The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way

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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. 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.)

Amidst such mighty forces at play, Gillespie’s gentle vision of a 1000-kilometre path along the Western Front, with people of all nationalities walking side by side, learning from the silent witnesses “where war leads”, feels like a drop in the ocean. But it is a drop which is becoming a stream, a stream which will become a mighty river, a roaring sea indeed, like the North Sea where I ended my walk, and I for one am happy to devote the rest of my life to seeing Gillespie’s magnificent roaring dream become a reality.’ Seldon 2022, 322 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”.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

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. 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.”

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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. 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:

Young Arthur must have been disorientated after his parents had suddenly died, his siblings had disappeared, his home had changed not once but several times, and now he had a new mother looking after him. But he prevailed. “The intellectual architect of both Blairism and Thatcherism”, The Economist said of him on his death in 2005. 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”. 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. 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.

About the journal

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. 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. 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.