The Path of Peace

1

The Silent Witnesses

DUM. DUM. DUM. DUM. It's 5 a.m., and the alarm on my phone is hammering away by my head. It has the tempo and bark of a Lewis machine gun, model 1916.

I drag myself up. I slept badly. I always do when I'm in a strange bed and have a big day ahead.

I creep quietly down the narrow staircase, put the kettle on, and take some tea in to Sarah's bedroom.

So much hinges on this day, Monday 9 August 2021. It's been a long time coming. A whole lifetime perhaps. But with the day now dawning, it seems to have come quickly, too quickly. I am not ready. The taxi is arriving at seven, and there is much to do. I pack and unpack my rucksack. I'm an innocent at this. I need more time to work through what I might need. I don't know what I'm doing. A hurried Covid test, debris left scattered on the sideboard, an even more rushed breakfast, and we're off.

Sarah and I don't talk much in the car. We are lost in thought. The radio blares out the half-remembered song 'Titanium' about a machine gun mowing people down mercilessly. Even here, we can't escape a long footprint of the First World War... I stare defiantly ahead as the taxi speeds into Heathrow's Terminal Two, disgorging us, our bags and dreams, into the cold morning air.

Confusion in all directions as we struggle to clear security and passport control. No one is listening to the announcements nor to the attendants. We're going to miss the plane - the whole plan is at risk - until the PA system tells us that Swiss Air Lines has pushed our departure time back eighty minutes.

Suddenly, we are in Row 34 at the rear of the fuselage. I'd been imagining we'd be almost alone. Fat chance. Full plane. Why on earth are so many flying to Zürich on a Monday morning? Haven't they heard about the pandemic?

Sarah squeezes my hand as we rattle down the runway, turns to me, and smiles, probing. This is it. No turning back now.

When did the plan to undertake this journey first come to me? I can no longer precisely remember. A decade ago, I was researching a book on the First World War and my co-author pointed to a letter written by a young officer, Douglas Gillespie, to his former headmaster at Winchester College. I'd worked in schools all my life so it caught my attention. Former students don't often write back to their schools, least of all to their heads. Who was Gillespie? I wondered as I gazed at his portrait. A sensitive face, proud perhaps, looking back at us in his crisp Second Lieutenant uniform, ready for the front. I had to find out about him.

Douglas Gillespie, newly enlisted in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, 1915.

He was posted to the front between Vimy Ridge in northern France and the Belgian border. A dangerous part of the line. By coincidence, his beloved younger and only brother, Tom, had fought at La Bassée, just a kilometre or two away. Soon after reaching the trenches, Douglas wrote a letter to his parents in Linlithgow, Scotland, with an ingenious idea for establishing a path along No Man's Land from Switzerland to the English Channel after the war was over. I was immediately captivated, still more so by the expanded vision of the idea he wrote about to his old headmaster.

'I wish that 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. The ground is so pitted, and scarred, and torn with shells, and tangled with wire, that it will take years to bring it back to use again, but I would make a fine broad road in the "No Man's Land" between the lines, with paths for pilgrims on foot, and plant trees for shade, and fruit trees, so the soil should not be altogether waste. Then I would like to send every man [woman] 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.'1

The silent witnesses.

These are the words that propelled me on my mission today. The words that could change history. If all goes well.

Douglas loved nature, as did many of his fellow soldiers. 'The Briton on service on the western front lived inside nature. [It] gave men a psychological, spiritual and religious uplift,' wrote John Lewis-Stempel.2 Douglas grieved desperately at nature's destruction all around him, as he did at the destruction of human beings, never more than when his brother Tom became one of those silent witnesses, killed in action that first autumn, in October 1914. The loss changed his older brother as he toiled on month after bloody month at the front. His letters home on the surface remained stoical and cheerful, but the impact was very evident, as when he wrote this, on 24 September 1915: 'My dear daddy, before long I think we should be in the thick of it. I have no forebodings, for. Tom himself will be here to help me, and give me courage and resource and that cool head which will be needed most of all to make the attack a success.'3

The frontispiece of Letters from Flanders, with a photo of Douglas Gillespie in 1911.

Twelve hours later, Douglas too was dead, killed in the opening hours of the catastrophic Battle of Loos. His body, mashed and mulched into the mud of northern France, was not recovered.

His distraught parents never recovered from the loss of their two sons, on whom they had pinned such hopes. To try to soothe their pain, in 1916 they published an edition of the letters Tom and Douglas wrote home: Letters from Flanders. A subsequent volume, pictured here, included an appendix with the seminal letter to his Winchester headmaster, Montague Rendall.

Douglas's audacious proposal for the Via Sacra, though considered idealistic in an increasingly jingoistic country, aroused some interest. A review in the Spectator described his 'great Memorial Road idea' as a 'brilliant suggestion'. But it was soon swallowed up in the rip tides of the Somme in 1916 and Passchendaele in 1917, and after the war ended in 1918, neither the British nor the French governments had time or appetite to realize the vision.

Thus it was that his genius of an idea for a Western Front path lay dormant for a hundred years. When I first read the letter in 2012, with interest in the Great War surging as the centenary approached, I sensed something substantial and potent. Had the time now come to revive the proposal, to make it a reality?

I needed to find out why Douglas, uniquely it would appear among the millions of combatants, dreamt up this vision of a Via Sacra. What exactly was in his head? I started living with him for months looking for answers.

It was a moment of great joy when I discovered that Douglas's niece, great-nephews and great-nieces were alive, and proved as passionate about his vision as me. We met up to explore if his pathway might even now be established. The project began to snowball, with well-wishers joining us, not least Rory Forsyth, who became chief executive of the Western Front Way, the charity we formed to promote it. We knew we had an uphill struggle. If the project was indeed brilliant, why had no one created it in the hundred years since the armistice?

We decided we had to walk sections of the front to explore if a continuous path along its entire length was remotely realistic. It was a sobering experience. Far less than 1 per cent of the lines of trenches remained, with the rest ploughed over to restore working farmland. We struggled to find any kind of track to walk. Scattered paths close to the old front existed in places, but they were not joined up. Creating Gillespie's vision now would be seriously hard work. So it was we found ourselves out in France in the summer of 2016, Brexit-referendum summer, retreat-from-continental-partner summer. My wife Joanna's final summer.

I had not found life at all easy since Joanna's diagnosis of cancer in the summer of 2011, but her death in December 2016 shook me far more than I imagined possible. We had met at Oxford in the mid-1970s, had three dearly-loved children, and grew ever closer. She was dark-eyed and beautiful, preternaturally clever and knowing. I had lost sight of where I finished and where she began. Her death ripped me in two.

Work became my salvation. I toiled away harder than ever before, but with less success. I had been running a small university since 2015, Buckingham, which my father had helped set up in 1976, but without Joanna I had lost my touch. I always knew what I was doing with her beside me: I could make the weather. But now, almost overnight, nothing seemed to work out as I would have liked. On the surface it looked OK - numbers, profile and new buildings - and we were achieving a model of a caring, free-thinking and humane university where students and their mental health would be looked after; an exciting community with festivals galore; and innovative, with emotional and artificial intelligence. But my love for the job and ability to inspire colleagues had evaporated; my keeping one step ahead of the board, shot. Very early on, one high-up asked how it was going. Quite difficult, I replied. Why? Well, my wife is dying. You better get over it, came the reply. Fair enough, I thought. That's the way things are here. I have always needed people in the past to believe in me, to dream dreams...