The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way

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Seldon has led the movement to create The Western Front Way from Kilometre Zero in Switzerland to the North Sea coast. Along the way Anthony Seldon digs into the issue how WWI and its after-effects still influences our today’s families, detailing how the sometimes quite dramatic experiences his ancestors had in the Great War formed their later lives. His self-doubt and the physical hardships (he was sixty-eight at the time), establish a profound empathy with those who lost their lives in the battles on the Western Front.

Douglas Gillespie, somewhat oddly writing to his old school headmaster, expresses a 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. Mobile meditation" describes the long distance walking experience but like the book, who can guarantee that trudging along you will find the solutions to life's great questions! It was also notable that several times Seldon tells us how few people visited the various monuments and sites he came across - it does suggest that it is perhaps too late for this to be a project that will ever capture the imagination of massed pilgrims. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.The patient, deeply compassionate, detail Seldon gives of these young soldiers is a worthy tribute to them – one aspect I haven’t mentioned is his sensitive portrayal of war memorials, and the preservation of trenches and destroyed villages which bear witness. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. I haven’t read any other book by Anthony Seldon, but I think this must have been a very different undertaking for him personally than would have been his previous books, political analyses of former UK Prime Ministers. Seldon was knighted in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to education and modern political history. When I stopped here on my exploratory walk in the summer of 2016, we were surprised to be told by guides that no American president has visited Romagne, despite it being the biggest American cemetery in Europe.

Publication of The Path of Peace should play a major role in raising awareness and pushing things forward. He was the 13th Master (headmaster) of Wellington College, one of Britain's co-educational independent boarding schools. The links and sequences between the great battles are shown, thereby making it much easier to understand their history, much better than in any larger and more comprehensive presentation.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. 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. 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.