The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way

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The long walk was lonely. “While I loved the quiet, and not reading the papers daily for the first time in my adult life, the burden of hourly decisions and worries took a toll,” he says. “Life is much easier when there’s someone to share it with.” 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 They date from the 1960s, when, together with the Central Council of Jews and the Rabbi Conference, the German Volksbund erected memorials to recognise the Jewish soldiers who died for the Kaiser. The markers read: “May his soul be woven into the circle of the living.” How, I asked myself, could such sacrifice be repaid with such horror just a generation later? He wrote in his haunting poem August 1914: “What in our lives is burnt/ In the fire of this?/ The heart’s dear granary?/ The much we shall miss?”. He was killed in April 1918 near Arras, during the German Spring Offensive. I could never forget Gillespie’s dream was to create not just a walking route along the front, but a path of peace. I would be walking in part to explore what he meant by that elusive word ‘peace’. What had it meant to those who fought in the war and survived? What did it mean to those whose livelihoods had depended on the millions of hectares ravaged by war?

Anthony Sheldon [00:02:52] So it was the idea of a soldier called Douglas Gillespie and he was in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and he went across to fight and he found himself in trenches very close to where his brother had been killed in the first winter of war in 1914. And in early 1915 he wrote to his parents with an idea and expanded it still further in a letter to his headmaster and said, Look, if I survive, I would like to see created to as a reminder of of where war leads - to death, including the death of his brother , I'd like to see created a tree shaded pathway a 'via sacra' he called it all the way from Switzerland through the Voges to the English Channel, along which I'd like every man and woman in Western Europe to walk as a reminder that war leads to death and destruction. And so that letter was found by my co-author in a book called 'Public Schools and the Great War' by David Walsh. He'd been pointed to it by the archivist at Winchester College, where this young man went to school. And I, I just knew at once when David showed it to me that this was an idea that needed to be realised. It didn't need to be lying dormant as just a musty letter in an archive - it could inspire a whole vision. And that was the beginning. So the idea begins and ends with one soldier, Douglas Gillespie, who alone of the millions of soldiers, apparently in the millions of soldiers who fought in that war, had this vision of a walkway along the line of the No Man's Land. And so then a group of people, including Tom Heap, who is just about the closest surviving relative male relative to Douglas Gillespie, Tom Heap, who is regularly on screen with BBC One's Countryfile programme - he became very interested in his family. His mother and Rory Forsyth became very interested and he is now the chief executive along with Kim Hayes, a group of people built up and they have made all the running. They are the heroes. And because it is now absolutely happening, it's totally happening. It's a walking and cycling route. It's already marked out in the most northerly areas and it will become as big in time as the Camino through southern France and northern Spain as the pilgrims pass. It's a wonderful and remarkable path with a mission to help everyone walking it discover peace - as he intended. Seldon had led battlefield visits to Flanders as a teacher for decades. As a historian, he was almost duty bound to do so. He was also drawn to the history of the First World War, using literature and performance productions as a way of transmitting the message. Here, something else comes into play. He was retired, recently widowed, and looking for a purpose to his new life. The travelogue is therefore both a historical account of the battles that took place in the villages he traverses, an account of his hike, and an interior monologue about his own search for peace. 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. 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.

The Path of Peace documents his journey. The book is a compelling mix of travelogue and history, nature-writing and reflection. He describes walking through the stunning rural scenery of Picardy, Champagne, the Ardennes, and the Vosges, travelling alongside the rivers Somme, Oise, Aisne, Meuse, and Moselle, and staying in historic towns such as Ypres, Arras, Rheims, Verdun, and Colmar. Along the way Anthony Seldon digs into the issue how WWI and its after-effects still influences our today’s families, detailing how the sometimes quite dramatic experiences his ancestors had in the Great War formed their later lives. (The German author Herfried Münkler describes in his book “Der Grosse Krieg” that his grandmother’s fiancée who was killed on the Eastern front and of whom he was told as a child, was looking over his shoulder whilst he was writing). So he came up with the novel idea, which he wrote about to his old headmaster and his parents in June 1915. His hope was 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”. He called it the “Via Sacra”, the “sacred street”. 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.

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.) 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. 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. The Western Front Way is a free walking and cycling route along the WWI Western Front. It stretches over 1000km, from Switzerland to the Belgian coast.

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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.

A DECADE ago, the historian and former head teacher Sir Anthony Seldon was researching a book on the First World War and its impact on public schools. About one fifth of the public schoolboys who fought in the war died, and it had a devastating impact on the survivors. IT IS also an intensely personal story. Sir Anthony travelled to the very spot where his grandfather Wilfred Willett was shot in the head. Willett survived, but was seriously injured, and had to give up his hopes of becoming a doctor, something that had a ricochet effect down the generations.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. 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.