The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way

Product Information

The route stretches 1,000 kilometres from Switzerland to the Channel Coast. The idea 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 after the war. 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.”

Are there other places or contexts where ‘walking for peace’ has been suggested – or could be beneficial? Tom Thorpe [00:10:01] Now you describe a number of adventures on your walk. Could you tell us about some of them? 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. It was a journey of exploration and discovery, but also, importantly, a pilgrimage. “It was a pilgrimage, because it was about honouring that one soldier. . . I was doing something for Gillespie that he couldn’t do himself,” he says now. Fittingly, Gillespie carried a copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress with him.I for one am happy to devote the rest of my life to seeing Gillespie’s magnificent roaring dream become a reality,” he ends the book, before quoting from Matthew 5.9: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.” 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. 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. 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. 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

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. 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.Second World War commander Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery later wrote that Monash was “the best general on the Western Front in Europe”. 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. 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. 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: 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.