War Horse: Fact and Fiction, National Army Museum, London - Museums Association

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War Horse: Fact and Fiction, National Army Museum, London

Michael Morpurgo’s novel about a horse’s experience of war has provided inspiration for theatre, film and radio. Sara Selwood sees how it works as an exhibition
Sara Selwood
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Michael Morpurgo’s bestselling 1982 novel War Horse is a fictional account of a former farm horse who is sold to the British army and survives various first world war battles.

At one level, it’s a sentimental story of an enduring friendship between Joey, the horse, and Alfred, the farmer’s son who enlists in order to rescue his beloved animal. At another, it’s about the universal suffering of war.

While the book was inspired by real events, its appeal lies in the conceit of the story as told from the horse’s perspective. We follow Joey’s struggle to survive in the muddy wastelands of war.

As a complete innocent, the horse is a literary device through which Morpurgo tells a story about the soldiers on both sides of the conflict, and of the people whose villages were turned into battlefields.

“My horse would witness it all, the pity and the futility and the huge senselessness, and the hope, too. I would see it and feel it through his eyes.”

Stage hit

Like many other popular narratives, Morpurgo’s War Horse is available on a number of platforms. The National Theatre put on a stage adaptation in 2007, which later transferred to the West End and Broadway. The BBC broadcast a radio adaption in 2008. Steven Spielberg’s film version will premier in the UK this month.
 
In the best tradition of popular children’s fiction – Alice in Wonderland and Where the Wild Things Are – and the experience of other Children’s Laureates, such as Jacqueline Wilson, it was only a matter of time before someone did the exhibition.

Morpurgo specialises in blurring the distinctions between fact and fiction, which plays into the tendency of the popular imagination to compound imagination with reality.

For example, War Horse describes a portrait of Joey hanging in the village hall of Iddesleigh, Devon, where he came from. Fans of the book who made the pilgrimage there were said to be disappointed not to see it.

To make up for this, the author commissioned a painting of the horse from Ali Bannister, portraitist and Spielberg’s equine artistic adviser.

Horse stories

It is to its credit that the National Army Museum’s (NAM) exhibition, War Horse: Fact and Fiction, does exactly what it says on the tin: it compares and contrasts the contents of the novel with the real-life stories of equines’ experiences of war.

The exhibition is organised around a number of themes: inspiration; requisition, transport and care; training and sport; roles; charge; no man’s land; legacy; horse heroes; and kit and equipment.

The mood changes dramatically from section to section – nowhere more so than from the lightheartedness of the introduction, which features images of horses cantering through open fields, to the next section, which covers requisition and transport.

This establishes the gravity of the animals’ situations and uses darkness and sound effects to give the impression of horses being shipped overseas.

The display of tools used to destroy wounded animals and those that succumbed to fatigue and disease gives a sense of foreboding. These include an axe and a “humane killer”, which fired a single cartridge into the skull.

The training and sport sections have all the swagger of the cavalry, with horses shown as status symbols. Further along, no man’s land is introduced by a life-size, ghost-like horse sculpted out of barbed wire. Hands-on interactives for children are distributed throughout these displays.

They include panels that slide open to describe horse heroics, saddles to sit on, silhouette horses to colour in, and books to read. There’s no getting away from the fact that the NAM has joined a bandwagon by tapping into the market that Morpurgo has already created.

The author; his publisher, Egmont; the National Theatre; the Handspring Puppet Company; and DreamWorks are all are given ample space in the exhibition, and the theatre is contributing to the programme.

War Horse must be an absolute gift for the museum’s director, Janice Murray, who is pursuing a family-friendly strand with a recently launched Kid’s Zone and NAM children’s parties.

A downside, however, might be that the market for horses and war is reaching saturation. At about the same time that the exhibition opened, and in the run up to Remembrance Day, Radio 4 was broadcasting Andrew Motion’s Laurels and Donkeys, a sequence of poems that draw on soldiers’ first-hand experiences of the two world wars and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a lighter vein, the BBC also serialised Warhorses of Letters, a comedy based on the exchange of love letters between Napoleon’s and Wellington’s horses, set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic wars. The two horses, Marengo and Copenhagen, whom the BBC present as gay, feature in the NAM exhibition.

Imperial War Museums (IWM), has been reflecting on the theme of animals and conflict for some time. IWM North was programming Animals and War events until the end of November 2011.

The IWM’s 2006 exhibition, The Animals’ War, had a broader remit than the NAM show by referring to the estimated 16 million animals exploited during the first world war.

For me, a troubling aspect of the NAM exhibition is its focus on “horse heroes”. The campaigner George Monbiot regards our attitude to what he calls “the cult of the heroic animal” as particularly awkward.

He sees this veneration as deliberately counter to, if not somehow justifying, our neglect of human victims of conflict.

It’s unclear where the NAM sits on this. It notes that the Animals in War Memorial in London was unveiled the year before the Women At War Memorial on Whitehall.

But it also engenders great sympathy for working horses, donkeys and mules by focusing on the work of animal welfare charities. I was left wondering whether this ambivalence was intended or accidental. But, on refection, this exhibition engenders curiosity precisely because of its inconsistency.

Sara Selwood is an independent writer, researcher and consultant

Project data

  • Cost £312,000
  • Main funder NAM
  • Exhibition team Becca Hubbard; Pip Dodd; Kate Swann; Alison Davis; David Collens (all NAM)
  • Exhibition design and brand/marketing design Alison Davis, Regina Diskin
  • 3D design MET Studios
  • Exhibition build MER Services
  • Object mounts Colin Bowles
  • Picture framing Academy Framing
  • Conservation in-house; Museum Conservation Services (paper); Rupert Harris Conservation (metals)
  • Exhibition ends August 2012


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