The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way

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There is much to admire in this account of his journey. Seldon gives us vivid descriptions of his aches and pains, blisters, moments of despondency and emergency visits to French hospitals, while making clear that they were as nothing compared with what the soldiers once went through. He has a historian’s enthusiasm and sharp eye for spotting and recounting good stories, many from the particular battlefields he is passing by. It is impossible not to be moved by a chaplain’s description of the last moments of a 19-year-old who had been court-martialled and sentenced to be shot: “I held his arm tight to reassure him and then he turned his blindfolded face to mine and said in a voice which wrung my heart, ‘Kiss me, sir, kiss me’, and with my kiss on his lips, and ‘God has you in his keeping’ whispered in his ear, he passed on into the Great Unseen.” Robert Graves, meanwhile, recalled an officer yelling at the men in his trench that they were “bloody cowards”, only for his sergeant to tell him: “Not cowards, sir. Willing enough. But they are all f-ing dead.” The book also includes some interesting wider reflections on Great War brothels, dentistry, dysentery, footwear, homosexuality and unexploded munitions – and whether “first-hand experience of war make[s] for better and wiser [political] leaders”. As a travel writer, Seldon is not particularly effective - he is much more a historian, which means that there is no doubt that the reader gets a strong feel for what both soldiers and civilians along the Front experienced between 1914 and 1918. Early in the book Seldon comments 'I had noticed as a teacher how gripped my students were by the First World War - far more so than they were by the Second.' I can't say this reflects my own experience - when I was at school, the Second World War was far more prominent and engaging as a historical subject - but Seldon's passion for the horrific events of the period comes through strongly and I learned a huge amount. The repeated sets of details of numbers killed, atrocities and more certainly hammer the point home, though over time it can feel a little repetitive. Sir Anthony is clearly delighted. “There are things in life that feel like an ideal project from the moment you start,” he says. He pays tribute to the colleague who first gave him the letter, and others who have become part of the team.

The route stretches 1,000 kilometres from Switzerland to the Channel Coast. The idea was inspired by a young British soldier of the First World War, Alexander Douglas Gillespie, who dreamed of creating a ‘Via Sacra’ that the men, women and children of Europe could walk to honour the fallen after the war. The walk has changed his life, enabling him to find greater peace personally. He married again earlier this year. Now, the ambition of Sir Anthony and his fellow enthusiasts is that the Western Front Way should become one of the great long treks in Europe: a northern equivalent of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela — something that offers a mix of physical challenge and camaraderie alongside the possibility of spiritual growth. A deeply informed meditation on the First World War, an exploration of walking's healing power, a formidable physical achievement... and above all a moving enactment of a modern pilgrimage.' Rory StewartOne thousand kilometres represents a million steps, he says. “For each step, ten soldiers had died or were badly wounded. So there was a sense there of really being in the presence of death.” That said, the silence also fed him. He found solace in the withdrawal from the daily routine. “I found myself meditating on the word ‘Maranatha’ [Come, Lord]. I say that twice a day, ideally for 30 minutes, and it takes me to a place beyond fear, beyond striving,” he says. The May 2016 Devolved Elections in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London: Convergences and Divergences Tracing the historic route of the Western Front, he traversed some of Europe's most beautiful and evocative scenery, from the Vosges, Argonne and Champagne to the haunting trenches of Arras, the Somme and Ypres. Along the way, he wrestled heat exhaustion, dog bites and blisters as well as a deeper search for inner peace and renewed purpose. Touching on grief, loss and the legacy of war, The Path of Peace is the extraordinary story of Anthony's epic walk, an unforgettable act of remembrance and a triumphant rediscovery of what matters most in life.

He wanted to know more about Gillespie, and soon discovered that his niece, great-nephews, and great-nieces were alive and were just as enthusiastic about the vision. The BBC Countryfile presenter Tom Heap is a great-nephew, which gave the project a boost. Supporters emerged, and the Western Front Way charity was formed. He writes about visiting the final resting places of the poet Edward Thomas, the musician George Butterworth, and the novelist Alain-Fournier, author of Le Grand Meaulnes — all victims of the war. Anthony Seldon’s books on British politics, his surveys of premierships, are well-known to students of contemporary Britain. His most recent book is of a different mettle, as its title intimates. Having accomplished my own pilgrimage to the battlegrounds where my grandfather fought in 1917 and 1918 - on the centenary of the Battle of Amiens in August 2018 and again in September 2022, when we presented a map he had kept of the battle at Bullecourt (Pas de Calais) to the small museum in the village there ( recounted on my blog ) - I was interested to read of Anthony Seldon’s much longer trip, published this autumn. Congratulations to The Western Front Way on the placement of their plaques on each of the first 10 steps of the route (and some more besides!) These victories brought the German army to its knees and they were forced to sign the Armistice in November.

The Path of Peace, Walking the Western Front Way tells the story of Seldon’s epic 38-day hike, from one end to the other, along the line over which the opposing armies fought for those four long years over one hundred years ago. And yet, for many, and as Seldon reminds us, the First World War remains in living memory. Those of us who are old enough to be grandparents ourselves knew our grandparents who had been young men and women at the time.

Sir Anthony will mark Armistice Day at a service and a ceremony at the Cenotaph, and, on Remembrance Sunday, he will be at church in Windsor, as usual. It was clearly very tough going, both physically and emotionally. “Not since my twenties have I had more highs and lows,” he has said of his walk. In what ways has Seldon’s book or Gillespie’s dream changed how you think about peace and peace-building? The book comprises many themes: there is the walk itself, the war, the unknown warriors in need of a champion, the charity too needing a champion, and the author’s own thirst for a drink and medical attention for his blisters. And swirling through this mix is the grief which Seldon feels after the loss of his wife.Alexander Douglas Gillespie, the inspiration for the Western Front Way. Photograph: Imperial War Museum The Western Front Way, an idea that waited 100 years for its moment, is the simplest and fittest memorial yet to the agony of the Great War. Anthony Seldon’s account of how he walked it, and what it means to all of us, will be an inspiration to younger generations.’ Sebastian Faulks Fighting, as we know, ceased with the armistice at 11am on 11 November 1918… Work began almost at once on a peace treaty, requiring the armistice to be extended three times. Representatives of thirty-two nations met in Paris from January 1919, though the proceedings were dominated by just three: France, Britain and the United States. The Treaty of Versailles, which dealt with Germany, was signed on 28 June 1919, five years to the day after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The final of five peace treaties – Lausanne, focusing on the Ottoman Empire – was not signed until July 2023. The answer seemed to be to walk: “I would walk all the way from Switzerland to the English Channel, just as the young Douglas Gillespie had envisaged. And I would shout about it and lobby everyone I knew to ensure that his idea for the path came into being.” Seldon was enacting an old idea. Douglas Gillespie, the younger of two brothers killed in the war, had wrote to his parents that after the war there should be a path where No Man’s Land had been, ‘with paths for pilgrims on foot, and plant trees for shade, and fruit trees, so the soil should not be altogether waste. Then I would like to send every man and child in Western Europe on pilgrimage along that Via Sacra, so that they might think and learn what war means from the silent witnesses on either side’ (p.5). It was a striking and visionary idea and it captivated Seldon when he read the letter.

The two truly iconic British actions on the Western Front were, of course, the Somme in 1916, with its 12 bloody battles over four and a half months, and the Ypres salient where four major engagements stretched over four and a half years. Five men of OSP were killed on the first day of the Somme, 1 July 1916; nine more in the following months. Walking the route near Mametz Wood, Seldon observes “it is hard to conceive that the gentle undulating soil saw such horror”. And at the end of this sector, he wrote “it took 20 kilometers to walk the length of the entire battlefield: 30,000 paces, 33 casualties for each pace”. Before the war, my father’s parents Philip and Masha Margolis emigrated from the Ukrainian town of Pereiaslav near Kyiv (then part of the Russian Empire), and the 1911 census places them in Whitechapel. They had escaped from Tsarist persecution, pogroms and poverty, but in London’s East End, with Jews and Christians divided by streets, as my father’s brother Cecil recalls in his memoirs, “fighting and brawling was commonplace among the young”. A timely, eloquent and convincing reminder that to forget the carnage of the past is to open the door to it happening again.' George Alagiah He was a wonderful man but the early traumas scarred him for life and cannot but have affected my brothers and me. The project, motivated by his wholehearted engagement with an idea that had emerged for an international path of peace, reaching from the Belgian Coast, through France, down to the old Franco-German-Swiss boundary, came from his discovery, ten years earlier, of the letters of a Second Lieutenant in the Argyll and Southern Highlanders who had perished in September 1915 at Loos. “I wish that when peace comes, our government might combine with the French government to make one long Avenue between the lines from the Vosges to the sea” where “silent witnesses” on either side would inform pilgrims, “every man [woman] and child in Western Europe” about “what war means”. Seldon, intrigued, found and enlisted the support of Douglas Gillespie’s descendants, and, with others, set up a charity to see through this vision. The Western Front Way is now a recognized long-distance path.And yet Seldon had been on that path for years before he read the letter. Finally, he stands on the spot where his grandfather had been shot in the head and mused how as a survivor, the trauma, foreboding and anxiety had passed to his Mum and then to him. ‘I inherited these debilitating personality traits, and have never been able to transcend them. If only I could, 107 years later… leave them here, right here in these woods’ (p.257). That connection with the past and what it means in the present makes this a great book. Seldon first read Gillespie’s letter in 2012. As he put it, ‘with interest in the Great War surging as the centenary approached, I sensed something substantial and potent. Had the time now come to revive the proposal, to make it a reality?’ (Seldon 2022, 7) With the support of some of Gillespie’s great-nieces and great-nephews, among other significant collaborators, Seldon formed a charity called the Western Front Way, which has successfully established a 1000km trail (with a route for bikes as well as for walkers) that echoes the line of No Man’s Land along the Western Front. This route ( described as‘the biggest single commemorative project underway on the globe’) functions as both a memorial and a learning experience, with an app offering historical context en route. Anthony Seldon is no disinterested writer. Convinced that Douglas Gillespie’s dream was “the best idea that emerged from the war”, he set up a charity to create the Western Front Way – no simple task given that very little of the lines of the trenches remain and that much of the countryside destroyed by wars is now grassed over, planted with trees, or restored to working farmland. This book is his account of his own journey on foot along the route of the Western Front Way, from Vosges Mountains (Kilometer Zero) to the Channel, a total of 1,000 kilometers which he accomplished in 35 days in August/September 2021. Soon after his posting to the trenches, Douglas had written to his parents with his idea for establishing a path, after the war was over, running right along the Western Front. He expanded the idea in a subsequent letter to his former headmaster at Winchester College: “I wish that when peace comes our government might combine with the French government to make one long Avenue between the lines from the Vosges to the sea… a fine broad road in the No Man’s Land between the lines [the area between the Allied and German front-line trenches] with paths for pilgrims on foot… Then I would like to send every man and child in Western Europe on pilgrimage along that Via Sacra so that they might think and learn what war means from the silent witnesses on either side”. Witnesses of which Douglas Gillespie himself would soon enough be a member. IT IS very easy to lead “blunt” lives, he believes. “One thing I’ve noticed, writing about Prime Ministers, most people don’t really think through what it is they are doing. Life just happens.” (His books include biographies of Winston Churchill, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and David Cameron.)