The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way

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It is subtitled "Walking the Western Front Way" and so naturally contains lots of detail about Anthony Seldon's walking experiences. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Photograph: The Print Collector/Heritage Images/Getty View image in fullscreen Anthony Seldon’s ‘strikingly tormented book’ follows in the footsteps of great war soldiers. In a 'warts and all' description of a gruelling hike, Sheldon captures the sheer scale of both the conflict and the casualties along with its continuing connection to the landscape and lives of people today. The Path of Peace' is the extraordinary story of Anthony's epic walk, combining memoir, nature writing and travel, and touching on grief, loss and the legacy of war in a profoundly moving act of remembrance.

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. 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. With such a noble enterprise, it is difficult to criticise this book in any way, but in some ways I did find it awkward to read. But Pershing never even ran for president, another marker of the way the war is regarded in the United States.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). Anthony Seldon's account of how he walked it, and what it means to all of us, will be an inspiration to younger generations. Instead, this blend of history, travelogue and deep personal reflection makes for a moving as well as interesting and entertaining read. I loved this - relished every well-chosen word - and visiting the battlefields of Flanders has inched further up my bucket list as a result. 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.

He was the 13th Master (headmaster) of Wellington College, one of Britain's co-educational independent boarding schools.The central concept of a path of peace along the old Western Front is a superb one and I'm pleased this seems to be making good progress gaining the necessary backing. 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. The repeated sets of details of numbers killed, atrocities and more certainly hammer the point home, though over time it can feel a little repetitive. 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.

Seldon has led the movement to create The Western Front Way from Kilometre Zero in Switzerland to the North Sea coast. Seldon's walk, at the centre of this book, was in part a means of raising publicity for the venture.And that his life's work in private education is part of the reason for that in helping to entrench the privilege and inequality of opportunity that stifles social mobility. In many respects, though obviously to a lesser extent, his travails provide a mirror to those poor souls who actually lost their lives in WW1: the loss of his wife, the constant worry that he might not complete the walk, the exploration of his own life. His circumstances add to the tone of the book; he has deadline to finish the walk and his body is not performing as well as he would want and he constantly doubts he will succeed.