The search for the First World War's 'meaning' began almost as soon as the War itself, and for some people, as Winter observes, the search still continues.5 In villages and towns throughout Europe visible evidence of that search may be found: in virtually all of them there are war memorials in the form of plaques, sculptures, and other objects which recall the First World War and the sacrifices which it entailed.

What or whom they commemorate, and precisely what about the First World War they ask viewers to remember, are questions to which there is no single answer, as Winter points out.6 Different meanings are yielded by different religions traditions and cultural norms. In France visitors encounter monuments aux morts, locating French memorials within a tradition of suffering and sacrifice, as Winter explains.7 In Britain and other Anglo-Saxon countries, by contrast, the memorials are war memorials. As Winter observes, the specific subject of remembrance here is at times less precisely fixed; the suggestion being that war memorials invite the viewer to recall more than the central facts of bereavement and loss of life during the First World War.8

Winter notes that war memorials inhabit three distinctive spaces and time periods:

(1) scattered across the Home Front prior to 1918 (largely in the form of temporary shrines);
(2) in post-War civic sites and churches during the decade following the Armistice; and
(3) in the war cemeteries abroad.9

As Winter elaborates, the first category features many commemorative objects drawing on the heroic images of war. The second category had conventional patriotic, as well as ecumenical, elements immediately emphasising the universality of loss, and the special features of aesthetic and national political traditions. These local war memorials arose from the post-War search for a language in which the values of the community for which the soldiers had laid down their lives could be reaffirmed. The third category embodies both a more enduring achievement and a more universal language which both draws on and, on occasion transcends, particular traditions.10 It is the second category of memorials which concern us here.

Mells is a scattered village in north Somerset with tree-shaded lanes on different levels, and disorderly groups of Mendip stone buildings. It lies in the midst of the headwaters of the River Frome in a triangle formed by Radstock, Frome and Shepton Mallet.11 The church there, St Andrew's, was probably built in the late fifteenth century; it is a modest building backed still by wide green fields. The Horner family was at Mells from 1524 at which time the Dissolution of the monasteries gave them the monastic buildings and surrounding acres rumoured to be the famous 'plum' in Little Jack Horner's pie (a rumour denied strongly by the family).12 The Horners had Mells Manor built on the old foundations laid by the church and enclosed the land as a deer park. In 1724 a young Horner married Susannah Strangeways, an heiress from Melbury, Dorset and her fortune allowed the building of a house within the park.13

Frances Graham married John Horner, bearing him three children - Katherine, Edward and Mark. In 1895 John Horner was appointed as Commissioner of Forests and Woods, and the Horners decided they needed a London house to go with this role.14 Frances consulted her sister Agnes (as she always did when she needed to make decisions), who was married to Herbert Jekyll brother of Gertrude Jekyll, the plantswoman and garden designer. Knowing of her sister-in-law's partnership with Edwin Lutyens, Agnes suggested the young architect to Frances. Lutyens was invited to Mells in October 1896 to see if he could help the Horners - which he did. After the death of Frances Horner's mother in 1900, the Horners moved from Mells Park into the more manageable Manor House where Lutyens also helped with alterations to the House, and the layout of the garden.15

As a family friend it is unsurprising that Lutyens was asked to design young Edward Horner's memorial following his death in action at Noyelles in November 1917. The memorial consists of an enormous equestrian statue on a plinth which is situated in the Horner Chapel (formerly the Lady Chapel) within St Andrew's Church (see Figure 1 photograph by Peter Lowry). The plinth, which is similar in design to Lutyens' Cenotaph, supports the equestrian statue designed by Sir Alfred Munnings, RA who is better known for his paintings of horses. This statue represents Munnings' first known venture into sculpture and on the strength of it, he was invited to do work for the Jockey Club. Sited on the plinth, below the horse's tail, is Horner's original wooden cross grave marker. There are two inscriptions carved on the plinth: on the left (looking at it from the horse's head) are the words (see Figure 2):

and on the right (see Figure 3): HE HATH OUTSOARED THE SHADOW OF OUR NIGHT.

On both sides of the plinth, below the inscriptions, there is a laurel wreath with AD MCMXVII inscribed within (see Figure 3). To the right of this statue there is a stained glass window depicting St Francis, and below it is fixed a wooden tablet (see Figure 4), inscribed:

The inscription on the wooden tablet contains several of what Hynes calls the 'Big Words' - 'Valour', 'Heritage', 'Swift and Noble Death' - he describes these words as affirming both the value and the meaning of the ideals which prompted Edwardian England to send its young men to the slaughter of the First World War.16 Hynes believes that monuments such as Horner's may be thought of as official acts of closure bringing the War and its emotions to a grand, 'affirming' conclusion.17 For Hynes war memorials embody in permanent form ideas about the War - romantic, heroic, histrionic, occasionally even tragic. He feels they have their own rhetoric - sometimes gestural in symbols, allusions to the past, and symmetry, and sometimes verbal in the epitaphs.18

Discussing figurative statues, Bruce notes that modern, free-standing figurative sculpture derives from the ancient world, like so many of the memorial symbols.19 In Mesopotamia and Egypt a free-standing carved figure remained rigid - the life-like statue emerged in the sixth century (BC) in Greece; thereafter, essentially human figures of gods, mythical heroes and athletes appeared.20 When, subsequently, Hellenic sculptors represented Alexander the Great and Philip of Macedon, the hero-king statue entered the canon of Western statuary.21 Artists later extended this scope in order to include famous men, orators, poets and philosophers.

In many cities and towns there may be found equestrian monuments to local or national heroes. The adoption of the free-standing Hellenistic sculptured figure of the hero-king by the Romans signalled Imperial dominance.22 The emperor was their hero-king and an even more potent image in the later Empire, was that of the Emperor on horseback (which itself had Hellenistic antecedents).23 The image of the ruler and of the national and/or local hero on horseback proliferated throughout Europe. London's last equestrian hero is Earl Haig (see Figure 5) - the internal combustion engine having ended equestrian images, although in places they were resurrected. Bruce notes that ordinary men, as well as kings and military leaders, have been represented on horseback; this is demonstrated in the Horner memorial.24

Such lavish expenditure (as in the case of the Horner memorial) on private memorials to the fallen was the result of the decision made by the Imperial War Graves Commission - Longworth describes it as their most important decision - that there would be 'no distinction . . . between officers and men lying in the same cemeteries in the form or nature of the memorials' which were raised there.25 The feeling of the Commissioners, as Ware explained, was that 'the proper and only possible place for special individual memorials was in the homes, villages, etc. of those who had fallen and not in the military cemeteries abroad'.26 Although they also aimed for uniformity at home (as in the Brookwood cemetery near Woking) and they even sought, where possible, to replace private memorials with Commission headstones in Home Front cemeteries.27

Much opposition to the Commission's work was engendered by the ban on private memorials. The ban had not been issued until 1916 and many private memorials had already been erected overseas by then, none of which the Commission had the power to touch, this created some anomalies, many of which still remain unresolved.28 The only thing the Commissioners could do was beg agreement from the relatives to remove the memorial. The Commission stayed firm on this issue of not allowing private memorials, although it tried to satisfy individual feelings wherever possible, allowing a personal inscription on the headstone (payment for which was voluntary), and if they wished it, the Commission returned the original wooden cross which the headstone displaced, to the next of kin.29 In spite of these concessions a noisy storm of protest erupted against the Commission's policies, and on May 4, 1920 a House of Commons debate took place to decide whether the Commission could impose its policies with regard to uniform headstones (rather than individual memorials or even the cruciform headstones which many desired), and the non-repatriation of bodies.30

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