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A young soldier’s noble vision: creating the Western Front Way 

In 1915, Douglas Gillespie, aged 25, hoped that a tree-shaded ‘via sacra’ would one day mark the Western Front. Anthony Seldon helps to realise this a century later

12 November 2022

9:00 AM

12 November 2022

9:00 AM

The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way Anthony Seldon

Atlantic Books, pp.350, 20

This profound and emotion-laden book ends, as did the first world war, in hope, and no little catharsis. It begins, though, in overpowering grief, not just that of the Western Front’s bereaved, but the author’s. In 2016 Sir Anthony Seldon’s wife died of cancer, diagnosed five years earlier. They had met at Oxford, she was ‘dark-eyed and beautiful, preternaturally clever and knowing’, and when they married, his father, whose own people had been refugees from the pogroms in Ukraine, was delighted that he’d found a Jewish girl.

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