The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way

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The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way

The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way

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For me, reading this book in January 2023 revived memories of the research by the OSP History Group between 2014 and 2019 into the men of Old Saint Paul’s who fell in World War One. So it was with considerable interest that I followed Anthony Seldon as he pursued his own pilgrimage. There are many parts of the Western Front to which our soldiers did not go: I have learned about other battlefields, other towns and villages and buildings destroyed by war. Some restored, some left as memorials to many fallen men.

Anthony Sheldon [00:01:34] I became interested, I think, at a young age at school. But then when I became a school teacher and saw the syllabus and started learning about it, there's nothing better than to learn about anything than to start teaching. So I started teaching it. In my first year I directed Journey's End, the famous J.C. Sheriff brilliant play .. and I I took my cast across. I remember phoning the Imperial War Museum and said, I've never been, and they thought I was very green and they told me where to go including Beaumont Hamel and Sanctuary Wood, Thiepval and La Voiselle. We went to all those and it was huge fun. And that was the first, I think, of 70 trips that I've taken in the 35 years since So I mean, a pretty high level of interest probably.

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”. The book comprises many themes: there is the walk itself, the war, the unknown warriors in need of a champion, the charity too needing a champion, and the author’s own thirst for a drink and medical attention for his blisters. And swirling through this mix is the grief which Seldon feels after the loss of his wife. Before the war, my father’s parents Philip and Masha Margolis emigrated from the Ukrainian town of Pereiaslav near Kyiv (then part of the Russian Empire), and the 1911 census places them in Whitechapel. They had escaped from Tsarist persecution, pogroms and poverty, but in London’s East End, with Jews and Christians divided by streets, as my father’s brother Cecil recalls in his memoirs, “fighting and brawling was commonplace among the young”. Soon after his posting to the trenches, Douglas had written to his parents with his idea for establishing a path, after the war was over, running right along the Western Front. He expanded the idea in a subsequent letter to his former headmaster at Winchester College: “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… a fine broad road in the No Man’s Land between the lines [the area between the Allied and German front-line trenches] with paths for pilgrims on foot… 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”. Witnesses of which Douglas Gillespie himself would soon enough be a member. IT IS also an intensely personal story. Sir Anthony travelled to the very spot where his grandfather Wilfred Willett was shot in the head. Willett survived, but was seriously injured, and had to give up his hopes of becoming a doctor, something that had a ricochet effect down the generations.

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”. Second World War commander Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery later wrote that Monash was “the best general on the Western Front in Europe”. Sir Anthony will mark Armistice Day at a service and a ceremony at the Cenotaph, and, on Remembrance Sunday, he will be at church in Windsor, as usual. The Western Front Way, an idea that waited 100 years for its moment, is the simplest and fittest memorial yet to the agony of the Great War. Anthony Seldon's account of how he walked it, and what it means to all of us, will be an inspiration to younger generations.' Sebastian Faulks

Other stories

They date from the 1960s, when, together with the Central Council of Jews and the Rabbi Conference, the German Volksbund erected memorials to recognise the Jewish soldiers who died for the Kaiser. The markers read: “May his soul be woven into the circle of the living.” How, I asked myself, could such sacrifice be repaid with such horror just a generation later? He writes about his Jewish grandparents, who fled Ukraine a century ago in search of peace, and the crippling anxiety that was passed down the family. He reflects on the loss of Joanna, and whether he could move on, into a new relationship. He explores a lifetime of drivenness, a nagging fear of failure, and his desire to move into a less manic way of living.

A journey of self-discovery and a pilgrimage of peace… A remarkable book by a remarkable man.’ Michael Morpurgo In 2011, Anthony Seldon was researching for a book on World War One when he found letters written by a young officer in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. Douglas Gillespie had been posted to the front near Vimy Ridge in northern France, his younger brother, Tom, fought at La Bassée just one kilometer away.And yet Seldon had been on that path for years before he read the letter. Finally, he stands on the spot where his grandfather had been shot in the head and mused how as a survivor, the trauma, foreboding and anxiety had passed to his Mum and then to him. ‘I inherited these debilitating personality traits, and have never been able to transcend them. If only I could, 107 years later… leave them here, right here in these woods’ (p.257). That connection with the past and what it means in the present makes this a great book. 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. 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. Where too was the bounty of peace for the children, the women and the parents, like Douglas and Tom’s family, deprived forever more of those they most loved and needed?

Congratulations to The Western Front Way on the placement of their plaques on each of the first 10 steps of the route (and some more besides!) He has a historian’s enthusiasm and sharp eye for spotting good stories, many from the battlefields he is passing by In what ways has Seldon’s book or Gillespie’s dream changed how you think about peace and peace-building? 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….I would make a fine broad road in the ‘No-Mans Land’ between the lines, with paths for pilgrims on foot and plant trees for shade and fruit trees, so that the soil should not altogether be waste. Then I would like to send every man, woman and child in Western Europe on a pilgrimage along that Via Sacra so that they might think and learn what war means from the silent witnesses on either side.” 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?

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Alexander Douglas Gillespie, the inspiration for the Western Front Way. Photograph: Imperial War Museum 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. 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.”



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