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

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. After her death, which ‘ripped me in two’, writes Seldon, he threw himself into his work – his prodigious writing and the vice-chancellorship of Buckingham University, which his father had helped found. It was no remedy, however, and in 2020 he left, including the tied cottage. For the first time in most of his adult life he found himself without a wife, job or home. He turned for solace to the Western Front.

It seems a curious choice at first glance. I have visited the Western Front many times, though not nearly as often as Seldon, who during his teaching career led more than 100 parties to see what remains of the trenches and the immaculately tended cemeteries. I myself always tried to stay clear of the cemeteries, not to avoid being reminded of the ultimate price of my trade – the army takes its recruits there to see exactly what unlimited liability may mean – but because they make me angrier still at the war’s generalship, and indeed with those who seek to rehabilitate the reputation of Douglas Haig in particular. What competent military commander could, in his instructions before the Somme offensive, rule out reconnaissance, as Haig did: ‘The advance of isolated detachments should be avoided.