The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way

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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 Before the war, my father’s parents Philip and Masha Margolis emigrated from the Ukrainian town of Pereiaslav near Kyiv (then part of the Russian Empire), and the 1911 census places them in Whitechapel. They had escaped from Tsarist persecution, pogroms and poverty, but in London’s East End, with Jews and Christians divided by streets, as my father’s brother Cecil recalls in his memoirs, “fighting and brawling was commonplace among the young”. England has been all she could be to Jews, Jews will be all they can be to England”, stated the Jewish Chronicle on the outbreak of war in 1914. He wrote in his haunting poem August 1914: “What in our lives is burnt/ In the fire of this?/ The heart’s dear granary?/ The much we shall miss?”. He was killed in April 1918 near Arras, during the German Spring Offensive. Tom Thorpe [00:06:13] Which brings me to my next question. Why did you want to walk the way and why did you want to write a book about it?

Life was also very busy. For all the enthusiasm of a handful of individuals — given greater poignancy by the Brexit vote — no one had time to dedicate the uninterrupted attention the project needed. 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.

The Path of Peace documents his journey. The book is a compelling mix of travelogue and history, nature-writing and reflection. He describes walking through the stunning rural scenery of Picardy, Champagne, the Ardennes, and the Vosges, travelling alongside the rivers Somme, Oise, Aisne, Meuse, and Moselle, and staying in historic towns such as Ypres, Arras, Rheims, Verdun, and Colmar. The May 2016 Devolved Elections in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and London: Convergences and Divergences IT IS very easy to lead “blunt” lives, he believes. “One thing I’ve noticed, writing about Prime Ministers, most people don’t really think through what it is they are doing. Life just happens.” (His books include biographies of Winston Churchill, John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, and David Cameron.)

He was a wonderful man but the early traumas scarred him for life and cannot but have affected my brothers and me. 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. For me, reading this book in January 2023 revived memories of the research by the OSP History Group between 2014 and 2019 into the men of Old Saint Paul’s who fell in World War One. So it was with considerable interest that I followed Anthony Seldon as he pursued his own pilgrimage. There are many parts of the Western Front to which our soldiers did not go: I have learned about other battlefields, other towns and villages and buildings destroyed by war. Some restored, some left as memorials to many fallen men. Second World War commander Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery later wrote that Monash was “the best general on the Western Front in Europe”. The world has not achieved the peace that those young men of 1914 believed they were fighting for; we saw a second world war start only 20 years after the first ended; now, in 2023, we must hope that we are not on the brink of a third. As our Rector said in his sermon on Remembrance Day, 13 November 2022, “There are no answers to the persistence of human destructiveness. But there are ways of responding”. Douglas Gillespie’s response, his vision of a Way of Peace, is surely more relevant and necessary than ever.He has a historian’s enthusiasm and sharp eye for spotting good stories, many from the battlefields he is passing by 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….I would make a fine broad road in the ‘No-Mans Land’ between the lines, with paths for pilgrims on foot and plant trees for shade and fruit trees, so that the soil should not altogether be waste. Then I would like to send every man, woman and child in Western Europe on a pilgrimage along that Via Sacra so that they might think and learn what war means from the silent witnesses on either side.”