seemed on the brink of defeat.

His coffin lay in state for two days in London and three in Edinburgh. Thousands of mourners, many war veterans, filed past it. An early live broadcast by the BBC made his funeral at Westminster Abbey into a national occasion. Nobody then could have imagined his reincarnation in Blackadder

The "official" narrative of the first world war – that it had been a war worth fighting, worth "the sacrifice" – began to crumble soon after and can never now be resurrected. For all these reasons, Maclean's grave is a less troubling thing to look upon than Haig's; with him we know where we stand.

• This article was amended on 17 September 2013. An earlier version said that nobody after the first world war could have imagined Haig's reincarnation as Stephen Fry. To clarify: Stephen Fry portrayed the fictional character of General Melchett in Blackadder. The role of Haig was taken by Geoffrey Palmer.