The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way

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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. To support the “Western Front Way”-initiative the author in the late summer of 2021 set out to walk the whole length “from the Vosges to the sea” .

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. Seldon gives us vivid descriptions of his aches and pains, blisters, moments of despondency and emergency visits to French hospitals, while making clear that they were as nothing compared with what the soldiers once went through.The writing is so vivid and powerful that you feel that you are with Seldon all the way as he reflects on the war, the landscape, and how he tackles the many physical challenges of such an endeavour. It is unclear how far his arduous walk has brought peace to the author of this strikingly tormented book. 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. His beloved wife, Joanna, had died of cancer and, after disputes with the board, Seldon decided to quit Buckingham, leaving him with “no job, no home, no wife”. There’s a lot more on this subject, with facts and figures, which I’m not good at retaining, and some interesting points about how much, by contrast, World War Two meant to Americans, including the role of Hollywood in its promulgation.

It is an intensely personal work of someone trying to rediscover themselves and advance a worthy cause.Apart from his teaching and administrative work, his establishment credentials included being director for the National Shakespeare company, name dropping Boris Johnson as a contact and easy access to national newspapers and TV channels. And I love the idea, first suggested by a First World War officer, Douglas Gillespie, to turn the entire Western Front into a Path of Peace. History of the First World War is intertwined throughout the account of the walk, making this an easy and engaging read. He notes that he was head of two public schools and then ran a 'small university' which his father had helped set up in 1976. I might not share Seldon's passion, but I can appreciate it and feel the importance that this walk traces a line that has a deep connection to the personal history of many European families.

I greatly enjoyed this account of the author’s walk along the Western Front Way - the ‘Via Sacra’ first imagined by a young WWI soldier, Douglas Gillespie. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.Anthony Seldon's account of how he walked it, and what it means to all of us, will be an inspiration to younger generations.

Apart from these outer challenges, the author had to fight some inner demons: he was still mourning the death of his wife, had lost his last job and the house that went with it, and last but certainly not least he had to fight his own body: the daily slog became quite exhausting and tiring. 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. 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”.This described his dream of creating a commemorative path after the war, along no man’s land all the way from Switzerland to the Channel. And he made it, regardless of the challenges: Covid still reigned, making accommodation scarce, the territory to a significant extent uncharted, meaning that he had to find his own way (once he sighed relief when he could just trot along somebody else who was the pathfinder), sometimes in rough terrain, making him fall down into a crevice, and a vicious dog biting him, with the ensuing visit to a hospital (one of in total three -short- stays in hospital during the trip).