There’s something about doing things deliberately, and intentionally finding things which are going to be challenging at the end of your life, and taking them on.” Are there other places or contexts where ‘walking for peace’ has been suggested – or could be beneficial? 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. Seldon first read Gillespie’s letter in 2012. As he put it, ‘with interest in the Great War surging as the centenary approached, I sensed something substantial and potent. Had the time now come to revive the proposal, to make it a reality?’ (Seldon 2022, 7) With the support of some of Gillespie’s great-nieces and great-nephews, among other significant collaborators, Seldon formed a charity called the Western Front Way, which has successfully established a 1000km trail (with a route for bikes as well as for walkers) that echoes the line of No Man’s Land along the Western Front. This route ( described as‘the biggest single commemorative project underway on the globe’) functions as both a memorial and a learning experience, with an app offering historical context en route. 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?

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. 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.” 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?

Book reviews

Fighting, as we know, ceased with the armistice at 11am on 11 November 1918… Work began almost at once on a peace treaty, requiring the armistice to be extended three times. Representatives of thirty-two nations met in Paris from January 1919, though the proceedings were dominated by just three: France, Britain and the United States. The Treaty of Versailles, which dealt with Germany, was signed on 28 June 1919, five years to the day after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The final of five peace treaties – Lausanne, focusing on the Ottoman Empire – was not signed until July 2023.

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. At German cemeteries of the First World War on the Western Front there are 3,000 grave markers with the Star of David. The route of his 1,000 kilometre journey 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. Tragically, Gillespie was killed in action, his vision forgotten for a hundred years, until a chance discovery in the archive of one of England’s oldest schools galvanised Anthony into seeing the Via Sacra permanently established.He was a wonderful man but the early traumas scarred him for life and cannot but have affected my brothers and me. That said, the silence also fed him. He found solace in the withdrawal from the daily routine. “I found myself meditating on the word ‘Maranatha’ [Come, Lord]. I say that twice a day, ideally for 30 minutes, and it takes me to a place beyond fear, beyond striving,” he says. Too young for the orphanage, he was fostered by one Jewish couple after another, until eventually adopted by Marks and Eva Slobodian, Russian émigrés who may or may not have known his parents. These victories brought the German army to its knees and they were forced to sign the Armistice in November. 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.

Douglas Gillespie was killed in September 2015, in the opening hours of the Battle of Loos. His body was never recovered. His devastated parents published some of the letters they had received from both sons in a volume, Letters from Flanders, which brought the proposal of a Via Sacra to public notice. The concept attracted some interest — The Spectator described his “great Memorial Road idea” as a “brilliant suggestion” — but it was never taken up. The original idea for the walk came from a young British soldier, Douglas Gillespie, a notion which laid buried for 100 years until I came across it some years ago. His younger brother died very close to where he was fighting, and feelings of grief and perhaps guilt troubled him.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 Sir Anthony is clearly delighted. “There are things in life that feel like an ideal project from the moment you start,” he says. He pays tribute to the colleague who first gave him the letter, and others who have become part of the team.