Commemoration and empathy
Children’s fiction that draws upon the First World War
War is still a reality
People prayed, or wished, or said, as it drew to a close, that the First World War had been the ‘war
to end wars’. Its impact was truly global: the political map of the world was redrawn. The huge
movements of peoples that resulted from this led to a flu pandemic that killed thousands if not
millions of souls. Yet the war just lasted for a few months longer than four years. It is sad to reflect
that for some children in the world today, living in zones where conflict has raged, on and off, for
decades, war is all they have ever known, and the impact on their health, aspirations, educational
opportunities and life expectancy is truly terrible.
Yet for children born and brought up in Britain over the last ten or fifteen years, imagining life in a
conflict zone must be extremely difficult. Sadly there are children from families in the Armed Forces
who have lost a parent; and the occasional terror attacks that assault citizens on the street fill us
with horror, but imagining life in a war-torn country with its accompanying privations, insecurity and
the loss of loved ones is mostly beyond us. We live on a globe where war remains a reality and our
communities include those who have fled conflict situations, so although we cannot imagine it
ourselves, we know that this is something that profoundly affects fellow human beings: some we will
never encounter, and some, having fled their homeland, may be living next door.
Commemoration and empathy
As a nation, we are invited and asked, a hundred years after it took place, to commemorate the First
World War. If this commemoration is to have some ultimate purpose, other than a recounting of
national stories and a listing of dates, perhaps this might be for us all to develop an appreciation that
war is a terrible thing that devastated the world more than once in the last century and devastates
the lives of children and adults, still, today. Fiction is one route into this.
Using fiction
Maurice Lynch, in his little book Tell Me a Story: Story and RE (BFSSS National RE Centre, 1990)
suggests that in sharing stories with children we are seeking to help them develop:
 A sense of awe and wonder
 A sense of transience and constant change
 A sense of pattern, order and purpose
 An awareness of and relationship with the natural world (wind, fire, light, darkness, water,
stone, wood)
 An awareness of special worth, uniqueness, identity
 An awareness of community, its demands, values, rituals and celebrations
 An awareness of others as feeling, thinking people – relationships
 An awareness of joy and celebration
 An awareness of sadness, loss and suffering
 An awareness that life involves choices and that making them is often hard
Stories create a climate where children can respond both cognitively and affectively:
Cognitive
Affective
What was it about?
Why did she do that?
Are there other stories like it?
How would you have felt?
I wonder why we tell that story?
Stories help us to:
 Respect and value the ideas of others
 Evaluate interpretations
 Develop empathy and understanding
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The extraordinary success of the play and the film based on Michael Morpurgo’s novel Warhorse,
persuades us that people are ‘up for this’. So as we seek to create commemoration events, of many
kinds and for many people, over the next few years, it may be worth investigating the collection of
children’s fiction that draws upon the First World War as a way to rehearse not just the facts and
feelings of a century ago, but to change us, so that when the occasion arises, we can align ourselves
with those who still encounter the horrors of war, and stand beside them, not just with sympathy,
but with empathy.
Fiction titles for children and young people
Sam Angus, Soldier Dog, Square Fish, 2014, ISBN: 978-1250044174
Paul Dowswell, Eleven Eleven, Bloomsbury, 2012, ISBN: 978-1408826232
Jim Eldridge, Stories of the First World War, Scholastic, 2014, ISBN: 978-1407140551
Michael Foreman, War Game, Pavilion Children’s Books, 2006, ISBN: 978-1843650898
Michael Foreman, The Amazing Tale of Ali Pasha, Templar Publishing, 2014, ISBN: 9781848778979
Sonya Hartnett, The Silver Donkey, Walker Books, 2008, ISBN: 978-1406304299
Michael Morpurgo, War Horse, Egmont, 2012, ISBN: 978-1405259415
Micahel Morpurgo, Private Peaceful, Harper Collins, 2004, ISBN: 978-0007150076
Linda Newbury, The Shell House, Red Fox, 2003, ISBN: 978-0099455936
Linda Newbury, Some Other War, Barn Owl Books, 2002, ISBN: 978-1903015209
Marcus Sedgwick, The Foreshadowing, Orion Children’s Books, 2006, ISBN: 978-1842555170
Marcia Williams, Archie’s War, Walker Books, 2014, ISBN: 978-1406352689
Non-fiction titles for children and young people
Peter Hepplewhite, True Stories from World War 1, Macmillan 2014, ISBN: 978-1447256298
Barroux, Line of Fire: Diary of an Unknown Soldier, August-September 1914, Phoenix Yard
Books, ISBN: 978-1907912399
Paul Dowswell, The Story of the First World War, Usborne 2014, ISBN: 978-1409523468
Teaching resources
Chris Hudson, What Price Peace? Barnabas in Schools, 2014, ISBN: 978 841016917
Anyone wishing to include children in events related to First World War commemorations will find
helpful ideas in this book, intended to resource primary school teachers.
Offering cross-curricular teaching material with a strong RE element, the book focuses on four
themes, ‘Patriotism and protest’, ‘Keeping yourself human’, ‘Caring for the soldiers’ and ‘Myths and
reality’. The treasures of this book are the stories, each carefully researched and engagingly told, of
individuals who engaged, cared, challenged and suffered.
Three assemblies conclude the book. These are assemblies (input with a short prayer), rather than
acts of worship, each concentrating on an event that might be the focus of a commemoration at
some point over the coming four years. The first, ‘How the Great War started’, ingeniously
examines the vainglorious ambitions and futile outcomes of imperialism using paper hats.
Gill Ambrose, Editor of ROOTS Adult & All Age
www.rootontheweb.com
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