Review by Tracey Foster of "The Path of Peace: Walking the Western Front Way" by Anthony Seldon

Establishing a path for future generations to tread in the footsteps of silent witnesses was the goal of Douglas Gillespie, a young officer serving at the front in 1915. Seldon, an author of historical books, had spent a long time researching the First World War and was particularly intrigued by a letter Gillespie wrote to his headmaster, expressing a desire that in the future, everyone should walk in the footsteps of soldiers of both sides of the war: a path of peace, a path of remembrance, a walk to honour those who fought for our future. Gillespie’s vision for Via Sacra gained some support in 1916 when his posthumous letters were published by his parents in the book Letters from Flanders. This was quickly dismissed after the turmoil unleashed on the countryside in the battles of the Somme and Passchendaele rendered it almost impossible.

Back in 2021, Seldon found himself at Kilometer Zero, during a pandemic, attempting to walk the whole Path of Peace. Recording the journey on his phone, he attempted to do two things, undertaking two walks in parallel: "One, through Covid-affected villages in the present moment, with flies and sweat, while trying to puzzle out the route; and two, walking a hundred years ago along the old front line, missing the flies and sweat, the fear and noise."

This is a walk that is unmarked, built on and bordered, a path that is hard to define, often blocked and private. Undeterred, Seldon battles along stretches of B roads, lined with ossified tree stumps and relics of war. He recalls entries from First World War diaries: "Here nature is disfigured by war. There is not a tree trunk which does not bear the trace of shot or shell; the bark of the pines bears gashes, other trees are amputated halfway up or cut close to the ground."

Seldon reflects, whilst walking, what the original aim of a path of peace was. Gillespie wanted hikers from both sides to walk this route to comprehend where war can lead. Seldon decides to ruminate on those he has offended throughout his literary career and concludes "it’s painful. But walks, like prayerful silence, can change us within."

Utilizing war poetry and archive diaries, the walk is undertaken with reference to strategic advances and losses and the personal correspondence of those that endured it. Kipling was one of those whose story parallels the sad fate of many British families awaiting good news back home. After pushing his seventeen-year-old son into war, he was later devastated by his senseless death in battle. John Kipling, inexperienced and naive, was an officer in the Battle of Loos, recklessly leading his men into a charge with a head wound. His death led Kipling to write: "I have many times asked myself whether there can be any more potent advocates of peace upon earth than this massed multitude of witnesses to the desolation of war."

The war cemeteries that line this walk bear witness to the numbers of silent witnesses who leave behind only a name, and for many more not even that.

Seldon finishes his work at the coast of Ostend still under Covid restrictions and worries that he may not be allowed back into Blighty. He returns in 2022 to cut the ribbon on his newly marked path where the word has spread about Gillespie’s Via Sacra, France and Belgium committing to maintain the route and add way markers: "A walk to enhance and deepen life, not to dwell on loss. A 1,000 Kilometer path along the whole Western Front, with people of all nationalities walking side by side, learning from the silent witnesses where war leads, feels like a drop in the ocean. But it is a drop which is becoming a stream, a stream which will become a mighty river, a roaring sea."

About the reviewer

Tracey Foster started off in a long career as an Art and Design teacher but wanted to refocus her creative energies into writing poetry and prose. After helping others find inspiration in the world around us, she took an MA course in Creative Writing at Leicester University and has not looked back. She finds inspiration in the past and the events that shape us. Previous work has been published by Comma Press, Ayaskala, Alternateroute, Fish Barrel Review, Haiku Foundation, Mausoleum Press, Bus Poetry Magazine, Wayward Literature, The Arts Council and she writes on her own blog site, The Small Sublime, found here.

Review by Jon Wilkins of "Not So Quiet" by Helen Zenna Smith

In 1930 author Evadne Price was asked by her publisher to write a spoof of All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque. Instead, she wrote a serious work, based on the now-lost diaries of Winifred Young, who served in France during the war as a volunteer ambulance driver.

As Helen Zenna Smith, Price wrote a supposed semi-biographical account providing an incredible female insight to the horrors of World War I. Not So Quiet criticises nationalism and the social, physical, and psychological effects of the war upon England's youth, men and women.

Praised by the Chicago Sun-Times for its "furious, indignant power," this story offered a rare, funny, bitter, and feminist look at war. First published in London in 1930, Not So Quiet ... (On the Western Front) describes a group of British women ambulance drivers on the French front lines during World War I, surviving shell fire, cold, and their punishing commandant, "Mrs. Bitch." The novel's power comes from Smith's outrage at the senselessness of war, at her country's complacent patriotism, and her own daily contact with the suffering and the wounded.

At the heart of the novel is the juxtaposition between the families of the young women back in England, who are puffed up with pride for what their girls are doing and the visions of glory that come with it, and the realities of the women’s lives on the front. Details are not skimped here and we are plunged into the filth, the squalor, and of course the unrelenting gore of transporting the critically injured soldiers from the battlegrounds to the war hospitals. Quickly Helen becomes bitter about her mother’s constant boasting about what she is doing and, when Helen is sent home ill for a time, she is faced with repeated encouragement to get better quickly and get back out there, if not to do her duty then to make her mother proud.

One of the most compelling aspects of the book is seeing Helen gradually stop caring what her family think. In particular, there is the matter of hair. One of Helen’s new friends, Tosh, has chopped her long hair short, to the horror of some of the other volunteers. How ghastly and unfeminine! But in the filth of the situation, dealing with long hair is nothing more than another inconvenience in a life filled to the brim with them. The difference with hair is that you can do something about it. Yet, Helen is reluctant to do the same, and that reluctance comes from one place: her mother. The moment, about halfway through the novel, when she does chop her hair off, is an important symbol of her increasingly fractured relationship with her family, and more importantly, her family’s expectations.

When Helen is at home, ill, she becomes determined that she will not go back to France. She will not even get a "cushy" job in England. She is done with war, absolutely.

Helen’s sister, Trix, is also a "war girl," and comes back to England pregnant and in need of an abortion. The first thing she does is beg Helen not to tell her parents that she is in the country. Helen is against the abortion – not for moral reasons, but because it is dangerous, and girls die having them – and asks whether the man might marry her. Trix declares it could be any one of three men, and so Helen agrees to raise the money needed. There is only one thing to do. Go back to the front.

It is important that this is the reason that she goes back. She does not do it for glory, nor duty, nor to make her family proud. She does it because her beloved little sister needs her help, and because Trix also understands the horror of war. They were close anyway, but they are bound even tighter by the shared understanding that their experiences separate them from their family back at home. They have seen things that their parents and aunts will never see, and could not begin to comprehend.

This is a wonderful exposition of the crimes of the First World War. Suffering and the pointlessness of war are at the forefront of the novel. The denouement is heart-rending. It must be read.

About the reviewer

Jon Wilkins is 66. He is married to the gorgeous Annie with two wonderful sons. He was a teacher for twenty years, a Waterstones bookseller and coached women’s basketball for over thirty years before taking up writing seriously. Nowadays he takes notes for students with Special Needs at Leicester University. He has had a work commissioned by the UK Arts Council and several pieces published traditionally as well as on-line. He has had poems in magazines and anthologies, art galleries, studios, museums and at Huddersfield Railway Station. He loves writing poetry. For his MA, he wrote a crime novel, Utrecht Snow. He followed it up with Utrecht Rain, and is now writing a third part. He is currently writing a crime series, Poppy Knows Best, set at the end of the Great War and into the early 1920s.

Review by Philip Tew of "Poppy Flowers at the Front" by Jon Wilkins

Last year, this website managed to reunite me with Jon Wilkins, a colleague of mine in the late 1970s, teachers together at a boys’ secondary modern school in Leicester, an awful place to work, but we survived. We were united by our aspirations to write and while teaching there, I completed a draft first novel with which I did nothing, exhausted by the writing process. Youth is wasted on the young!

However, eventually in 2019 I published my first novel, Afterlives, and Jon was in touch again, after a generous review. I am about to reciprocate, but certainly not out of loyalty, but merit. Jon’s novel, Poppy Flowers at the Front, has been published, a charming and skilful narrative of two young female ambulance drivers surviving the horrors and discomforts of the Western Front toward the end of the First World War. Blending diary entries, letters and a confessional and impressionistic first person account, Poppy and her feisty French friend, Élodie leap off the page, dynamic, contested and intriguing. A life amid mud, death and struggle is evoked wonderfully, with our emotion engaged, but the narrative never descends to any sentimentality. The love affair between the two young women ties together the various complex strands. I will not reveal the plot, which is teasingly seductive and exciting, and must be fresh and unexpected in the readers’ minds.

For an older male writer to capture the lives of these two young and rebellious women full of such life and hopes and dreams is literally a tour de force. Poppy Flowers at the Front unfortunately came out as the Covid lock-down started, but now we are emerging from that peculiar social nightmare, you should read this book and thrill in its twists and turns, and the emotional subtlety that is displayed in the various encounters. It is an adventure, a reflection, a social narrative, and a fine piece of writing. I rate this novel. Brigand Press, a new micro-press, have opted for another fine story, wonderfully narrated and they should be supported in their efforts. Find their website, and buy it!  You’ll want to read to the end.


About the reviewer
A graduate of both Leicester and De Montfort universities, Philip Tew is an academic and novelist. Since 2001 he has edited, written and co-written twenty-five scholarly books on various topics, including many on post-war and contemporary British fiction. He published his first novel, Afterlives, in 2019 and a second book of fiction, Fragmentary Lives: Three Novellas, in 2020. A second novel, Clark Gable and His Plastic Duck, is about to be published by Brigand Press in August 2020. He is currently preparing a further book of fiction, consisting of two novellas, a volume tentatively entitled Heroes and Villains.


You can read another review of Poppy Flowers at the Front by Jon Wilkins on Everybody's Reviewing here. 

Review by Gus Gresham of "Poppy Flowers at the Front" by Jon Wilkins

This is a poignant, compelling story of love and desolation amid the sterling work of ambulance women during the 1914-18 World War.

As any good reader or writer knows, it is the detail that convinces and transports us to the virtual landscape of a story. Like all great novels set in the First World War (All Quiet On The Western Front; A Farewell To Arms …), Jon Wilkins’s excellent novel, Poppy Flowers At The Front, airlifts us directly into the sights and smells and sounds and mud and blood and horror and senseless waste of the trenches.

We are in safe hands, though (we hope), with the engaging narrator Poppy Loveday, who guides us through her story as surely as her ambulance negotiates the muddy rutted tracks between the field hospital and the Front, with shells exploding around her. She is diligent in her selfless efforts, but is consumed daily by the suffering of "young boys in pain, a pain they did not deserve. Boys who screamed in terror, far from home and their mothers."

Yet, amid it all, there is light-hearted relief, humour and sensitivity, especially in the jaunts to Paris, rural France and rural England. And on a visit home, there is a beautifully understated exchange as Poppy’s father quizzes her about how hard life really is on the Western Front: "'Now tell me all about France, the truth mind…' So, I did and he was very quiet and very shocked."

The main counterpoint to the horrors of trench-warfare is embodied in a wonderfully handled and sensitive love story. The reader turns the pages in anticipation of something dreadful happening to the heroine or her lover at any time … and … (no spoilers!). Recommended.


About the reviewer
Gus Gresham is an avid reader and writer. He has a Master’s degree in Creative Writing and has worked variously as a mechanical engineer, construction worker, fruit picker, community activist for Greenpeace, writer, English tutor, audio-book producer, interpersonal and communication skills facilitator, and building surveyor. He’s had short stories published in literary magazines Brittle Star and Under The Radar, and his recently published novel, EARTHRISE, is available on Amazon. You can read a review of it here.