A special place among Bory Jenő’s First World War memorials is held by the work commemorating former pupils of the Royal Hungarian State Ybl Miklós Secondary School in Székesfehérvár. It preserves the memory of students who fell in the war, and was of particular personal significance to the artist, who himself attended the institution and took his school-leaving examination there in 1899.
The Székesfehérvár Association of Former Secondary School Pupils resolved to erect the memorial in 1925. Seeing the commemoration of former schoolmates killed in the war as its first important task, the association commissioned Bory Jenő to design it. Its cost was met by public subscription, while the association collected the names and details of former pupils who had died heroically.
The work was intended for unveiling in June 1928, but was eventually unveiled on 30 September 1928. The ceremony became a major public event in the city, attended by county and city leaders, military and ecclesiastical dignitaries, teachers and pupils of the school, and relatives of the fallen. Lord Lieutenant Count Viktor Széchényi unveiled the statue, and Dr József Bezdek, the headmaster, accepted the memorial on behalf of the institution.
The central figure is a student portrayed as a young soldier. The bronze statue, about 240 cm high, stands on a limestone base one and a half metres high. Bory did not depict a battle scene, but created an ideal hero. The youth stands with raised head, holding a lowered flag in his right hand as a sign of reverence for the fallen, and a laurel wreath raised aloft in his left, a symbol of glory and remembrance. The figure expresses at once grief, respect and the nobility of sacrifice for the homeland.
The base bears the following inscription: ‘Erected in 1928 by the old pupils of the institution as a token of their reverence and gratitude in memory of former schoolmates who died heroically in defence of the homeland.’
The sides of the base originally bore the names of fallen students, while the reverse carried Sándor Sajó’s poignant lines:
‘Here the heroic students died,
Flowers torn and swept away by storm,
From the dust of earth they grew into heaven,
They must be sought in the heights.’
Weathering severely eroded the inscriptions over the decades, and the memorial was fully restored in 1989. The following year, new name plaques were placed on the wall behind it, also commemorating former secondary-school pupils who died in the Second World War. The statue still stands in Ady Endre utca near the former school, now the Székesfehérvár SZC I. István Technical School. It is often known colloquially as ‘The Fine Student Soldier’, aptly expressing the work’s central idea: the memory of a generation that left the schoolroom for the front and sacrificed its life there.