And he made it, regardless of the challenges: Covid still reigned, making accommodation scarce, the territory to a significant extent uncharted, meaning that he had to find his own way (once he sighed relief when he could just trot along somebody else who was the pathfinder), sometimes in rough terrain, making him fall down into a crevice, and a vicious dog biting him, with the ensuing visit to a hospital (one of in total three -short- stays in hospital during the trip).

In 2012, however, he was deeply inspired by a letter a young but soon-to-be-killed officer called Alexander Douglas Gillespie had sent his parents from the western front. This described his dream of creating a commemorative path after the war, along no man’s land all the way from Switzerland to the Channel. After that, he wrote, he hoped to “send every man 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”. The walk has changed his life, enabling him to find greater peace personally. He married again earlier this year. Now, the ambition of Sir Anthony and his fellow enthusiasts is that the Western Front Way should become one of the great long treks in Europe: a northern equivalent of the Camino de Santiago de Compostela — something that offers a mix of physical challenge and camaraderie alongside the possibility of spiritual growth. A journey of self-discovery and a pilgrimage of peace… A remarkable book by a remarkable man.’ Michael Morpurgo Anthony Sheldon [00:02:52] So it was the idea of a soldier called Douglas Gillespie and he was in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and he went across to fight and he found himself in trenches very close to where his brother had been killed in the first winter of war in 1914. And in early 1915 he wrote to his parents with an idea and expanded it still further in a letter to his headmaster and said, Look, if I survive, I would like to see created to as a reminder of of where war leads - to death, including the death of his brother , I'd like to see created a tree shaded pathway a 'via sacra' he called it all the way from Switzerland through the Voges to the English Channel, along which I'd like every man and woman in Western Europe to walk as a reminder that war leads to death and destruction. And so that letter was found by my co-author in a book called 'Public Schools and the Great War' by David Walsh. He'd been pointed to it by the archivist at Winchester College, where this young man went to school. And I, I just knew at once when David showed it to me that this was an idea that needed to be realised. It didn't need to be lying dormant as just a musty letter in an archive - it could inspire a whole vision. And that was the beginning. So the idea begins and ends with one soldier, Douglas Gillespie, who alone of the millions of soldiers, apparently in the millions of soldiers who fought in that war, had this vision of a walkway along the line of the No Man's Land. And so then a group of people, including Tom Heap, who is just about the closest surviving relative male relative to Douglas Gillespie, Tom Heap, who is regularly on screen with BBC One's Countryfile programme - he became very interested in his family. His mother and Rory Forsyth became very interested and he is now the chief executive along with Kim Hayes, a group of people built up and they have made all the running. They are the heroes. And because it is now absolutely happening, it's totally happening. It's a walking and cycling route. It's already marked out in the most northerly areas and it will become as big in time as the Camino through southern France and northern Spain as the pilgrims pass. It's a wonderful and remarkable path with a mission to help everyone walking it discover peace - as he intended. In 2011, Anthony Seldon was researching for a book on World War One when he found letters written by a young officer in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders. Douglas Gillespie had been posted to the front near Vimy Ridge in northern France, his younger brother, Tom, fought at La Bassée just one kilometer away.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 Seldon’s book ends by reflecting on the tragedy of a world where history seems doomed to repeat itself: in this particular case, with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. (Seldon’s own family hailed originally from that region: ‘One hundred years earlier my grandparents had fled west from near Kyiv in search of peace. Now their descendants beat the same path.’) As he concludes:

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”. That said, the silence also fed him. He found solace in the withdrawal from the daily routine. “I found myself meditating on the word ‘Maranatha’ [Come, Lord]. I say that twice a day, ideally for 30 minutes, and it takes me to a place beyond fear, beyond striving,” he says. Young Arthur must have been disorientated after his parents had suddenly died, his siblings had disappeared, his home had changed not once but several times, and now he had a new mother looking after him. But he prevailed. “The intellectual architect of both Blairism and Thatcherism”, The Economist said of him on his death in 2005.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. Of course, the book does not replace a full-fledged history of the war on the Western Front, but it highlights the most important battles. The links and sequences between the great battles are shown, thereby making it much easier to understand their history, much better than in any larger and more comprehensive presentation. Sir Anthony will mark Armistice Day at a service and a ceremony at the Cenotaph, and, on Remembrance Sunday, he will be at church in Windsor, as usual. Alexander Douglas Gillespie, the inspiration for the Western Front Way. Photograph: Imperial War Museum

A timely, eloquent and convincing reminder that to forget the carnage of the past is to open the door to it happening again’ – George Alagiah The long walk was lonely. “While I loved the quiet, and not reading the papers daily for the first time in my adult life, the burden of hourly decisions and worries took a toll,” he says. “Life is much easier when there’s someone to share it with.” There’s something about doing things deliberately, and intentionally finding things which are going to be challenging at the end of your life, and taking them on.”Any student of the history of WWI could use this book to recapitulate in short form the battles of the Western Front and their distinctive elements. I for one am happy to devote the rest of my life to seeing Gillespie’s magnificent roaring dream become a reality,” he ends the book, before quoting from Matthew 5.9: “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God.”

Unlike Smith and Gee, war poet and artist Isaac Rosenberg did not return from the front line. He wrote that “nothing can justify war”, but joined up in October 1915 anyway because “we must all fight to get the trouble over”. 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.)

The Church Times Archive

He was promoted to commander of the Australian Corps in mid-1918. His meticulously planned operations would see the Australian Corps spearheading the British victories at Amiens, Peronne, and on the Hindenburg Line.