The Path of Peace E-Book

Anthony Seldon

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 554

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Blackwell's Non-Fiction Book of the Month 'A formidable achievement' Rory Stewart 'Thoughtful [and] heartfelt' Observer 'Profound [and] compelling' Spectator 'A noble endeavour' New Statesman Without a permanent home, a wife or a job, and with no clear sense of where his life was going, Anthony Seldon set out on a 35-day pilgrimage from the French-Swiss border to the English Channel. 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. 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. Along the way, he wrestled heat exhaustion, dog bites and blisters as well as a deeper search for inner peace and renewed purpose. Touching on grief, loss and the legacy of war, The Path of Peace is the extraordinary story of Anthony's epic walk, an unforgettable act of remembrance and a triumphant rediscovery of what matters most in life. ***A WATERSTONES BEST BOOKS OF 2022 PICK*** ____________________________________________ '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 'A deeply informed meditation on the First World War, an exploration of walking's healing power, a formidable physical achievement... and above all a moving enactment of a modern pilgrimage.' Rory Stewart 'A journey of self-discovery and a pilgrimage of peace... A remarkable book by a remarkable man.' Michael Morpurgo 'An incredible journey that will move and inspire.' Bear Grylls

Leseprobe

THE PATH OF PEACE

‘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

‘A journey of self-discovery and a pilgrimage of peace… A remarkable book by a remarkable man.’

Michael Morpurgo

‘A timely, eloquent and convincing reminder that to forget the carnage of the past is to open the door to it happening again. If anyone needs persuading that a 1,000 kilometre Western Front Way would be both civilizing and educational this is the book they should read.’

George Alagiah

‘A dazzling journey... The Path of Peace is a beautiful and generous gift to those of us fascinated by our common histories of the First World War.’

Olivette Otele

‘A haunting, intense, enjoyable and memorable book.’

Tristan Gooley

‘This beautifully written and heartfelt account of the author’s experiences and reflections as he follows the Western Front Way will surely inspire others to make the pilgrimage’

Cherie Lunghi

‘A mesmerising and deeply impressive book unlike any other on the First World War.’

David Yelland

Also by Anthony Seldon

Churchill’s Indian Summer: The 1951–55 Conservative Government

By Word of Mouth: Elite Oral History

Ruling Performance: Governments since 1945 (ed. with Peter Hennessy)

Political Parties Since 1945 (ed.)

The Thatcher Effect (ed. with Dennis Kavanagh)

Politics UK (Joint author)

Conservative Century (ed. with Stuart Ball)

The Major Effect (ed. with Dennis Kavanagh)

The Heath Government 1970–1974 (ed. with Stuart Ball)

The Contemporary History Handbook (ed. with Brian Brivati etc.)

The Ideas That Shaped Post-War Britain (ed. with David Marquand)

How Tory Governments Fall (ed.)

Major: A Political Life

10 Downing Street: An Illustrated History

The Powers Behind the Prime Minister (with Dennis Kavanagh)

Britain under Thatcher (with Daniel Collings)

The Foreign Office: An Illustrated History

A New Conservative Century (with Peter Snowdon)

The Blair Effect 1997–2001 (ed.)

Public and Private Education: The Divide Must End

Partnership not Paternalism

Brave New City: Brighton & Hove, Past, Present, Future

The Conservative Party: An Illustrated History (with Peter Snowdon)

New Labour, Old Labour: The Wilson and Callaghan Governments, 1974–79

Blair

The Blair Effect 2001–5 (ed. with Dennis Kavanagh)

Recovering Power: The Conservatives in Opposition since 1867 (ed. with Stuart Ball)

Blair Unbound (with Peter Snowdon and Daniel Collings)

Blair’s Britain 1997–2007 (ed.)

Trust: How We Lost it and How to Get It Back

An End to Factory Schools

Why Schools, Why Universities?

Brown at 10 (with Guy Lodge)

Public Schools and the Great War (with David Walsh)

Schools United

The Architecture of Diplomacy (with Daniel Collings)

Beyond Happiness: The Trap of Happiness and How to Find Deeper Meaning and Joy

The Coalition Effect, 2010–2015 (ed. with Mike Finn)

Cameron at 10 (with Peter Snowdon)

Teaching and Learning at British Universities

The Cabinet Office 1916–2016 – The Birth of Modern British Government (with Jonathan Meakin)

The Positive and Mindful University (with Alan Martin)

The Fourth Education Revolution (with Oladimeji Abidoye)

May at Ten (with Raymond Newell)

Public Schools and the Second World War (with David Walsh)

Fourth Education Revolution Reconsidered (with Oladimeji Abidoye and Timothy Metcalf)

The Impossible Office?: The History of the British Prime Minister (with Jonathan Meakin and Illias Thoms)

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2022 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Anthony Seldon, 2022

The moral right of Anthony Seldon to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Map artwork by Bell Hutley.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 740 7

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 741 4

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London

WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

This book is dedicated with admiration and thanks to those who have worked hardest to see the Western Front Way/Via Sacra become a reality: Rory Forsyth, Kim Hay, Tom Heap, Peggy Heap, Lal Mills, Amanda Carpenter, Kitty-Buchanan Gregory, Charles Pike, Laura Lestoquoy and Andrew Gillespie. All profits from the book will go to the Western Front Way.

And all her paths are peace.

Proverbs 3

Contents

  1 The Silent Witnesses

  2 Kilometre Zero

  3 Alsace

  4 The Vosges

  5 Lorraine

  6 Verdun

  7 Champagne–Argonne

  8 The Aisne and Marne

  9 Picardy

10 The Somme

11 Artois

12 Forgotten Flanders

13 Ypres Salient

14 To the Sea

15 Epilogue

Glossary

Illustration Credits

Notes

Acknowledgements

Index

1

The Silent Witnesses

DUM. DUM. DUM. DUM. It’s 5 a.m., and the alarm on my phone is hammering away by my head. It has the tempo and bark of a Lewis machine gun, model 1916.

I drag myself up. I slept badly. I always do when I’m in a strange bed and have a big day ahead.

I creep quietly down the narrow staircase, put the kettle on, and take some tea in to Sarah’s bedroom.

So much hinges on this day, Monday 9 August 2021. It’s been a long time coming. A whole lifetime perhaps. But with the day now dawning, it seems to have come quickly, too quickly. I am not ready. The taxi is arriving at seven, and there is much to do. I pack and unpack my rucksack. I’m an innocent at this. I need more time to work through what I might need. I don’t know what I’m doing. A hurried Covid test, debris left scattered on the sideboard, an even more rushed breakfast, and we’re off.

Sarah and I don’t talk much in the car. We are lost in thought. The radio blares out the half-remembered song ‘Titanium’ about a machine gun mowing people down mercilessly. Even here, we can’t escape a long footprint of the First World War... I stare defiantly ahead as the taxi speeds into Heathrow’s Terminal Two, disgorging us, our bags and dreams, into the cold morning air.

Confusion in all directions as we struggle to clear security and passport control. No one is listening to the announcements nor to the attendants. We’re going to miss the plane – the whole plan is at risk – until the PA system tells us that Swiss Air Lines has pushed our departure time back eighty minutes.

Suddenly, we are in Row 34 at the rear of the fuselage. I’d been imagining we’d be almost alone. Fat chance. Full plane. Why on earth are so many flying to Zürich on a Monday morning? Haven’t they heard about the pandemic?

Sarah squeezes my hand as we rattle down the runway, turns to me, and smiles, probing. This is it. No turning back now.

When did the plan to undertake this journey first come to me? I can no longer precisely remember. A decade ago, I was researching a book on the First World War and my co-author pointed to a letter written by a young officer, Douglas Gillespie, to his former headmaster at Winchester College. I’d worked in schools all my life so it caught my attention. Former students don’t often write back to their schools, least of all to their heads. Who was Gillespie? I wondered as I gazed at his portrait. A sensitive face, proud perhaps, looking back at us in his crisp Second Lieutenant uniform, ready for the front. I had to find out about him.

Douglas Gillespie, newly enlisted in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, 1915.

He was posted to the front between Vimy Ridge in northern France and the Belgian border. A dangerous part of the line. By coincidence, his beloved younger and only brother, Tom, had fought at La Bassée, just a kilometre or two away. Soon after reaching the trenches, Douglas wrote a letter to his parents in Linlithgow, Scotland, with an ingenious idea for establishing a path along No Man’s Land from Switzerland to the English Channel after the war was over. I was immediately captivated, still more so by the expanded vision of the idea he wrote about to his old headmaster.

‘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. The ground is so pitted, and scarred, and torn with shells, and tangled with wire, that it will take years to bring it back to use again, but I would make a fine broad road in the “No Man’s Land” between the lines, with paths for pilgrims on foot, and plant trees for shade, and fruit trees, so the soil should not be altogether waste. Then I would like to send every man [woman] 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.’1

The silent witnesses…

These are the words that propelled me on my mission today. The words that could change history. If all goes well.

Douglas loved nature, as did many of his fellow soldiers. ‘The Briton on service on the western front lived inside nature… [It] gave men a psychological, spiritual and religious uplift,’ wrote John Lewis-Stempel.2 Douglas grieved desperately at nature’s destruction all around him, as he did at the destruction of human beings, never more than when his brother Tom became one of those silent witnesses, killed in action that first autumn, in October 1914. The loss changed his older brother as he toiled on month after bloody month at the front. His letters home on the surface remained stoical and cheerful, but the impact was very evident, as when he wrote this, on 24 September 1915: ‘My dear daddy, before long I think we should be in the thick of it. I have no forebodings, for… Tom himself will be here to help me, and give me courage and resource and that cool head which will be needed most of all to make the attack a success.’3

The frontispiece of Letters from Flanders, with a photo of Douglas Gillespie in 1911.

Twelve hours later, Douglas too was dead, killed in the opening hours of the catastrophic Battle of Loos. His body, mashed and mulched into the mud of northern France, was not recovered.

His distraught parents never recovered from the loss of their two sons, on whom they had pinned such hopes. To try to soothe their pain, in 1916 they published an edition of the letters Tom and Douglas wrote home: Letters from Flanders. A subsequent volume, pictured here, included an appendix with the seminal letter to his Winchester headmaster, Montague Rendall.

Douglas’s audacious proposal for the Via Sacra, though considered idealistic in an increasingly jingoistic country, aroused some interest. A review in the Spectator described his ‘great Memorial Road idea’ as a ‘brilliant suggestion’. But it was soon swallowed up in the rip tides of the Somme in 1916 and Passchendaele in 1917, and after the war ended in 1918, neither the British nor the French governments had time or appetite to realize the vision.

Thus it was that his genius of an idea for a Western Front path lay dormant for a hundred years. When I first read the letter in 2012, 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?

I needed to find out why Douglas, uniquely it would appear among the millions of combatants, dreamt up this vision of a Via Sacra. What exactly was in his head? I started living with him for months looking for answers.

It was a moment of great joy when I discovered that Douglas’s niece, great-nephews and great-nieces were alive, and proved as passionate about his vision as me. We met up to explore if his pathway might even now be established. The project began to snowball, with well-wishers joining us, not least Rory Forsyth, who became chief executive of the Western Front Way, the charity we formed to promote it. We knew we had an uphill struggle. If the project was indeed brilliant, why had no one created it in the hundred years since the armistice?

We decided we had to walk sections of the front to explore if a continuous path along its entire length was remotely realistic. It was a sobering experience. Far less than 1 per cent of the lines of trenches remained, with the rest ploughed over to restore working farmland. We struggled to find any kind of track to walk. Scattered paths close to the old front existed in places, but they were not joined up. Creating Gillespie’s vision now would be seriously hard work. So it was we found ourselves out in France in the summer of 2016, Brexit-referendum summer, retreat-from-continental-partner summer. My wife Joanna’s final summer.

I had not found life at all easy since Joanna’s diagnosis of cancer in the summer of 2011, but her death in December 2016 shook me far more than I imagined possible. We had met at Oxford in the mid-1970s, had three dearly-loved children, and grew ever closer. She was dark-eyed and beautiful, preternaturally clever and knowing. I had lost sight of where I finished and where she began. Her death ripped me in two.

Work became my salvation. I toiled away harder than ever before, but with less success. I had been running a small university since 2015, Buckingham, which my father had helped set up in 1976, but without Joanna I had lost my touch. I always knew what I was doing with her beside me: I could make the weather. But now, almost overnight, nothing seemed to work out as I would have liked. On the surface it looked OK – numbers, profile and new buildings – and we were achieving a model of a caring, free-thinking and humane university where students and their mental health would be looked after; an exciting community with festivals galore; and innovative, with emotional and artificial intelligence. But my love for the job and ability to inspire colleagues had evaporated; my keeping one step ahead of the board, shot. Very early on, one high-up asked how it was going. Quite difficult, I replied. Why? Well, my wife is dying. You better get over it, came the reply. Fair enough, I thought. That’s the way things are here. I have always needed people in the past to believe in me, to dream dreams with me. I was now on my own.

Work was making me ill, and in late 2019, I went down with shingles and almost certainly pneumonia. One icy night in Trafalgar Square on a charity sleepover with our students’ union, and unable to stop coughing, I realized things had to change. I couldn’t transact my magic, be the transformative leader I needed to be, and was becoming frustrated and angry. In the summer of 2020, I walked away after five years. I can’t do things by half-measures. I felt a failure.

So here I found myself in 2021, without a job. Suddenly stopping work after many years of intense activity is a huge shock. I had always come alive in the company and stimulus of students: our houses at Brighton, Wellington and Buckingham were always full of young people, having meals with us, listening to brilliant speakers in front of the fire, or just chewing the cud. All gone. On top of that, I was without a tied house that for twenty-five years went with a succession of jobs running schools and then the university. New waves of realization of losing Joanna hit home in the echoing empty chambers of the free time I now had. No job, no home, no wife. No knowing what to do with the rest of my life. I better take action, quickly.

I would walk.

I would walk all the way from Switzerland to the English Channel, just as the young Douglas Gillespie had envisaged. And I would shout about it and lobby everyone I knew to ensure that his idea for the path came into being.

I had always loved walking – as a student, with the children and close friends. As head at Brighton College, I led walks with the parents from Eastbourne to Winchester along the Pilgrims’ Way; at Wellington College, along the Thames from Oxford to Tower Bridge. I had entertained thoughts at job transitions of undertaking a long hike, John o’Groats to Land’s End perhaps. But Gillespie’s vision seemed to be more purposeful. And personal. I realized it was a long way, and I was sixty-eight, but by spreading it out with rest days, and some support, I reckoned I could manage it.

Foolishly, maybe, given I’d never been on a walk that lasted more than two days. This would need several weeks, cover 1,000 kilometres, and take over 1 million steps, through soil where up to 10 million soldiers and civilians had spilt their blood.

Which end should I start at? At first I thought west to east. But walking back from the Vosges mountains to the sea soon seemed more appealing because I would have a sense of walking home as well as towards the areas of greatest British involvement in the war, rather than away. I was due to leave in May, then on 9 June, but Covid restrictions kept upending my plans. Departure was pushed later and later. With reports that the virus was running rife in northern France, the walk began to look bleak. Hotels and restaurants were closing up. For three miserable weeks in July, it looked as if my plans would collapse, at least for 2021.

Then out of the blue, in early August, restrictions were lifted. Had I left it too late? September was approaching; the window was shutting. It was mad to go – the walk would be compressed, with rest days now ruled out because of time, and gone too any margins for error or mishap. The delays meant I would have to lose plans for a regular support team. I would have to move at pace and on my own, finding my own route and rest places in a country almost closed because of Covid. I knew the risks, but I knew I had to go.

Because this was to be more than a walk. It was to be a pilgrimage. Helping achieve Gillespie’s dream of a permanent 1,000-kilometre path was certainly a powerful motivation; but it was not enough.

Gillespie wanted it to be more than a pleasant walk through nature. He had a deadly serious intent in that letter to his headmaster. He wanted it to be a path of peace and a walk of remembrance. It should be an encounter, a life-changing experience for all who travelled the path, a challenge to find greater peace within, peace with fellow human beings and with the natural world.

With my life as it was, I needed this pilgrimage as much as anyone. But could I myself manage to achieve the inner transition I would need to make? Despite a frenetic practice of meditation and yoga, and arguing for the teaching of happiness, enduring peace had so far eluded me. As long as I was busy, I got by. The swirl of activity kept me from introspection, from confronting my demons. Fear had been my constant companion. Fear of just about everything. Fear of failure. Fear that no one would want me. As now seemed to be the case.

I knew I was no different to the millions of others who yearn for peace in their lives. Like many alive across the world today, the First World War had shaped my life profoundly. The war had been fought in Europe, Asia and Africa, with some 65 million mobilized, of whom approaching 10 million were killed.4 Its scars are still buried deeply in the collective unconscious and a profound fascination with the conflict endures.

I had noticed as a teacher how gripped my students were by the First World War – far more so than they were by the Second. But I had never understood the hold the war had on me. Could it be to do with the experience of my four grandparents? I needed to find out more about them too as part of my pilgrimage, to probe the murky myths that all families pass on.

Confronting parts of myself that I had long suppressed was what frightened me most on the journey out to Switzerland. The physical challenge of the walk would be demanding, certainly, but nothing compared to the psychological challenge. Could I let go of my own ghosts, reconcile myself to disappointments, make peace with those who had damaged me? Could I move on from Joanna and find new love, enduring peace and happiness within? Could I change to a less manic gear? Writing a book on Boris Johnson, as planned, if I was to keep up my rhythm of books on recently departed prime ministers, would hardly help me do this. Could I find peace in places where numinous spirits floated just above the soil in which the millions died, ten silent witnesses for each pace I would be treading along the walk?

If the Western Front Way came into being, with my life broken as never before, I could pave the way to greater peace, as Gillespie envisaged, for all who walked along it.

What a time to be walking too, with so many mourning loved ones lost in the pandemic, Britain wrestling with its own sense of identity, and Russian threats towards Ukraine intensifying and Europe teetering on the brink of war. One hundred years earlier my grandparents had fled west from near Kyiv in search of peace. Now their descendants beat the same path.

So today I would start walking Gillespie’s path of peace. I would walk it to see, a century on, if I could help it to be built; to help the Via Sacra become the Via Pax.

Now, all roads led to Kilometre Zero.

2

Kilometre Zero

‘CAN YOU REMIND ME why I’m doing this?’

‘Because you said you must,’ Sarah replies, returning to her magazine.

‘I look out of the window, as the sun rises over a carpet of cloud.

An hour later, we are at Zürich airport queueing at passport control. ‘There should be two separate lines: one for those who voted remain, the other for Brexit,’ I say testily. ‘It wouldn’t have made any difference,’ she responds. ‘Why?’ ‘Because Switzerland was never in the EU.’

We find ourselves last in a long queue for our hire car. On either side of us, the kiosks for other hire companies are empty. We find our car in the lot easily: it’s the only one left. A long time after setting off, we pass Basle airport, the intended destination but for the delays. By mid-afternoon, we arrive at our destination.

After all the noise of the journey – the crowds, the flight, the two-hour car trip – we’ve made it to Kilometre Zero. Elated and exhausted, I am desperate to look around, but it is already late, 4 p.m., and I had planned to walk four or five hours that day. So, there is little time to explore beyond a hurried photograph taken by Sarah, my foot self-consciously positioned on a trench emplacement.

Kilometre Zero is where the Western Front trenches, which began their winding journey on the Belgian coast, came to an abrupt end. But, in this story, the beginning.

The beginning of my walk, and the beginning of the fighting in the First World War; the site where the first witnesses were silenced. The beginning of the front.

‘The marker of three states’, with a Swiss soldier to the left, and two Frenchmen on the right. © Swiss Federal Archives

Nearby Kilometre Zero is the spot where the Swiss, French and German borders converged. ‘The marker of three states’, as it was known in 1914, commemorates the exact spot with three stones, two clearly visible in the photograph above. The third, the oldest, is just visible at an angle at the bottom right. Although the Franco-German border now lies on the River Rhine 40 kilometres to the east, the stones still stand here innocently today.

A Swiss stream flows north from here to become the Largue river. Though barely 10 metres wide, it served as No Man’s Land in this most southerly sector of the front. The French hunkered down on the west bank, the Germans facing them on the east. The Swiss army’s task was to prevent them trying to steal round behind the other via their sovereign soil to the south. They meant it, in appearances at least. They stationed a garrison on the border to ensure that the French and Germans, long versed in killing each other, played by the rules.1

The combatants understood that they could neither shell nor fire on or even over the Swiss trenches. The Swiss soldiers demanded cover nevertheless from stray bullets and shrapnel that would occasionally come their way. They remained to the end proudly neutral, resolutely above the fighting and slaughter afflicting their neighbours on all sides. Lapses were rare, and caused great consternation when they occurred.

Easter Sunday 1917 saw one such diplomatic embarrassment when a Swiss military band was playing, to the evident delight of the German troops who began to sing and dance extravagantly in the open air. As the Swiss territory jutted into French and German land, the German soldiers, though within comfortable range of the French, assumed they were safe as any bullet would have had to travel over Swiss land. Suddenly a shot rang out. A Portuguese soldier fighting with the French had not been apprised of the rules of etiquette. His bullet hit an unsuspecting German clean in the stomach. It was widely considered a very poor show. The innocent soldier, whose only sin was to become entranced, later died and is buried at the most southerly German burial ground on the front, just north of Altkirch, at Illfurth.

German soldiers were only too happy to serve in this peaceful sector. At the very end of their front line, they erected a wooden box for a sentry. Its signboard read: ‘Final stop of the underground train from Ostend to Switzerland’ (or in German, Endstation der Untergrundbahn Ostende–Schweiz). All very amusing, if not entirely accurate. As we shall see, the Western Front ended not at Ostend, but 15 kilometres south-west, at the coastal town of Nieuwpoort.2

If you had travelled the other way during the war, westwards towards the English Channel, you’d have encountered a multi-kilometre labyrinth of interconnected trenches which moved barely at all from late 1914 to March 1918. There was nothing quite like it in earlier wars, nor indeed during the Second World War nor since.

The afternoon is going, and I am desperate to set out on the walk. But before I do so, for those less familiar with the story, let me sketch out why the Western Front remained static in trenches for so long, despite the hope among all major European armies that rapid movement would characterize the war. This is the key to understanding the entire caboodle.

Field Marshal Alfred von Schlieffen was the dramatist responsible for penning the script for the Western Front. The Schlieffen Plan of 1905–6 envisaged that, in the event of a simultaneous war against France and Russia, the German army would quickly invade France through the Low Countries, rather than on their shared border further to the east. Having knocked out France at pace, Germany would turn its attention to fighting Russia on their Eastern Front.

In the early days of the war, his plan seemed a brilliant success. Though Belgium put up spirited resistance, its fortresses, including Liège and Antwerp, were pulverized by heavy German artillery. The French attempt to halt the Germans at the Battle of the Frontiers saw them thrown back with horrifying losses, while the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) with French support was sent into retreat after bloody fighting at the Battles of Mons and Le Cateau. In early September 1914, German forces were so close to Paris that their patrols glimpsed the Eiffel Tower.3 France teetered on the brink.

As Germany prepared to defeat the French army once and for all, the Allies marshalled their forces in the First Battle of the Marne, shattering the German expectation of a quick knockout blow. The Marne saw half a million casualties on both sides in just one week, as the largest armies in history collided for the first time.4

The German forces pulled back, digging the war’s first trenches by the River Aisne. In the ensuing ‘race to the sea’, both sides tried to outflank the other north-westwards up to the English Channel, while in the other direction, the front line edged south-eastwards down towards the Alps. With winter approaching, exhausted troops dug trenches to hold their positions, with the Germans often on the higher ground. Even if they had not yet knocked France out of the war, most of Belgium, and much of northern France, was in their hands. They were perfectly happy to dig in and defend.

Now, let’s take a moment to consider trenches. Battlefields of the past, whether Agincourt, Ramillies or Waterloo – all incidentally fought close to the Western Front – left little tangible evidence behind. They were brief affairs, and if part of a longer conflict, the fighting moved on to fresh killing grounds. As war became mechanized from the nineteenth century, with rapid-fire rifles, machine guns and long-range artillery, troops needed better protection.

Survival rates on both sides proved many times higher when soldiers were able to find shelter below the direct sight of the enemy. Urban areas provided cover in buildings, but the First World War was a rural affair mostly. Hence trenches dug in farmers’ fields, woods and open land. At first, they were thought to be a temporary expedient. But as the days turned to weeks, and weeks to months, and the line remained resolutely fixed with neither side able to break through, the system became permanent. The truth slowly dawned that it was much easier to defend than to attack trenches, at least until the arrival of tanks from 1916 helped the conflict to become the war of movement its scriptwriters had envisaged.

Early trenches in 1914 were primitive. Douglas Gillespie wrote in August 1915 that ‘it was through this part of the country that Tom marched and fought during his last few days’, remarking how better constructed the trenches already were by then.5 Along the front, concrete, wood, brick, corrugated iron and steel, anything that was solid, was dragged into service. New trenches were constructed either from the surface down, allowing many soldiers to work at the same time but exposing them to enemy fire, or by sapping, where they extended the trenches at each end out of enemy sight, but with smaller numbers able to dig at one time. The soil removed was shovelled into sandbags, piled on top of the trenches at the front facing the enemy, known as parapets, and behind, known as parados. Trenches could be more than 2 metres deep, with a raised fire-step at the front on which soldiers could stand to see over the top. They were zigzagged, called traverses, to limit the impact of direct hits by shells or the risk in a successful raid of an enemy firing the length of a trench. Up to five or more parallel lines of trenches would face the enemy, with No Man’s Land (controlled by neither side) between 10 metres to 0.8 kilometres wide, depending on terrain, separating both sides, and rows of barbed wire erected there for extra protection. The front-line trenches would have gently rising saps jutting out into it, from which wiring and raiding parties could sortie. Behind the front lines were support trenches; behind them, lines of reserve trenches. Linking them all were communication trenches. Dugouts which afforded protection from shrapnel were usually located in support trenches; the Germans dug them deeper, while the French and British dugouts had to be shallower because they were on lower ground more liable to flooding, and were rarely more than 5 metres below the earth.

To one side of Kilometre Zero lay these trenches and 1,000 kilometres of war. To the other, up to 1,000 kilometres of comparative peace, until the Eastern Front offered its own concoction of twisted flesh and steel. Because of the Germans’ failure to stifle France quickly, they had no option but to fight on the two fronts Schlieffen had planned to avoid. The designation the ‘Western Front’ was thus coined by the Germans; to the British, the Western Front lay way to its east.

But which Western Front would I follow? There is no single Western Front. So the route I decided to take over the next five weeks is the line from late 1914 until the German breakout through the front in their great offensive of March 1918. With almost all the trenches long since disappeared, I needed all the help I could get from colleagues in our new Western Front Way team. We identified the closest tracks and roads to where the front lay in those thirty-nine months – sticking as close to the trench line as possible – at least until I reached Belgium, where the path by the summer of 2021 had been already marked out. I’ve never been any kind of pathfinder, let alone over such a long distance, and to be honest, I don’t know how good I would be at doing it. Booking places to stay en route was extremely tricky as only larger towns seemed to have places still open. Walking through a plague was not making my task any easier. I only hoped I could rely on taxis to ferry me at the end of each day to a new abode – if I could find one.

My alertness to daily-changing Covid constraints was mirrored by my middle child, Susie, whose wedding had been long planned and most eagerly awaited by her for the end of August at our house in a village north of the Dordogne, the house I bought for her mother in 2015 on almost her last visit to our beloved France. Somehow, if it was to happen, I would need to break off my walk for a couple of days and find my way south. The timing of the wedding I could see would be significant for my journey.

The Western Front is not a clear line like the coastline of Devon and Cornwall. I envied author Raynor Winn walking a similar distance along that coastal path as recounted in her inspiring book, The Salt Path. If she and her husband Moth deviated from their track one way, they were in gorse bushes; the other, and they were over the cliff edge into the sea. Their journey was full of test and challenge, but they at least knew their route. Nor would this be like the Camino de Santiago, the 1,000-year-old pilgrim path across northern Spain to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela. In time, our hope is the Western Front Way might attract walkers with similar intent and in similar numbers. But as long as the route is not marked, it will lack the company of fellow travellers which is one of the Camino’s great joys.

No, my journey would be more like that of Patrick Leigh Fermor, the legendary writer who walked from the Hook of Holland to the Danube across Germany and Austria as Nazism was taking hold in 1933–4, as recounted in his revered book, A Time of Gifts. He had to puzzle out his route as he went along, as I would too. He had to rely on the kindness of strangers, as I would. He was walking alone, as I would. The seeds of the Europe through which I would walk were sown by the Europe through which he walked. The seeds of the Europe through which he walked was flowering its blood-dimmed tide in Eastern Europe with increasing menace as I walked.

I could never forget Gillespie’s dream was to create not just a walking route along the front, but a path of peace. I would be walking in part to explore what he meant by that elusive word ‘peace’. What had it meant to those who fought in the war and survived? What did it mean to those whose livelihoods had depended on the millions of hectares ravaged by war?

Fighting, as we know, ceased with the armistice at 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918, a truce which required the cessation of all hostilities along the Western Front, and the withdrawal of German forces east of the Rhine. While the Germans had to surrender most of their army’s weapons, warships and aircraft, and release Allied prisoners of war, the blockade of Germany was to remain in place. The armistice had been signed at 5.45 a.m. at Compiègne, but fighting continued until 11 a.m. An estimated 2,738 unfortunate soldiers were killed in those final hours.6

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 the five peace treaties – Lausanne, focusing on the Ottoman Empire – was not signed until July 1923.

Five peace treaties.

Did they bring peace? Not to the millions suffering from what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. The guns might have fallen silent, but not the guns still raging in the heads of those poor souls. The poet and composer Ivor Gurney, who spent the last fifteen years of his life in psychiatric hospitals before his death in December 1937, is one of the better-known ‘long’ casualties of the war. What of those millions of unknowns who woke screaming night after night in terror? 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?

On the very western tip of Europe, there was no peace in Ireland. Nor for the ‘cornermen’, returning soldiers, damaged in body and mind, without jobs or hope, begging on street corners year after year. Nor on the eastern frontiers of Europe was there peace for the Jews, victims of the collapsing Russian Empire. Pogroms – rampages by locals whipped up at Easter by anti-Semitic clergy – had been commonplace for centuries before 1914, leaving behind them a trail of death and rape. But from 1917, the perpetrators included the upper classes. To the Bolsheviks, the Jews were bourgeois swine; to the White Russians, they were dirty revolutionaries, kinsmen of Bolshevik Trotsky. Some 150,000 Jews are estimated to have been murdered in 1918–21.7 The depravity and cruelty of the Russian Civil War at large, and the ‘Red Terror’ unleashed by the Soviet Union’s first head, Lenin, which left many times that number dead, has rarely been matched in history. So much for ‘the war to end wars’, as, following the title of a 1914 H. G. Wells book, the First World War came to be known.

‘Peace’, at least at a national level, held in Europe for twenty years after the armistice before forces, unleashed by the war and its aftermath, propelled the world into an even greater conflagration after September 1939. Before 1914, Europe’s great powers had been at peace, mostly, for a hundred years since the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 had brought the last great continental war to an end. Is peace, then, merely the absence of war? Or is it something altogether deeper?

The walk would for the first time ever give me the prolonged chance to reflect on how my life, like that of hundreds of millions alive today, has been affected by what happened between 1914 and 1918. I have been captivated by the Great War for as long as I can remember. I have been at my happiest when conducting trips around the trenches. Before departure, I encouraged those joining to research their family and the war, something almost all are eager to do, making connections and reaching new understandings.

This walk would give me a taste of my own medicine. I knew some facts, but not the emotions nor the deep way that the experience shaped my parents, and hence me. My grandfather Wilfred Willett, a Cambridge graduate training to be a doctor at London Hospital, enlisted in the London Rifle Brigade as soon as war was declared. By October, he was out at the front, taking part in fighting to the south of the Belgian town of Ypres on what was called ‘the salient’ (an area jutting out into enemy territory). On 13 December 1914, one of his men was wounded in No Man’s Land. He slithered out over the top and, utilizing the basic medical knowledge he had acquired, tended the man’s wounds. While doing so, a sniper’s bullet glided into the side of his head. But for his wife Eileen badgering the War Office to let her travel across the Channel to France to bring him back home when all had given up hope, he would have died.

Eileen’s twenty-first birthday had fallen on the day Britain entered the war, 4 August. Joanna shared the same birthday, a fact my mother always thought significant. The story of Eileen’s journey to France and Wilfred’s partial recovery thereafter is retold in Jonathan Smith’s novel, Wilfred and Eileen, and in a BBC 1 television series.8 So it had become, in my head, a sepia-tinted story of romantic love and heroism. I had to plumb much deeper.

For Wilfred, there was no peace after 1918. Deprived by injuries of his vocation of becoming a doctor, he sought solace in writing and politics. His close friend, author Henry Williamson, based his character Phillip Maddison on him in his A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight series of books. But when disillusion with peace struck in the 1920s and Williamson turned sharply right, Wilfred turned left, becoming a Communist, and selling copies of the party’s newspaper, the Daily Worker, on the railway bridge by Tunbridge Wells station. His daughter, my mother, crossed the street every publication day to avoid him on her journey home from her private school. She too knew little of peace in her family home, her father suffering violent mood swings and at war with her brother. Once she jerked a Lee Enfield rifle away from her brother taking aim at their father in the garden. Her childhood made her anxious, giving her a sense of foreboding which I inherited. Unexamined, I have lived with it all my life. I too am a child of the war.

My father too was sculpted by the war. When the Sunday Times some years ago wanted to conduct a joint interview, he couldn’t face talking about his own childhood. He later told me the reason was ‘there was so much death’. The facts I knew. His parents, Jewish émigrés from Pereiaslav near Kyiv, found safety from pogroms in London’s East End. But not from the Spanish flu spread by the war, which killed them within a week of each other in July 1918. My father, adopted by a cobbler in the East End, didn’t know till he was twelve that he had brothers and sisters. They found out where he lived and wrote in chalk on the street cobbles outside: ‘Abraham is our brother.’ The shock was said to have given him his lifelong stammer.

The First World War has preoccupied me throughout my life. No sooner had I become a schoolteacher than I bundled the cast of R. C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End that I was directing into a minibus heading to the trenches. More recently, I was executive producer of the film of the play, directed by Saul Dibb. In between these came the sixty or so trips I led to the trenches, for students, staff and, most recently, parents. Every time, the experience is fresh, fresh as the hopes of the young men marching off to war. What keeps drawing me back, again and again? Telling the stories to different groups, noticing how they all, sooner or later, become engaged emotionally, clearly fulfilled a need. Helping others make deep connections spared me from travelling deep inside for myself. We are all children of that war.

The plays, the trips, my family’s experiences, were all pointing me to this day, the day I begin my pilgrimage.

Here I am at Kilometre Zero on Day 1. My face looks anxious. Gillespie had no real idea what he had let himself in for when his photograph was taken. Neither, a hundred years later, did I.

Kilometre Zero, Day 1, 9 August 2021.

3

Alsace

SARAH STEPS BACK INTO our hired car and drives off northwards to Colmar. Suddenly, I am alone.

I take a deep breath, turn around one final time and look into Switzerland, and turn back to commit that first step, the most difficult. Once I get moving I’m excited and happy.

I feel a rush of joy, after so many anxious months of waiting, to be here at last, on the eastern tip of the Western Front. I don’t care about the difficulties that may lie ahead. I’m just thrilled to be alive and starting the walk this summer afternoon, walking to the Channel.

I am walking home. But I don’t have a home. Since leaving Ondaatje Hall at Buckingham, I have lived in a succession of rented flats, my worldly possessions in storage. So what!

The walking kit on which I will rely is feeling good. My IsoGrip boots (£200, reduced to £150) came from Mountain Warehouse in Brighton, and my long-sleeve North Ridge top, cowboy hat and waterproof trousers (£250 in total) from The North Face in Bath. The portentous names of the shops, the labels on the clothes and the expense reassure me that I have purchased the real thing. I may not be a genuine long-distance walker, but at least I make a passable impression of looking like one.

This first section of the walk will take me through Alsace, part of the Western Front often left off British maps of the war. Neither British nor Commonwealth forces fought here. But the region through which I will be walking saw intense fighting in 1914, with three battles between the French and Germans.

In the opening days of the war, Joseph Joffre, commander-in-chief of the French forces, saw the area as ripe for a coup de théâtre by seizing Alsace back from the Germans. On 7 August, the French First Army thus advanced eastwards across the German frontier to the city of Mulhouse (Mülhausen in German), which the surprised Germans rapidly quit. But then reinforcements arrived, and the French withdrew themselves back towards the Vosges. There, they mustered, and attacked again on 14 August as part of a vast military advance along their entire frontier, inspired by Napoleonic zest. For a second time, they seized the city, only to withdraw again when it became clear that the plan was collapsing in the face of superior German strength. On 24 August, Joffre accepted that his cunning scheme had failed, and with German forces breaking through in Belgium, he ordered a retreat.1

Now it was the Germans’ turn to attack, deploying their Sixth and Seventh Armies, mainly Bavarian soldiers, under the command of Rupprecht, Crown Prince of Bavaria. They made more progress to the north-west, in Lorraine and the Vosges, than in Alsace, where the French forces held out, and by mid-September, with 66,000 German casualties, he called off the attack. For the next four years till the armistice, Alsace was one of the war’s quiet sectors.2

I’m only dimly aware of this history as I start, so am having to gen up on it as I go. More immediate concerns than Rupprecht, though, fill my thoughts. How will I possibly recall everything I see? Details of Kilometre Zero are already confused in my mind. Realizing how easily I will forget thoughts and details of my journey, I decide then and there to dictate a diary into my phone as I strut along, snapping periodic photos at will. It proved a happy decision.

‘So, that first step I took ten minutes ago from Kilometre Zero has been trodden,’ was my opening comment. ‘The emotion and tension towards the first day built and built, but now it has happened, it’s happening in prose, not poetry. I am climbing a hill a little too steep for comfort coming away from Kilometre Zero towards Pfetterhouse, the first community on the long route.’

Looking back at my walking diary from the tranquillity of my writing desk, I had forgotten how I saw the task at the time. ‘I’ll be undertaking two walks in parallel,’ I recorded, ‘one in the present moment, through Covid-affected villages, with flies and sweat, while trying to puzzle out the route; the other will see me walking a hundred years ago following the old front line, missing the flies and the sweat, the fear and noise.’

This book is written in two tenses: the present for the walk and what I see during it, the past tense when writing about the war and its aftermath.

What I failed to understand on that first day was the walk would be taking place in a further dimension, neither in colour nor in black and white, nor indeed in physical time, but in the depths of the subconscious. The physical walk, and the sights I would see, shone a light on suppressed chasms of thought and emotion which continued long after the walk was over. In that churning liminal space, I find it difficult to tell dreams from reality.

Back to the diary: ‘The first afternoon is still warm. My plan is to be walking north-west along the front in the first half of the day, which means the sun will be mostly on my back. But walking today north and starting out at 4 p.m., the sun is on the left side of my face.’

To my west lies the low mountain range of the Vosges; to the north, the flat plains of Alsace; and to my east, the southern tip of the Black Forest. Cradling it, the mighty Rhine, the first of the seven rivers that will be my touchstones on the walk. My route never allows me to see it, but for my first hundred kilometres, the Rhine is a constant companion. I can sense it, can smell it almost, and can never forget its pulsing urgency. The Rhine indeed was the ever-present unconscious shadow of the Western Front. For four and a half years, it was never within sight of the fighting, but never beyond its sounds. It mirrors the front’s length: 1,036 kilometres from the Old Rhine Bridge at Constance in the Alps till, at the Hook of Holland, it expires into the dark oblivion of the North Sea. As the Western Front runs north through Alsace, it mimics it flowing north from Basle; then, as the front wheels north-westwards, so too does the Rhine, both travelling urgently onwards in search of the sea. I am never happier on the walk than when I am beside a river, always on the move, always lifting my spirits and urging me on.

‘Now I’m thirty minutes in. Cars whistle periodically by on the country lane into Pfetterhouse,’ I record. ‘Lush green fields in every direction, the lane stretching straight ahead, here and there tractors at work in the fields. The air is full of the smell of manure and flowers.’ Blue cornflowers, pink and white mallow and wild parsley! After all the planning and worries of the last year and more, suddenly here is deep peace. Messages from friends and well-wishers arrive regularly on my phone.The Times featured the walk today as its page-3 story, accompanied by an editorial in support of our Western Front Way. ‘I can see keeping up with messages is going to be a challenge. And possibly dangerous if I’m going to be replying to them when I walk. As I will. Patrick Leigh Fermor didn’t have to contend with this.’

I am pulled up short when I walk down into Pfetterhouse. I am not certain what I expected of the first community on my journey – an open café at least – but what I find is a ghost town. Not a car, not a person, not an open shop, a railway station closed years before, a reminder of a once flourishing community. Though only early August, the carefully tended gardens have an autumnal feeling, the smell of burning leaves and wood lingering in the still air. And despite the town’s elegant timbered houses, À VENDRE signs are ubiquitous. Sudden dog barks enfilade the stillness, without sign of the hounds or their owners. Is this a foretaste of what I can expect?

With no time to tarry, I consult my map, and decide to take the road north to Seppois-le-Haut. ‘One hour in exactly, it’s 5 o’clock, and the first euphoria is wearing off,’ I record. The path that will take shape doesn’t exist this far east, and I gloomily envisage being forced to walk along busy roads with cars shooting past in both directions day after day. The honeymoon is over before it could begin. ‘I’ve just had my first altercation with a mosquito, which results in me spraying on industrial quantities of insect repellent. After just one hour, my right knee is beginning to hurt, as it has done periodically over the years.’

In preparation, I had been to see Rupert Molloy, a physiotherapist in Henley-on-Thames, who told me the problem wasn’t my knee, but my ankle. ‘No, it’s my knee hurting: it’s my knee and I know it’s my knee.’ ‘Have you ever twisted your ankle?’ he replied gently to my tart response. ‘When running, repeatedly,’ I said. ‘Well that’s it,’ he pronounced, as he took my ankle in his hand and showed me exactly where the pain was based, causing my kneecap to be misaligned. His solution was German ‘instructional leggings’ to re-educate my knee back into its right position. I’d been feeling very sorry for my knee. I meekly accepted his advice that it needed re-educating.

I press on through Seppois-le-Haut and le-Bas to the village of Largitzen. Already I’m fretting about the time. It’s nearly 6 p.m., and my target for today is Altkirch (Alte Kirchen in German, old church).

But at current rate of progress, I won’t arrive there till 8 p.m., too late to have dinner in Colmar, a good seventy-five minutes away by taxi. I’m not good at admitting failure, least of all on Day 1. Torn between trying to make my first day objective, and a convivial dinner in Colmar with Sarah, I decide the latter is much the preferable. So, I summon a local taxi to meet me in Hirtzbach, 5 kilometres north. Feeling a little downcast, I press on. I haven’t even the excuse of heavy baggage to blame for slowing me down; my rucksack contains only water: Sarah has taken all my heavy equipment, which I will have to carry with me after she leaves. The prospect is not an encouraging one.

The German place names remind me that I’m emphatically not starting out on my walk in mainstream France. For this is Alsace, which, along with Lorraine, had for centuries been contested territory with the German states. From the end of the Roman Empire in the fifth century for over a millennium, Alsace was part of the German world. I see echoes of this repeatedly. The half-timber architecture with flat roof tiles has more in common with German buildings. The cookery is Germanic, with pork and sauerkraut favoured dishes. Even the drinks – schnapps, lagers and distinctive Alsatian white wines – are closer to what can be found over on the east bank of the Rhine than to France.

La Tache Noire (The Black Spot) by Albert Bettannier (1877).

France annexed Alsace in 1648 at the end of the bloody Thirty Years War until Germany grabbed it after crushing Napoleon III’s forces in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. The culture of the territory was truly hybrid: during the 220 years of Catholic French control from 1648, German-speaking was common, as was toleration of Protestantism (unsurprising given the leading role Strasbourg played in the Lutheran reformation). Now, thanks to migration, French is the common language.

The 1871 German annexation of most of Alsace-Lorraine, including its biggest city Strasbourg, had been a source of enduring bitterness in France and inspired strong feelings of revanchism. The statue depicting the City of Strasbourg in Paris’s Place de la Concorde was draped in black fabric and wreaths for decades afterwards. The simmering resentment was never better captured than in the painting opposite, with the teacher pointing a stick at the map to show his schoolchildren the region lost to their beloved country.

By 1914, Alsace was part of the German province of Elsaß-Lothringen. Germany clung on to the province on the west bank of the Rhine for strategic protection. The First World War proved how prescient Germany was: it gave it an initial springboard against France, and both Lorraine and Alsace would remain mostly under German control.

I am thus starting my walk in the only part of the Western Front to be fought on German soil. Nearly 380,000 soldiers from Alsace and Lorraine were drafted into fighting for Germany.3 Viewed with suspicion by the German High Command, it was decided in March 1915, after a spate of desertions, that soldiers from Alsace-Lorraine would be drafted elsewhere, to the German interior, the Eastern Front or the navy.

Germany, I remind myself, had in 1914 only been united as a nation for a little over forty years. Its troops fighting under Rupprecht in Alsace saw themselves as both Bavarian and German. Similarly, French-speaking troops dragooned into fighting didn’t see themselves as ‘German’. With desertion rates soaring, many fled into Switzerland, and some 17,500 escaped over the border to volunteer in the French Army.4

War memorials in Alsace reflect this painful divide. Statues of a soldier in German uniform would not have been palatable post-1918, so memorials often feature a bereaved woman carrying a child and dressed in Alsatian costume, an allegory for Alsace mourning her lost sons. Alsace-Lorraine suffered terrible hardships during the war, akin to those communities in northern France that found themselves in late 1914 trapped behind German lines. Thousands of refugees from the fighting fled to Strasbourg in search of food. The destruction of farms and property led to shortages, and factories were transferred to the German interior. To combat growing dissent, draconian Germanization policies were introduced, with Governor Johann von Dallwitz declaring in 1914 that an ‘iron broom’ would expunge anti-German sentiment. The French language was banned, thousands were imprisoned for singing the Marseillaise, or wearing a cockade, or providing intelligence to the enemy. Thousands more who were considered pro-French were placed in ‘preventative detention’ camps.