The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way

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There is perhaps a slight jarring for me personally from the realisation that the social distance between Sir Anthony's ancestor Wilfred Willett (Cambridge, 2nd Lt, London Rifles) and mine - a Cardiff docker and gunner with the Welsh division on the Somme - is probably quite similar to the social distance between Sir Anthony and me today. This isn’t to say the story is primarily about Anthony Seldon; he provides an extraordinary account of the war and the lives of the soldiers who lost theirs in the battles.

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”. Very moving and I do hope this dream becomes a reality as a lasting monument for unnecessary deaths.While I was familiar with the extent of the battles in which the British took part, Ypres, the Somme, Passchendaele, I did not know the full, terrible, extent of the French battle of Verdun, and found the chapter on this very moving. However, as every experienced walker knowns, walking brings peace of mind and in the end he found it apart from possible routing for the “Western Front Way”. Over the space of 38 days in late Summer 2021, he walks the entire length of the trenches both as a means of promoting the idea of the Way and trying to come to terms with his own life and history. I wouldn’t presume to take issue with that, and I imagine that it would be a very useful source of knowledge and analysis for anyone needing to study or learn about The Western Front. We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed.

He remains “driven” enough to push himself to the limit towards the end because he has to get back to England to take part in a literary festival to publicise one of his books. As his journey involved a lot of walking along busy roads I thought it did not paint the Western Front Way in the best light and I hope its final route is a bit more rural. The idea for this initiative goes back to a letter written by the young British officer Douglas Gillespie to his parents, shortly before his death on the Western Front.

He has served as headmaster of Wellington College and vice-chancellor of the (private, though non-profit) University of Buckingham, while producing dozens of comment pieces for newspapers and books on recent history, including celebrated studies of post-second world war British prime ministers. As a result, Seldon’s mother had a childhood that left her with a “lifelong sense of foreboding and constant anxiety” – “debilitating personality traits” that he believes he has inherited and has “never been able to transcend”. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. It is not a history book of the First World War and there are some nitpicking things which I could say were not quite correct, but while this book will undoubtedly interest students of WWI it is not a history of the war. In this compelling and well-balanced book, Seldon reaches some valuable and poignant insights, both about the ways we commemorate and remember the War and about his own life.

I will use it as a reference source if I am ever looking for detail on the terrible battles my grandfather and so many others fought in the desolation of northern France. Writing a book on Boris Johnson, as planned, if I was to keep up my rhythm of books on recently departed prime ministers, would hardly help me do this.

Lots of history- but not dry- from the everyday topics (soldiers’ dental hygiene) to the big picture and big battles, to the necessity of humanity finding a way to peace.