Children Opening Speech

Children in war – SOFO Exhibition Launch, 21st October 2011

Opening speech by Professor Cecile Fabre

We are gathered here tonight to launch SOFO’s remarkable exhibition, Children and War. Children are war’s forgotten victims, and also its unmentioned participants – soldiers, bugle players, and in contemporary conflicts perpetrators of atrocities. It is a difficult topic: we are reluctant really to associate war and children. And yet, children appear in one of the most famous war poems ever written in the English language – Dulce et Decorum Est, by Wilfred Owen. Here is what he says:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Of course, Owen has in mind the 16, 17, 18 years old, who were sent to die in what he thought was the mindless butchery of the First World War. And in fact, one of the most enduring descriptions of the First World War is of hundreds of thousands of very young men being sent to die pointlessly, more or less indistinguishable from one another under the grime, the dust and the dirt of the battlefield. And yet, each of those men – more widely, each and every individual who fights and dies in war is rooted in a local community – a village, a network of friends and family, a house, a street school – our local community.

When we think about war, we can think about it in broad terms – as a succession of battles decided by generals and politicians for grand geostrategic purposes. But this exhibition compels us to think about war somewhat differently. It reminds us that significant events in war unfold through the acts, motives and suffering of individuals, each with their distinct local identity. In telling the story of those teenagers who died almost a hundred years ago, it brings to our mind the heavy price which Oxfordshire had to pay for the defence of the homeland. In telling the story of the children who were sent to die in Bergen Belsen thirty years later, it brings to our attention that our own soldiers, the Oxfordshire Yeomanry, were the first allied troops to enter the camp. In its display of a pitiful battered suitcase, a tight jumper, an oversized coat, a soft boy’s cap, it brings to life the fate of those thousands of children who were evacuated into our county from London and other vulnerable industrial centres, and prompts us to ask ourselves what we would do for our own children under similar circumstances. And right as you go in, through the stories of Grace and Hassan from Uganda and Iraq respectively, this exhibition also tells us, poignantly and painfully, that for many children all over the world, war is an ever present reality, a constant threat, an enduring pain which we, here, in this town, can sometimes help alleviate when we welcome those children as refugees.

This exhibition also tells us, incidentally, that war, for children, can be an adventure, a game, something to be thrilled about: you will have seen the display of old toy soldiers in the exhibition, together with an old handbook for playing war games. We might regret that. We might think that children could and should be kept away from war, in every way, even from war as a game. But before we do that, we would do well to remember the following words: ‘The toy soldier turned the current of my life.’ Those words were written by Winston Churchill, who of course had a life-long association with the Oxfordshire Hussars – an association which is the topic of another exhibition in the museum. One can’t help thinking that the toy soldier turned the current not just of his life, but of ours as well, and rather for the better all things considered.

This exhibition is a turning point for the Soldiers of Oxfordshire Trust. I was asked a couple of years ago to serve as an academic adviser to the Trust. So were others, some of whom are here tonight. All of us are deeply committed to the Trust’s project as shown tonight: to ensure that the regimental collections of pictures and artefacts are seen for what they are- as testimonies to the lives of thousands of Oxfordshire men and women who served and suffered in war and whose lives and experiences it is well worth knowing as a means to understand war better.

I have a more personal debt to acknowledge at this point. You will have noticed that I have said, in these opening remarks, ‘our county’, ‘our soldiers.’ You will also have noticed, as soon as I started speaking, indeed when my Colonel May pronounced my name, that I am not a native speaker of English - that I was not born in this country. I stand here before you tonight, as a French citizen who has spent most of her adult life here, in Oxford. My grandfather, then a very young medical student in France, was sent to work as a medic with the British medical corps at Bergen Belsen. It is thanks to SOFO that I learnt more about his experiences there than he himself has ever felt able to tell me. More widely, without the work that Trusts such as SOFO do, without exhibitions such as this one, those of us who do not serve or don't have relatives in the army are at risk of forgetting that war is not something which happens far away from us; war and its legacy are here, with us, through the refugees who come and live with us, the children in our schools whose father or mother is on deployment, through the pensioner whom we see every week at the post office and who still cannot bring herself to talking about her experience as an evacuee, through the grief-stricken parent who has just learnt that his 18 year-old son has been killed in Afghanistan.

I began by quoting from Wilfred Owen’s well-known poem, Dulce et Decorum Est. Let me end with some words from an unlikely source in this context, the British 19th century novelist George Eliot. Eliot does not write about grand gestures and solemn declarations. She writes about human beings, as individuals, each taken on their own, each with their own happiness and pain, each deserving of attention and concern. Here is what she says, and which I think is an entirely appropriate description of what SOFO are aiming to do:

‘We see human heroism broken into units and say, this unit did little – might as well not have been. But in this way we might break up a great army into units; in this way we might break the sunlight into fragments, and think that this and the other might be cheaply parted with. Let us rather raise a monument to the soldiers whose brave hearts only kept the ranks unbroken, and met death – a monument to the faithful who were not famous, and who are precious as the continuity of the sunbeams is precious, though some of them fall unseen and on barrenness.’