The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way

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It is not without significance that Seldon’s ancestors fled from Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression. As he finished writing the book, Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine was well under way. He tells us “My grandparents’ home town… is in Putin’s firing line. I see in the faces of those suffering grievously in that country the faces of my own children, for they share the same blood. Our relatives too were among those murdered by the Nazis at Babyn Yar in Kyiv in 1941: the memorial to 100,000 gunned down in a ravine was shaken by a Russian missile during the [2022] invasion”. A respected writer on contemporary history and politics, Seldon had lost his wife, his job and his home in recent years; his plan to walk the whole route was therefore not only to publicise the project but also to help him find peace and a sense of direction. So this is a very person book, in which the reader learns much about the author’s mental health – and also about his blisters! 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. 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.

The idea was initially proposed in 1915 by a New College Old Member while serving in WWI. 2nd Lieutenant Alexander Douglas Gillespie of the Argyll & Sutherland Highlanders wrote a letter home from the front line to tell of his vision of ‘a via sacra’ (a sacred road), a route for peace between the lines;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”. 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. 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.

The idea lay dormant for the best part of a century until Sir Anthony read Gillespie’s letter, and, as he writes in his new book, The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way, “sensed something substantial and potent” in the scheme. “I had one of those rare moments when time stands still,” he says now. 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. Antony Seldon is a prolific author and The Path for Peace may well be his best and most enduring book. It was not just the writing. The Path for Peace documents 1000 kms, over some 40 days, in which Seldon walked along the length of the western front (as first the Germans and eventually everyone, called it) and he was at the estuary town of Nieuwpoort and looking at the North Sea. More than a long walk, it had been a pilgrimage and a search for meaning. The world has not achieved the peace that those young men of 1914 believed they were fighting for; we saw a second world war start only 20 years after the first ended; now, in 2023, we must hope that we are not on the brink of a third. As our Rector said in his sermon on Remembrance Day, 13 November 2022, “There are no answers to the persistence of human destructiveness. But there are ways of responding”. Douglas Gillespie’s response, his vision of a Way of Peace, is surely more relevant and necessary than ever. The whole thing is hung on a letter written by a young British Second Lieutenant from the trenches in Northern France in 1915, shortly before he was killed. Douglas Gillespie, somewhat oddly writing to his old school headmaster, expresses a 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...' - this would be a 'Via Sacra' which would provide a pilgrimage route to enable the inhabitants of Western Europe to 'think and learn what war means.' Inspired by this, our author Anthony Seldon, who had recently lost his wife and reached a turning point in his career, set up a charity (which would close in 2022 to be replaced by a commercial venture) to work towards an end-to-end 1,000 kilometre 'hike and bike' trail called the Western Front Way. Seldon's walk, at the centre of this book, was in part a means of raising publicity for the venture.

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One 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.” There was this huge Western Front, all the way down into Switzerland, through Alsace and Lorraine. And the war ripped the soul and confidence out of the French people.” One of the most talented commanders on the Western Front was General Sir John Monash, an Australian of German-Jewish ancestry. He proved himself a good divisional commander, despite the terrible conditions of the Third Ypres campaign in 1917. Anthony Sheldon [00:01:34] I became interested, I think, at a young age at school. But then when I became a school teacher and saw the syllabus and started learning about it, there's nothing better than to learn about anything than to start teaching. So I started teaching it. In my first year I directed Journey's End, the famous J.C. Sheriff brilliant play .. and I I took my cast across. I remember phoning the Imperial War Museum and said, I've never been, and they thought I was very green and they told me where to go including Beaumont Hamel and Sanctuary Wood, Thiepval and La Voiselle. We went to all those and it was huge fun. And that was the first, I think, of 70 trips that I've taken in the 35 years since So I mean, a pretty high level of interest probably.

Seldon’s book ends by reflecting on the tragedy of a world where history seems doomed to repeat itself: in this particular case, with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. (Seldon’s own family hailed originally from that region: ‘One hundred years earlier my grandparents had fled west from near Kyiv in search of peace. Now their descendants beat the same path.’) As he concludes: In 2012, however, he was deeply inspired by a letter a young but soon-to-be-killed officer called Alexander Douglas Gillespie had sent his parents from the western front. This described his dream of creating a commemorative path after the war, along no man’s land all the way from Switzerland to the Channel. After that, he wrote, he hoped 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”.

There’s something about doing things deliberately, and intentionally finding things which are going to be challenging at the end of your life, and taking them on.”