Review Section

Society & Animals 21 (2013) 591-593 brill.com/soan

Review Section

Fact and Fiction: Reinterpreting Animals in a National Museum Pip Dodd (Curator), War Horse: Fact and Fiction [temporary exhibition at The National Army Museum in London from October 22, 2011, until March 31, 2013].1

Overview This exhibition is based on the children’s bookWar Horse by Michael Morpurgo, which he says was inspired by a conversation with a World War I veteran and his own feelings of anger when he learned of the slaughter or sale of horses to butchers at the end of the war (Purves, 2011). Characters from the book—Albert the farm boy and his [sic] horse Joey—are used to draw out information about real-life horses and soldiers from the National Army Museum Collections whose advertising material underlines the exhibition’s focus on “encouraging visitors to think about the millions of war horses who have supported the British Army across time” (National Army Museum, n.d.). So, while this exhibition is not about “all animals who have died in war, but only those who served . . . alongside British and Allied forces,” as Hilda Kean (2011, p. 62) has said of the Animals in War memorial in London, it can at least be seen as “an attempt to incorporate animals explicitly and positively within British history and heritage” (p. 60).

Do National Museums Have a Role to Play in Democratizing Animal Narratives and Interpretations? Rather than glorifying and romanticizing war, as might be anticipated in a national museum of the army, themes throughout this exhibition correspond to issues raised in Morpurgo’s work, namely, animal welfare, the relationship between animals and humans, and the suffering and huge loss of life of both. In bringing the novel into a national museum setting, it could be argued that, far from “join[ing] a bandwagon by tapping into the market that Morpurgo has already created” as another reviewer recently stated (Selwood, p. 47), the curatorial team is giving public recognition to animal suffering as well as a public airing of unpleasant facts and difficult issues, rather than leaving them largely unseen in archives. For example, the acquisition records of the Army Remount Department show horses as a com- modity of war, being described purely in terms of the purchase price paid and their physical size and color. Also displayed is a branding iron used on the horses. It is hard to view these artifacts in a positive light, but at least they are publicly acknowledged. If Joey and Albert— fictional characters representing horses and soldiers who fought and died in WWI—can bring new audiences to view the real-life artifacts and images of suffering, can representation itself play an active role in changing what it represents? This was a question asked by Jens Jäger (2003) when considering 19th-century photographs of British and German

592 Review Section / Society & Animals 21 (2013) 591-593 landscapes and monuments and how they were being interpreted and read at a particular cultural moment. Do exhibitions such as this one in a national museum have a role to play in what Carol Freeman (2011) has recently referred to as “The Animal Moment that is being felt in both academic and wider circles offer[ing] opportunities to re-examine and re-assess animal representations” (p. 154)? Although this is an official museum, the exhibition is not solely concerned with the role of the army, and its strength is in the variety of sources used to deliver information. For example, photographs show the work of the Blue Cross in treating horses in their hospitals and Dorothy Brooke in highlighting the plight of ex-war horses in Cairo. There is also a letter from Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig in January 1919 to the Duke of Portland (then Chair of the RSPCA), thanking the charity for all the support in WWI, “which ha[s] saved so many animals.” However, there might be more than one reading of this: are Field Mar- shall Haig’s thanks for the lives of the animals themselves or for the saving of army funds and efforts in replacing them? In showing such a range of materials in a new way and thereby expanding their visitor base, is the National Army Museum trying, as Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (1999) describes, to “work towards democratization of the museum . . . by reviewing existing historical (and other) narratives” (p. 4)? Citing Stuart Davies’ museum visitor studies,2 Hooper-Greenhill also points out that over one-third of all museum visitors go to national museums (1999, p. 5), so surely such an exhibition has a role to play in raising debate—at the national level—regarding animal-human relationships, the treatment of animals by humans, and the centrality of animals in human history.

Remembering and Memorializing Animals It is hard not to be affected by the real-life stories of personal relationships between cavalry- men and their horses in the Boer War and WWI, shown through the artifacts, personal records, and animal relics in this exhibition as well as the award of medals to animals for their war service—although, as Hilda Kean has commented in Lest We Forget (2011), animal commemoration is often more about making humans look better (p. 69). One such example can be found in this exhibition in the account of Wellington’s treatment of his horse Copenhagen, who was given a funeral with full military honors and buried on the Duke’s Hampshire estate. At least there are traces of these commemorated animals: we can see images of some; are given hints of the personalities of others in soldiers’ letters or diaries; and we know that they did exist from their given names or relics. Erica Fudge (2002) reminds us that such representation is often more about human identity through the animals than about the animals themselves (p. 9), but the same cannot be said for the central piece of this exhibition. Laura Antebi’s Joey in No-Man’s-Land, a life-sized silver barbed wire sculpture of Morpurgo’s horse Joey, has no images of men in mud, no representations of human bodies; this is distinct animal suffering. The only references to humans in this installation are subliminal, through the title of the piece or the invention of the barbed wire; this transition from “facts” to emotional response prepares the visitor for the final theme of the exhibition—that of commemoration. At this point visitors are invited person- ally to memorialize a horse from the exhibition by naming and coloring a horse cut-out to pin on the collective memorial board. Selecting one horse is very difficult, so here’s to the