The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way

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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. Tom Thorpe [00:06:13] Which brings me to my next question. Why did you want to walk the way and why did you want to write a book about it?

Then, as during the Covid pandemic, relatives could not see loved ones close-up, so the older children waved a final goodbye to their parents in London Hospital from a safe distance. Philip and Masha died on 16 and 21 July , 1918, and are buried in Edmonton Jewish Cemetery.

This is the world’s biggest commemorative project,” he says. There is interest in Germany, and he would love to see if it is possible to extend the route from Canterbury Cathedral to Freiburg. “That would be an extension to join two of the greatest Christian centres in Northern Europe.” Do you believe, as Seldon argues, that from ‘drops in the ocean’ like Gillespie’s Path of Peace, great rivers and seas can flow? What makes you optimistic about this? What makes you pessimistic?

During the First World War, a young soldier called Douglas Gillespie used a letter home from the trenches to expound on an idea for remembering the dead after the fighting was over. Gillespie proposed a path from the English Channel to Switzerland, following the route of the line that had formed to become the Western Front. Sadly, Gillespie could not act on his dream, as he was killed shortly after the letter was sent. Years later, while researching a different book, historian Sir Anthony Seldon found it. A few years passed and, gripped by his own annus horribilis, Seldon decided to break with all the surety of his previous life: his family, a permanent home, and his work. Instead, Seldon embarked on a solo walk of the entire route that Gillespie had proposed. This book, The Path of Peace, is the story of Seldon’s remarkable adventure. Reflecting on history, travel, memories of ancestors who had lived with the shadow of the Great War, and the nature of grief itself, the story has a lot to offer. 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.”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. 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. 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. 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. 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”.