The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way

Product Information

In the East End of London, my father must have heard the sirens at 11 am on 11 November 1918, signalling the end of the war, but aged just two and a half would not have understood what the sound meant. Nor did local people, who thought it was to announce a Zeppelin raid. 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.

This walk is best described as a journey. By continuing along its path, Seldon provides a rod that keeps this book from falling into a depressing litany of grief, blisters, thirst, dog and insect bites, angry motorists, and loneliness. Through fortitude and a little humour, Seldon keeps the reader upbeat; in one case, including an amusing interaction with a homeless Frenchman. It is encouraging, too, to read of individuals who showed kindness to Seldon on his way. After all, the walk was undertaken during the pandemic. You could forgive people for being wary of a stranger. 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 route of his 1,000 kilometre journey 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. Tragically, Gillespie was killed in action, his vision forgotten for a hundred years, until a chance discovery in the archive of one of England’s oldest schools galvanised Anthony into seeing the Via Sacra permanently established. 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!)

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. My books have mostly been about recent British history, including biographies of the six Prime Ministers after Margaret Thatcher. So deciding to write a book on this walk was a fresh departure, a chance to delve into the history of those who died and also that of my own family. He was a wonderful man but the early traumas scarred him for life and cannot but have affected my brothers and me.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 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. Unlike Smith and Gee, war poet and artist Isaac Rosenberg did not return from the front line. He wrote that “nothing can justify war”, but joined up in October 1915 anyway because “we must all fight to get the trouble over”. So much for “the war to end wars” as, following the title of a 1914 H.G. Wells book, the First World War came to be known. “Peace”, at least at a national level, held in Europe for twenty years after the armistice before forces, unleashed by the war and its aftermath, propelled the world into an even greater conflagration after September 1939. Before 1914, Europe’s great powers had been at peace, mostly, for a hundred years since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 had brought the last great continental war to an end. Is peace, then, merely the absence of war? Or is it something altogether deeper?’ Seldon 2022, 22-23