On November 1st, the UK historian and biographer Sir Anthony Seldon and founding proponent of the Western Front Way launches his book recounting his pilgrimage and personal reflections while walking the WFW in 2021. Available at bookstores (Atlantic Books) after November 1st! Congratulations. My copy on order and I’m looking forward to settling in by the fire for a good read when it arrives! Great article by Dr. Seldon in last weekend’s Times.
Hi everyone, following a couple of days in the lovely city of Amsterdam (and various flights for a long trip back), I returned home on the weekend now enjoying Kootenay life and some lovely Fall weather. If your are interested, I have added daily route-taken maps that can be found in the photo gallery pages. I will leave the wordpress site up for another week or so, and may add a few more photos to the galleries. Thanks for following!
After a great rest in the tent in Nieuwpoort, I rode along quiet, flat (!) pathways to the lovely city of Bruges where I’ll officially end my time on the bike, conclude this blog, and start making my way to Amsterdam to fly home next week. Can’t wait. I’m homesick, and miss Ali and my family very much. I’ll keep the site up a few more weeks (fix a few typos etc lol).
It has been an inspiring trip on so many levels: meeting and making new friends who had such interesting stories and ideas (I loved our various discussions riding side be side along the route until the familiar “car back!” was hollered from the rear rider to get us all back in line); setting and achieving a difficult physical challenge; supporting the Western Front Way idea of a path for peace dreamed by an ancestor who was himself in the midst of a war; and learning so much about the horrific violence and resulting trauma faced by a generation and their families over a hundred years ago-including my grandparents and Ali’s grandparents. And I was comforted to realize that I felt immense grief when reflecting on everything I took in and experienced. I would have been worried had I not.
But perhaps what is most bewildering and indeed so troubling is that the immense tragedy of the 1914-1918 conflict continues to be replicated around the world today at the hands of political and military leaders who must simply have no regard or care for human life, humanity or our precious planet. Perhaps A.D. Gillespie’s vision of a path of peace should be ubiquitous and daily; that every time we walk a forest path, along a beach, through a busy street, we should take a few moments to contemplate and personally commit to living and working for peace, and to listen long and hard to the spirits of the silent witnesses.
Thanks everyone! Peace be with you.
One aspect of the trip that I am also still struggling to fully comprehend is the long lasting impacts of war on our precious planet. I saw this years ago working with forestry faculty in the late 90s at Hue University in Central Vietnam and their efforts to restore the land and mountain forests (and health in the communities) from impacts of Agent Orange spraying by the US in the Vietnam war. It is painstaking work and requires smart people, research, exhaustive work on the ground, and time.
In the case of the 1914-1918 conflict the unearthing of unexploded ordinance or cordoning off of areas of risk to agriculture or habitation, while becoming less and less is still very much “a thing”. In the battle at Verdun for example in the first 10 hours, 2 million (that’s a 2 and six zeros) rounds of artillery were fired. And over the course of Verdun, nine entire towns were destroyed. A hundred and four years later those rounds are still being dug up. I rode past one at the edge of a farmers field in France, and took a picture of one set on a stump near a forest cemetery….
…heartbreaking and outrageous to think that since 1918 up to the present day somewhere in the world this has happened and is happening to people in their communities…
International day of Peace..
Left Ypres on the morning of Sept 21 with two brief stops at Tyne Cot with much significance to Australia, New Zealand and Canada (in addition to the British forces) and the battle of Passchendale. We also stopped at the German cemetery at Langmarck. We reached the sea and the end of the WFW in time for a lovely lunch of steamed mussels and fries (er…chips). And of course much celebration and sad farewells to my new friends. I will have a few more posts to make in the next few days before wrapping up the postings for this blog. Stay tuned. I’ve left out many details over the trip, but will add a few thoughts in the coming days. And I will continue to process what I have experienced…
I have added John McCrae’s poem In Flanders Fields and AD’s letter of September 23, 1915 in the Quotes and Passages page.
Big kms (119!), impactful sites, moving ceremony to end the day..
It’s hard not to catch a sob in your throat when you first lay eyes on the Vimy Ridge memorial. In fact I didn’t catch it in time and let out a few…. I don’t think it is a national pride thing for me. I was simply awestruck and moved I guess. The memorial has immense aesthetic beauty; it is a powerful work of art, and when you look at the expressions on the faces and the stance or repose of the sculpted figures, you simply cannot suppress the sadness of the thought of the terrifying-and in some cases fatal-experience the young men had who were far from home and away from families who loved them; being sent into such a horrific battle. Between 15-20,000 Canadians were involved in direct combat that day April 9, 1917. They had been huddling in the tunnels for 18 hours waiting for the artillery to stop and then sent out and “over the top.” They won on that particular day, but at considerable cost. 10,600 casualties, 3,600 of which were fatal.
Equally impactful was the Loos Memorial which holds the inscription of A.D. Gillespie’s name. His name appears on one of the panels inside the enclosure under the Argyll and Sutherland listings for Lieutenants. His remains were never recovered but he was lost at the Battle of Loos in September to October, 1915. Seeing his name had a similar effect for me as did Vimy: AD Gillespie was a young, brilliant scholar and thinker who had such potential and whose life was taken so young. But what made seeing his name so special was to visit his marker on the route that he dreamed about in 1915, and to visit it over 100 years later with Tom, Alice, and Theo, descendants of AD’s sister and distant relatives to my family. I will be forever grateful to them for including me in this journey.
On the September 20 leg, we also stopped at the Faubourg D’Amiens Commonwealth Memorial at Arras. Alice and Tom’s brother-in-law Len who has done so much research on WW1, helped me find a relative of friend and colleague back home, Neil. Cornelius Lill of the East Yorkshires is remembered there. Thank you Len!
We ended the day crossing into Belgium and arriving in Ypres (Ieper) in time to attend the nightly 8 pm ceremony at the Menin Gate. The Menin Gate is the largest British Commonwealth memorial to the some 300,000 British and Commonwealth (including thousands of Canadians) soldiers who defended the town of Ypres for four years. The remains of 90,000 were never recovered. Their names adorn the walls of the gate. The people of Ypres have been honouring them nightly since 1928. It’s an incredibly moving ceremony and sacred place.
September 19th was a shorter distance (about 65kms) from Peronne to Bucqouy where we began a journey through an area known as the Somme. This is gently rolling terrain where the Western Front changed position back and forth over a number of years and involved British, Commonwealth, and German soldiers in the hundreds of thousands. The Commonwelath War Graves Commission maintains hundreds of large and small war graveyards and many of them are here. The day was full with a number of stops at graveyards and memorials of all sizes; some in farmers fields , others in beautiful parks and forested areas. Tom and I happened on one by the side of a secondary road that was entirely Canadian: the Sunken Road Graveyard containing perhaps a hundred remains: buried where they died.
Large Commonwealth cemeteries/memorials at Poziers and Thiepval contain headstones as well as walls or memorial structures with thousands of names for which no remains were found following the catastrophe of battle. A particularly moving memorial was the beautiful Canadian memorial to an entire generation of Newfoundlanders wiped out on July 1st of 1916 at Beaumont Hamel. I know I have only scraped the surface but the number of dead across this landscape from a four year cruel and tragic conflict is very hard to make sense of. In one German graveyard alone, Nampcel, there are 11,324 buried, 4 to each cross marker. I’ve updated the new photo gallery and added AD Gillespies letter from September 19, 1915.
A little bit of everything!
Thank you to Tam and Tony for shuttling a few of us back to the WFW route at Laffaux from our night in the very beautiful medieval city of Laon. We had cool morning temperatures (7 degrees C!) on the open paths toward Terny Sorny, then worked our way through some lovely but windy farmland, calm and shady forest, and canal and riverside along the Oisie River and Oise/Canal Du Nord system. A lovely lunch at Pont L’eveque and finishing the afternoon on a very pleasant (lower wind speeds!) ride along the canals coming into the Somme River system and into a very pretty city of Peronne. Today did not have many stops of interest, so we pressed on: 116kms..
We stopped at two German cemeteries at Nempcel with approximately 13,000 graves combined from battles along the river Aisne, and a French cemetery at Tracy-Le-Mont.
A new challenge: headwinds!
September 17…. Sommepy Tahure through Reims and along the Chemins des Dames and WNW to Laffaux. Chillier today with Autumn in the air. A relentless and blustery headwind challenged our progress of 116 kms, but it was a lovely ride along the Canal de l’Aisne a Marne and then up along the Chemins des Dames (historically significant to the Franco British alliance) to Laffaux. Tonight we are staying in the old medieval city of Louan.
Today was the first instance of seeing a British graveyard along the route at La Ville aux Bois. Amazing to see graves of soldiers from so many parts and regiments all over the UK.
Cycling the Western Front Way 