The whirlwind of achievement that is Anthony Seldon — author of political biographies, former headmaster of Wellington College, afterwards Vice-Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, thinker, educationalist and historian — has given us a new book. Having stepped down from his post at Buckingham, his wife taken by cancer, and with no clear sense of where his life was going, just as the shadow of Covid menaced the world, Seldon decided to walk the battlegrounds of 1914–18 on his own personal 35-day pilgrimage.

Visiting battlefields has always been big business. The earliest historians noted that in the aftermath of Marathon in 490 BC, and later clashes at Thermopylae, Salamis and Platea, the Ancient Greeks began erecting monuments to commemorate the sacrifice of their slain warriors. These not only acted as a sacred place to remember the dead, who lay under the earth in tumuli, and for others to hope the martial magic would rub off on them, but to remind their enemies to think twice before returning. 

Significantly, the Greeks referred to their monuments as “trophies”. The original word was tropaion, which derives from tropi, the point where enemy lines broke. These earliest memorials were makeshift, often a nearby tree, decorated with the armour, shields, helmets and weapons of the defeated, dedicated to whichever god was associated with the battle. Since rendered in stone, these trophies of war have featured ever since in battle commemoration.

Whilst the Greeks, Persians and others were battering each other into submission, the Judeo-Christian Old Testament recorded the stories of Abraham and his descendants, summoned by their God to leave their homeland on a journey that continued for generations. They travelled out of both necessity and ritual, often returning to sites of sacred encounters. Long after the wanderings of the original Israelites, new Christians began venturing to the Holy Land in the 4th century, to walk in the footsteps of Jesus. By the 12th century, these journeys had become known as pilgrimages. Behind these travels lay the concepts of discovering an internal sacred space, of penance and ritual.

Seldon reminds us Britain has never been very good with its war dead

Seldon invites us to join him, his backpack and blisters, doing just that. Following the line of the old Western Front through France and Belgium, he is alone for much of his epic 1,000km journey. The Path of Peace is partly Seldon encouraging us to share his quest for his inner sacred space, giving us a book that is both about pilgrimage and tourism. 

The idea came from reading the letters of a former Wellingtonian pupil to his headmaster. 2nd Lieutenant Alexander Douglas Gillespie, of the 8th Gordon Highlanders, wrote of wanting to create a “Via Sacra”, a post-war sacred way, where “the men, women and children of Europe could walk to honour the fallen of the war” in which he was fighting. Gillespie never got to see it, for he was killed in action in 1915. A hundred years later, Seldon saw the chance to realise the young man’s vision — part of the purpose of his travelogue is to help establish “The Western Front Way”.

Seldon takes us through the ritual of visiting cemeteries, British, French, German, American; placing stones on Jewish graves; and the penance of inadvertent thirst, starvation, mosquito bites, heat exhaustion, soakings from rain, cuts from falls and badly blistered feet, for which we visit a succession of hospitals. In a sense his peregrination, with its challenges, is a continuation of a long tradition. Europeans were doing this sort of thing for centuries in the golden age of pilgrimage, which lasted until the 16th century. It became one of the most widely recognised and exercised aspects of Christian devotion. 

Seldon’s antecedent pilgrims soon realised you didn’t have to go to Jerusalem. Canterbury (think Chaucer) or Walsingham would do. Visiting battlefields also slipped back into fashion, where the devout came to pray for the souls of the departed combatants or the victors to atone for their killing. William the Conqueror’s abbey at Battle, near Hastings, was one such, but every mediaeval battlefield sprouted shrines and chapels.

What killed the business was Protestantism and long campaigns like the Thirty Years’ War. Good Catholic pilgrims ventured to battlefields to pray for those men at arms, taken before their time, whose souls were locked in Purgatory. Prayers, gifts and money would speed the soul from its intermediate state between death and resurrection. As Protestant churches rejected the doctrine of Purgatory, all those battleground shrines in Northern Europe fell into decay as the reason for visiting them lapsed. It would take scores of 18th and 19th century romantic poets and writers to sugar-coat the idea of mortal combat, just when the notion of the Grand Tour kicked in. Travel was back for tour-ists, boosted by railways and Thomas Cook. 

Seldon reminds us that Britain has never been very good with its war dead. The slain at Waterloo were stripped and buried in mass graves. Later, their bones were exhumed and processed on site for fertiliser and glue. It was the awful carnage of the 1914–18 war that brought modern pilgrimage and battlefield tourism together. The Path of Peace follows in the footsteps of the millions of families mourning their loved ones. By the 1920s, they were able to travel to the trench lines and war graves of France and Flanders, which triggered a second age of pilgrimage. 

We are reminded of the “missing”. The term was an attempt to avoid the grizzly detail of a soldier being atomised by shell blast, mangled beyond recognition by bullet, blade or grenade, or dying a lonely death in a muddy shell hole. Unfortunately, the very word brought the next-of-kin unfounded hope that the “missing” might be found. A popular novel and film of the 1940s, Random Harvest, dealt with exactly this theme, when one of the “missing” returned home, having lost his memory. With a perceived failure of organised religion to prevent apocalyptic slaughter, the era saw a growth in the rise of spiritualism, as the living tried to communicate with the dead. 

The former headmaster is himself dodging the menace of Covid

Tracing the historic route of the Western Front is not new. My late friend, colleague and mentor, Richard Holmes, did it on horseback, which he described in Riding the Retreat (1995). 

He was in company and at night enjoyed convivial dinner parties, whereas Seldon is mostly alone — but he does justice to local restaurants when they are open. Holmes realised the horse brought him the same viewpoint as a First World War officer, with all its limitations, but also came to understand how dirty you got in the vicinity of horses. “After a while”, though, “you didn’t care how muddy you became”. Seldon’s exploration is similar, evoking the tribulations of a humble foot soldier, hungry, often cold and tired. As he describes the infantrymen of those days dodging bullet and shell, we are aware the former headmaster is himself dodging the menace of Covid.

Seldon visits many of the Commonwealth war cemeteries which pepper his route, e-mailing their head office as he advances, but observes that Britons are far too used to understanding the Western Front in terms of the sacrifices of country and empire — totalling nearly a million dead and 2.1 million wounded in all theatres. Mark Twain once wrote, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness.” Thus, The Path of Peace also reminds us of the French sacrifice. The French lost 1.3 million killed and 4.3 million military wounded from a smaller population, who mostly fell in France. The author finds Russians, Poles, Czechs and Italians fighting under French command, who now find themselves lying in some corner of a foreign field.

Seldon starts on the Swiss frontier, where the trench lines improbably vanish on reaching a few strands of a farmer’s fence marking the border. He walks us through some of Europe’s most beautiful and evocative scenery — the Vosges, Argonne and Champagne — little visited by Britons tracing the footsteps of their Tommy ancestors. When we do come to the haunting trenches of Arras, the Somme and Ypres, we have a context. He explores grief, loss and the legacy of war, along with a host of military topics from stretcher bearers, mutineers and generalship, to rations and tunnelling. The Path of Peace is Seldon’s life-altering walk. As an act of remembrance and a pilgrimage, does it work? Well, the Western Front Way is now a fact, not a vision. (See here for more details.) Throughout he mourns his first wife. At the end we discovered he has remarried. The walk brought him the inner peace for which true pilgrims yearn. Seldon muses about walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain. I am already reaching for my hiking boots.