My pilgrimage on the Western Front Way

Daunt Books in Marylebone was full last Tuesday evening for the launch of The Path of Peace, my book about walking from Switzerland to the North Sea, to help realise the vision of a young subaltern, Douglas Gillespie, killed in September 1915 shortly after unveiling his idea in a letter to his headmaster at Winchester College. He envisaged after the war a ‘via sacra’ being created along the entire Western Front and he wanted every man, woman and child to walk the trail as a reminder of where war leads ‘from the silent witnesses’ on both sides. A ‘brilliant idea’ was how The Spectator described the suggestion during the war. But the vision lay buried for 100 years. My walk last summer was 1,000 km and took one million steps through soil where ten million bled to death or were severely wounded in body or mind. The walk, perhaps the best idea to have emerged from the war, is now being marked out with signposts across northern France and Belgium, called the ‘Western Front Way’. Pilgrimages on foot or cycle can revive purpose and zest for life, as Gillespie intended. I recommend it!

My much loved father, Arthur Seldon, co-founder of the Institute of Economic Affairs, was one month old when the Somme battle opened in July 1916, but his parents, both immigrants from Ukraine, were soon ailing with the Spanish flu. I researched their lives in the wartime Jewish East End for the book, learning how my father was passed unwanted from family to family after his parents died until he was adopted by a cobbler from Russia. A lifelong and passionate champion of the free market, he would have recoiled at the insensitive application of its principles by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng.